Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1951, the classic sci-fi film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” was playing in theaters across America. The film’s opening sequence depicted a UFO hovering over Washington, D.C. Back then, flying saucer sightings were increasingly common, perhaps a result of mass hysteria spawned by cold war tensions and the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb. Or maybe we WERE being visited by other planets?

In any case, the movie made a big impression at the time, and countless kids—and probably a few adults as well—memorized the magic words “Gort: Klaatu barada nikto” which, in the film, prevented Washington DC’s destruction by a death-ray robot.

Fast forward some 50 years to 1999, when Washington DC’s National Symphony premiered a new concerto for percussion and orchestra, specially composed for virtuoso percussionist Evelyn Glennie by the American composer Michael Daugherty.

Inspired by the outer-space look of Glennie’s percussion gear, Daugherty titled his piece “UFO” and asked that the soloist arrive unexpectedly and dressed as a space alien! In performance, Glennie moves through the audience and around the stage while performing sleight-of-hand improvisations on a variety of flying saucer-like percussive instruments.

In September of 2001, the American composer Elliott Carter was just a few months shy of his 93rd birthday, but still busy composing new works both large and small.

On today’s date that year, Carter’s Cello Concerto received its premiere in Chicago with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony.

Now, Carter’s music is technically challenging for performers, and its complexity can make it equally challenging for audiences, especially at first hearing. Despite all that, Carter’s comments on his music were usually quite straightforward:

“In this score I have tried to find meaningful, personal ways of revealing the cello's vast array of wonderful possibilities,” he wrote. “My Concerto is introduced by the soloist alone, playing a frequently interrupted cantilena that presents ideas later to be expanded into movements.”

A month after its premiere, Ma, Barenboim, and the Chicago Symphony brought the new work to Carnegie Hall, and The New York Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini wrote:

“For all its complexities … the cello part has a rhapsodic, improvisatory quality …. At its conclusion, when Mr. Carter, who is 92, climbed the steps to the stage with a cane to steady him, he received a prolonged standing ovation.”

Today’s date in 1899 marks the birthday of the famous African-American composer, choir director, and teacher, William L. Dawson, in Anniston, Alabama. After musical studies in Kansas City and Chicago, from 1931 to 1956 Dawson taught at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed the Institute’s Choir into an internationally-renowned ensemble.

Dawson’s arrangements of African-American spirituals, which he preferred to call “folksongs,” are justly famous, but in 1934 he produced his masterwork, a “Negro Folk Symphony,” modeled on Dvorak’s “New World “ Symphony, but exhibiting Dawson’s own distinctive mastery and development of his themes. His goal, he said, was for audiences to know that it was "unmistakably not the work of a white man."

"The themes,” wrote Dawson, “are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. In this composition, the composer has employed themes … over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother's knee."

Dawson’s symphony was successfully premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who took the new work to Carnegie Hall, where its 35-year old composer was repeatedly called to the stage. The symphony was revised in 1952 with added African rhythms inspired by the composer's trip to West Africa.

“Spaghetti Western” is a nickname given a genre of Italian films from the 1960s, most famously directed by Sergio Leone, and often starring Clint Eastwood as the taciturn, gun-toting anti-hero.

“Spaghetti Western” is also the title of a Concerto for English horn written by the American composer Michael Daugherty that received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1998 at a Pittsburgh Symphony concert conducted by Mariss Jansons.

“Just as Leone’s films redefined the Western genre from an Italian perspective,” writes Michael Daugherty, “I redefine the European concerto … within an American context. In my ‘Spaghetti Western,’ the English horn soloist is the ‘Man with no Name,’ moving through a series of sun-drenched panoramas, barren deserts, and desolate towns of the Wild West, … [one of ] the gun-slinging characters who haunt the landscape.”

Daugherty gave ITALIAN titles to his three-movement concerto: “Strade Vuote” (Empty Streets), “Assalto all’oro” (Gold Rush), and “Mezzogiorno di fuoco” (Noon of Fire). And since Clint Eastwood was unable to play the English horn for the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere, Harold Smoliar removed the cigar from his parched, suntanned lips, adjusted his poncho, and took up his English horn for the performance.

On today’s date in 1875 one of the greatest musical match-makers of all time died in Spartanburg, South Carolina. His name was William Walker, an American Baptist shape note singing master, who published several collections of traditional shape note tunes.

Now, “shape note” refers to a simple musical notation designed for communal singing, and in his 1835 collection entitled “Southern Harmony,” Walker married a shape-note tune known as “New Britain” to a hymn text titled “Amazing Grace” written by an Anglican clergyman and abolitionist named John Newton.

Walker’s collection was a best-seller in the 19th century, and two centuries later, “Amazing Grace” has become one of the best-known and best-loved hymns of our time.

In 2011 a new orchestral fanfare based on “Amazing Grace” by the African-American composer Adolphus Hailstork was published and subsequently recorded by the Virginia Symphony–appropriately enough, since Hailstork has served as professor of music and Composer-in-Residence at both Virginia's Norfolk State and Old Dominion Universities, and in 1992 was named a Cultural Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In addition to this Fanfare, Hailstork’s works range from choral and chamber pieces to symphonies and operas.

On today’s date in 2011, the Saint Louis Symphony under David Robertson premiered a new piano concerto by the American composer Steven Mackey. The soloist was Orli Shaham, Robertson’s wife, to whom the new work was dedicated.

The new concerto had an odd title, “Stumble to Grace,” which Mackey explained:

“There is a narrative running through the piece … the piano is all thumbs … as it stumbles in its first entrance, playing naïve and awkward plinks and plunks. By [the end], the piano plays sophisticated, virtuosic and, at times, graceful contrapuntal music—a fugue, in fact …

“The inspiration … came from observing my now two-and-a-half year old toddler learning to become human … I wanted to open my compositional process to incorporate some of the whimsy and exuberance that he brings to his exploration of the world.”

Mackey concludes, “A preoccupation with one’s children is common among most new parents but this seemed particularly appropriate … for a piece written for Orli Shaham. She and her conductor husband, David Robertson, have twins less than a year older than my son and we’ve had play dates and shared narrations about new parenthood.”

It’s something of a parlor game for historians of the American presidency to constantly reappraise the status of past occupants of the Oval Office. For example, some recent historians have given President Dwight D. Eisenhower higher marks than others for his political accomplishments in the White House. But not even Eisenhower’s most vocal admirers would credit his administration with a particularly ardent passion for the fine arts.

In the spring of 1960, conductor Leonard Bernstein performed a concert in Washington D.C. attended by President Eisenhower, who thanked Bernstein with these words, “I liked that last piece you played; it’s got a tune. I like music with a tune, not all of them arias and barcarolles and things.”

Bernstein never forgot the phrase. In fact, he even titled one of HIS last pieces “Arias and Barcarolles.” Originally written in 1988 for vocal soloists and piano four-hands, one of Bernstein’s protégés, the Chinese-born composer Bright Sheng, orchestrated the work with Bernstein’s approval, and that version of “Arias and Barcarolles” premiered on today’s date in 1989. “Arias and Barcarolles” is a semi-autobiographical song-cycle dedicated to Bernstein’s friends and family, a sometimes humorous, sometimes touching summing-up of Bernstein’s life and career.

On today’s date in 1874 the Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, England. He was christened “Gustavus Theodore von Holst,” and his early works were published under that name, but he removed the Germanic “von” after World War I broke out in 1914.

At the Royal College of Music, Holst studied composition and became the close friend of fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams. For a time, Holst earned his living by playing trombone in theater and light music ensembles, and later with a British opera. In 1905, he took a teaching post at the St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, a post he kept until the end of his life. He only composed on weekends or during his summer vacations. It took him two years to write his most popular work, the orchestra suite “The Planets,” whose success baffled and dismayed Holst. “If nobody likes your work,” he argued, “you have to go on just for the sake of the work, and you are in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself.”

True to his word, Holst disappointed many admirers who kept hoping he’d write another big orchestral showpiece like “The Planets.” He never did.

“Name-dropping” can be VERY annoying, and we all know someone who can’t resist letting us know all the famous people they rub shoulders with–or DID, before social-distancing, that is.

Well, name-dropping is hard to avoid when talking about the remarkable mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, who lived from 1821 to 1910. She studied piano with Liszt, for example, and played duets with Chopin. Wagner asked her to sing through parts of his new opera, “Tristan und Isolde” with him.

She also composed her own music, and on today’s date in 1867, one of her chamber operas received its first performance. The work was entitled “Le Dernier Sorcier,” or “The Last Sorcerer.” The libretto was written by the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who adored Viardot and followed her around Europe like a puppy dog.

Later private performances were attended by Clara Schumann and the German Kaiser, and Viardot’s old piano teacher Franz Liszt arranged for the opera’s public premiere in 1869 at the Weimar Court Theatre. That same year Viardot built a little theater in her own villa, and at a performance there Brahms was so impressed he offered to return the following evening to conduct the work himself.

On today’s date in 1958, just nine days after his death, a funeral service was held for the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams at Westminster Abbey, where his ashes were laid to rest. Now, many famous people are buried at Westminster Abbey, but an actual funeral service there, especially for someone not of the royal family, is pretty rare. In fact, Vaughan Williams was the first commoner to be buried there for almost 300 years.

The previous such event had been for the 17th English composer and sometime organist of the Abbey, Henry Purcell–whose grave, like Vaughan Williams, is in the Abbey’s north choir aisle, should you wish to pay your respects.

Vaughan Williams had left instructions for which music was to be played: his anthem “O taste and see,” and also his setting of the hymn, “All people that on earth do dwell,” written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which had taken place at Westminster Abbey just five years earlier, in 1953.

The service was broadcast live by the BBC, and the announcer noted that if all the submitted requests to attend had have been honored, the Abbey would have been filled twice over.