Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1930, in Kingsway Hall in London, the British composer Sir Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5,” the last in this popular series.

Two of the previous marches had been dedicated to organist friends of the composer, and so when organist Percy Hull asked Elgar for a new work for the 1930 Hereford Festival, the “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5” is dedicated to him.

In 1930, Elgar was 73 years old and he liked to go for automobile rides in the country. Hull had given Elgar some driving lessons, and, appropriately enough, Elgar got the idea for the musical themes of his new march on a drive through the countryside with a friend. Elgar suddenly asked for something on which he could jot down his ideas. All the driver could produce was a road map of Worcestershire—so on its margins the first notes of Elgar’s new score were scribbled.

The march proved to be one of his last new orchestral works. Elgar planned to write a sixth “Pomp and Circumstance” March, a kind of soldier’s funeral march, he said, but Elgar himself died in 1934.

On today’s date in the year 1179, in the German convent of Ruppertsberg near Bingen, an 81-year-old abbess named Hildegard breathed her last. The 12th century was a time of great accomplishments in art, religion, and human thought, a kind of medieval Renaissance, and Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most remarkable women of that remarkable time.

And she recorded the precise moment it happened: “When I was 42 years and seven months old,” she writes, “a burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind, like a flame that does not burn but enkindles. All at once I was able to taste of the understanding the Psalter, the Evangelists, and the Books of the Old and New Testaments.”

Hildegard expressed her new awareness in music and is one of the earliest Western composers we know by name. She left a large body of highly original music. Largely forgotten for centuries by all but medieval specialists, in the late 20th century some recordings of Hildegard’s music sparked renewed interest, and her very old music seemed destined to resonate in a very new age.

On today’s date in 1925, Vincent Youman’s musical “No, No Nanette” opened on Broadway after a trial run in Detroit and additional preview stagings in Chicago and London.

Tunes from “No, No Nanette” even reached the Soviet Union, although occasionally something was lost in the translation. For example, in Russia, the musical’s popular foxtrot, “Tea for Two,” was called the “Tahiti Trot.”

Late in 1927, on a dare from the conductor Nikolai Malko, a 21-year old Soviet composer named Dimtri Shostakovich orchestrated this tune in just one hour. Malko was so pleased that he performed the orchestration the following year, and Shostakovich, who had a soft spot for musicals and operettas, incorporated his “Tahiti Trot” into his new ballet, “The Age of Gold.”

Just three years later, however, Soviet authorities decided that the foxtrot was just one more vestige of Western decadence, and Shostakovich quickly moved to disassociate himself from anything remotely connected to Broadway. His name even appeared on an open letter suggesting, “Only after thorough and widespread educational work on the class essence of light music will we succeed in liquidating it from Soviet society.”

In other words, “Nyet, Nyet!” to “Nanette!”

Today marks the birthday of Henry Brant, born in Montreal in 1913 to American parents. In 1929, Brant returned to New York and studied composition with Wallingford Riegger and George Antheil, exponents of the then-current modernist trends in music.

Brant came of age during the Great Depression, however, and has said back then avant-garde composers were faced with some hard choices. They could stop composing altogether, write for commercial films and radio, or simplify their cutting-edge music to make it more accessible. Satiric music was also an option, and some of Henry Brant’s early works fall into that category.

One 1938 chamber piece by Brant is entitled “Hommage aux Freres Marx,” subtitled “Three Faithful Portraits.” The portraits in question are of Chico, Groucho, and Harpo, the wildly popular “Marx Brothers” comedy team of the 1930s.

By the 1950s, Brant became fascinated with “spatial music” involving groups of performers positioned at different spots in a concert hall or performing space. Brant became famous for works exploring this option, and his “Ice Fields” for pipe organ and a symphonic orchestra, scattered at different spots around the concert hall, won for its 88-year old composer the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2002.

On this date in 1973, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in music by Mozart, Brahms, and the American composer, Roy Harris. The program was nothing out of the ordinary, but the concert took place in Beijing and marked the FIRST time an American orchestra had performed in Communist China. The orchestra was invited to China following the famous visit of President and Mrs. Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

In the audience for one of these historic concerts was a young student of traditional Chinese music named Tan Dun. When Tan heard the Philadelphians perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a work he had never heard before, he decided then and there to become a composer himself. In 1986, Tan Dun came to New York City, and since then has managed to combine elements of East and West into his own musical works.

In 1987, for example, he composed a violin concerto entitled “Out of Peking Opera,” which draws on both Chinese and European traditions. In addition to prestigious awards and commissions from major foundations and orchestras, in March of 2001, Tan Dun won an Oscar for his film score to the Ang Lee film, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

On today’s date in 1967, Aaron Copland’s final orchestra work, entitled “Inscape,” was premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Copland said the work’s title “Inscape” was borrowed from the 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Its compositional technique was borrowed from the serial or 12-tone models of Arnold Schoenberg and the some of the late works of one of Copland’s favorite composers, Igor Stravinsky. Bernstein himself was no great fan of 12-tone music, but he exclaimed to Copland following the premiere, “Aaron, it’s amazing how, even when you compose in a completely foreign idiom, the music STILL comes out sounding like you!”

Beyond the technical challenge involved, “Inscapes,” said Copland, reflected what he called “the tenseness of the times in which we live.”

Copland’s experiments with 12-tone pieces like “Inscape” didn’t impress the avant-garde composers of the day, and only baffled audiences who expected him to produce more works in the style of his popular ballet scores of the 1930s and 40s.

By 1970, Copland stopped composing altogether, and claimed not to miss it very much. “I must have expressed myself sufficiently,” he said.

For decades many of the 20th century’s greatest composers routinely visited Venice’s famous canals and churches during a biennial music festival that showcased brand-new works by the likes of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Britten, and others.

The French composer Darius Milhaud describes sharing space with several of his composer-colleagues in a cramped Festival “green room.” “It was a normal sight to see Stravinsky’s rain-coat and Constant Lambert’s tweed overcoat hanging near my two walking sticks,” writes Milhaud. “Meanwhile, the Italian composer Hildebrando Pizetti would be putting up a mirror, opening a silver toilet-case, and arranging flowers, his wife’s photograph and a sheaf of telegrams.”

On today’s date in 1937, Milhaud conducted the first performance of his “Suite Provencale” at the Venice Festival. This jaunty score proved to be one of his most popular orchestral works. In 1954, it was Leonard Bernstein’s turn. On today’s date that year, he conducted in Venice the premiere performance of his “Serenade” for violin and orchestra, with Isaac Stern the featured soloist.

Despite its admirable track record for picking winners, the Venice Festival shut down operations in 1973, although its impact lives on in the number of modern masterworks it helped launch in its day.

In 1886, a Czech patron of the arts named Josef Hlavka had a chapel built at his summer residence at Lužany in Bohemia and asked his composer friend Antonin Dvorak to write a mass to dedicate it.

As a devout Catholic, Dvorak was happy to oblige. Since the chapel was quite small, Dvorak wrote his “Mass in D Major” for just a quartet of soloists, a small choir, and organ, and led the premiere performance there on today’s date in 1887, with his wife Anna singing one of the solo roles.

Dvorak told Hlavka he was grateful for the chance to write so intimate a piece. “Until now,” wrote Dvorak, “I had only written sacred works of larger proportions with considerable vocal and instrumental means at my disposal.”

Ironically, Dvorak’s intimate “Lužany Mass” became popular as just such a large-scale work. At the request of his publisher, Dvorak orchestrated his “Mass,” and in that form it received its international premiere in 1893 at the immense Crystal Palace in London, performed by a huge chorus and a large symphony orchestra.

The published orchestrated version became extremely popular during Dvorak’s lifetime, but his small-scale original version was not even published until 1963.

The American composer Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965 and wrote thousands of musical works in a wide variety of styles. As a young boy, Cowell lived near San Francisco’s Chinatown, so Asian influences are as likely to crop up in his music as European models. And among Cowell’s aggressively experimental works are piano pieces that employ what he called “tone clusters”—chords played with a fist or forearm. Those pieces piqued the interest of European composers like Bartók and Janáček, but in addition to avant-garde scores, Cowell wrote dozens of conventionally tonal works, often hauntingly beautiful.

In 1941, Cowell discovered a collection of evocative 19th century American hymns titled “Southern Harmony.” These reminded him of even earlier works by the 18th century American composer William Billings, who liked to write what he called “Fuguing Tunes.” Combining these two influences, Cowell came up with his own series of “Hymns AND Fuguing Tunes” for various combinations of instruments.

Cowell’s “Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10” for oboe and strings, for example, was premiered on today’s date in 1955, in Santa Barbara, California, by oboist Bert Gassman and the Pacific Coast Music Festival orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

On today’s date in 1971, the Concert Hall at the newly opened Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., was inaugurated with a gala performance by the National Symphony Orchestra led by Antal Dorati, its Music Director back then. The National Symphony Orchestra, or NSO, was founded in 1931, and until the opening of the Kennedy Center, had used Constitution Hall as its home base.

Not surprisingly, considering its location in our nation's capital, the NSO has had a long tradition of performing, commissioning, and premiering works by American composers. Through the Hechinger Commissioning Fund, the NSO has commissioned more than 50 works, including “Fanfare for the Kennedy Center,” written by American composer Ron Nelson in honor of the Center’s 25th anniversary in 1996.

Leonard Slatkin, the NSO’s Music Director that year, had this to say about the composer: “Nelson is the quintessential American composer. He has the ability to move between conservative and newer styles with ease. The fact that he's a little hard to categorize is what makes him interesting.”

For his part, about his “Fanfare for the Kennedy Center,” Ron Nelson said: “It’s a musical epiphany that moves from darkness to light… from idea (French horns) to fruition (full brass).”