Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1992, one of the strangest—and some would say most strikingly original—violin concertos of the late 20th century had its premiere performance in Cologne, Germany. It was written by the Transylvanian-born Hungarian composer, György Ligeti.

Ligeti became famous in the West when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film “2001.” Kubrick used Ligeti’s music to evoke the eerie and empty vastness of outer space. And, in fact, Ligeti was fascinated by the sounds traditional orchestral instruments make when pressed to the extreme limits of their range—their own sonic “outer limits.” There’s some of that in Ligeti’s 1992 Violin Concerto, plus a dash of the traditionally melancholic Hungarian strain familiar from the music of Ligeti’s famous compatriot, Béla Bartók. Finally, tossed in for good measure, is Ligeti’s puckish fondness for thumbing his nose at life, the universe, and traditional concert hall decorum.

As if to counterbalance his melancholic strain, or perhaps just express it in a more surprising way, there’s a good deal of the clown in Ligeti, who includes a chorus of ocarinas in the score of his Violin Concerto.

As the 20th century drew to its close, some who followed the development of opera were struck by the number of new American operas on American themes.

On today’s date in 2000, one of these new operas debuted in San Francisco. “Dead Man Walking,” an opera in two acts, was based on a 1993 book by Sister Helen Prejean, a book also made into a successful movie. The libretto for the operatic version of Sister Prejean’s book was crafted by Terrance McNally and set to music by the American composer, Jake Heggie.

Now, an opera based on eye-witness accounts of American prisoners on death row might seem an unlikely topic for an opera, but Sister Prejean didn’t think so:

“I love the way the opera captures essential human conflicts: love or hate, compassion or vengeance, redemption or condemnation… From the beginning, I told McNally and Heggie that I’d trust them to compose the opera if they wove into its center the quest for redemption. They got it. And I could tell by the stillness in the auditorium and the tumultuous applause at the end that the audience also really gets it.”

On today’s date in 1927, a landmark film entitled “The Jazz Singer” received its premiere showing at the Warner Theater in New York. “The Jazz Singer” starred Al Jolson and is usually credited with being the first “talkie”—the first motion picture to successfully incorporate prerecorded music and spoken dialogue. Both the music and dialogue were recorded using the Vitaphone process, essentially a set of disc recordings synchronized for playback with the film’s projector.

The previous year, the New York Philharmonic had participated in the first Vitaphone projects, recording Wagner’s “Tannhauser” overture as the first-ever “music video,” and performing the soundtrack for an otherwise silent drama entitled “Don Juan,” starring John Barrymore.

Within a decade, Hollywood orchestras would be recording the classic film scores of European émigré composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, and within two decades American composers like Aaron Copland and Bernard Herrmann would be writing their memorable film scores as well.

But back in 1927, all of that was well in the future, and, as one of Al Jolson’s lines in “The Jazz Singer” so prophetically put it, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

On today’s date in 1867, two eminent British Victorians arrived in Vienna in search of Schubert. Now, Schubert had been dead for 39 years, as the two Brits were quite aware. George Grove, age 47, was England’s finest musicologist, and Arthur Sullivan, age 25, one the country’s most promising young composers.

Grove believed there might be forgotten manuscripts in the possession of the late composer’s relatives, so the pair met with Schubert’s nephew, a certain Herr Doktor Schneider, who said, oh yes, come to mention it, he did have some pieces by Uncle Franz that no one had played for more than 40 years. If the two gentlemen had no objection to getting dusty, they were welcome to rummage the family’s storage closets.

The two visitors braved the dust and found orchestral parts for Schubert’s “Rosamunde” incidental music, tied up in a big bundle after the work’s premiere back in 1823 and untouched since then.

Grove and Sullivan spent the rest of the day carefully making a copy of their discovery. At 2 a.m., after finishing the task, their spirits must have been pretty high, since to celebrate the proper Victorian gentlemen began an impromptu game of leap-frog.

On today’s date in 1945, Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of an orchestral suite arranged from Aaron Copland’s ballet score “Appalachian Spring.”

For the ballet’s 1944 premiere at the Library of Congress, Copland called for a chamber orchestra of 13 players, but for most music lovers, it’s as a work for a larger symphony orchestra that “Appalachian Spring” is most often remembered.

Copland said he had conducted all of his own works but knew his “Appalachian Spring” best of all. He also had some specific advice for other conductors of his score. “I have often admonished orchestras, professional and otherwise, not to get too sweet or too sentimental with it,” said Copland, “and I have reminded performers that ‘Appalachian Spring’ should be played cooler than Tchaikovsky and lighter than Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring.’”

“My own favorite place in the whole piece,” said Copland, “is toward the end where I have marked a misterioso. I would tell string players that we don’t want to know where the up and down bows are. They must have a special sustained quality there, a kind of organ like sound, with each entry like an Amen.”

"My own favorite place in the whole piece," said Copland, "is toward the end where I have marked a misterioso. I would tell string players that we don't want to know where the up and down bows are. They must have a special sustained quality there, a kind of organ like sound, with each entry like an Amen."

On today’s date in 1984, the Milwaukee Symphony and conductor Lukas Foss premiered a new work for narrator and orchestra by American composer John Corigliano. The new piece was entitled “Creations,” and was based on the creation story in the Biblical book of Genesis.

“Creations” began as a 1971 commission for a television pilot. The original idea was to have a variety of major composers illustrate in music selected chapters from the Bible, with the text narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The TV project fell through, and Corigliano thought this music for the pilot episode, “Genesis,” would remain unheard. But then, in 1984, Lukas Foss commissioned a revised version for a concert with the Milwaukee Symphony.

“Creations challenged me to write specifically for a recorded medium,” wrote Corigliano. “It also offered a chance to build music more abstractly than I’d done before… often out of pure sonority, rather than harmony and line. Much of my later work uses techniques I developed for the first time while scoring Creations… I envisioned the music as growing from abstract sounds into actual themes.”

In 2001, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, commissioned American composer Steve Heitzeg to write a “Nobel Symphony.”

In 1866, the Swedish engineer and scientist Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite. His patent helped him amass a great fortune, but, troubled by the destructive power and potential misuse of his invention, Nobel arranged that his estate would award annual prizes to those who made significant contributions to world peace.

For his “Nobel Symphony,” Heitzeg chose to set quotes from a variety of Nobel laureates , including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Dalai Lama. Purely instrumental effects were also employed to convey something of their ideas and ideals. For example, in a section honoring a 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Heitzeg scored an eerie march for a percussion ensemble consisting of hollow artificial limbs.

The October 2, 2001 premiere of Steve Heitzeg’s “Nobel Symphony” came shortly after the tragic events of September 11th. Understandably, its message had a special resonance for the performers and audiences present at its first performance.

On today’s date in 2010, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, the ALIAS ensemble gave the premiere performance of a new chamber world by American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. It was titled “Hilos”–the Spanish word for “threads”–and scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet.

Now, it’s not unusual for composers to tap their particular cultural background for inspiration, but Gabriela Lena Frank has a pretty wide variety of options in that regard: Her father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. They met when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s, and Frank herself grew up in Berkeley, California.

"There's usually a story line behind my music," says Frank. Regarding “Hilos,” she noted, “There are similarities to [Mussorgsky’s] ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ in that each movement tells a different story … ‘Hilos’ refers to the ‘threads’ that make up Andean textiles and how these threads weave together.”

Each movement of “Hilos” has an evocative title, such “Canto del Altiplano” (Song of the Highlands), “Zumballyu” (Spinning Top), or “Juegos de los Niños” (Games of the Children).

Even during the bombing of London by the German Air Force, the “London Blitz” of World War Two, the BBC Proms Concerts continued.

True, in 1941 a German incendiary bomb did destroy the long-time home of the Proms, Queen’s Hall on Langham Place, but, not to be deterred, the Proms simply moved to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington.

Wartime Proms programs included this printed notice: “In the event of an Air Raid Warning the audience will be informed immediately, so that those who wish to take shelter either in the building or in public shelters outside, may do so, The concert will then continue.”

Talk about pluck!

In 1944, the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams completed a new oboe concerto to be premiered at a Proms concert, but a German V-1 rocket that landed dangerously near the Albert Hall led to an early end to that Proms season, since the V-1 rockets, unlike the German bombers, didn’t allow enough warning time to clear the hall.

So, on today’s date in 1944, the new Vaughan Williams concerto was premiered not in London, but in Liverpool, with soloist Leon Goossens and Malcolm Sargent conducting the Liverpool Philharmonic.

On today’s date in 2000, a new cello concerto with an unusual title received its premiere performance at the Barbican Center in London. Billed as the “Crouching Tiger” Concerto, this score was by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, and was derived from Tan’s film score for Ang Lee’s mystical and magical martial arts film titled “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

That score featured a prominent cello part, tailor-made for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a variety of traditional Chinese instruments and a percussion battery that included a North African frame drum. The haunting score matched the film so effectively that it was nominated for—and won—an Academy Award.

It was director Ang Lee who suggested that Tan Dun rework his film score into a cello concerto, and even offered to put together a special film to accompany the concerto. In effect, saying, “Turnabout is fair play—you composed music to fit my film, now I’ll compose a film to fit your concerto!”

Lee pulled together shots from the original film and mixed in real and imaginary scenes from New York’s Chinatown and 19th century Beijing for the new film designed to accompany performances of the new concerto.