Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1919, the British composer Edward Elgar finished a work he labeled jokingly as his “Opus 1001” – a 50 second “Smoking Cantata,” intended, according to the manuscript score, as "an edifying, allegorical, improving, expostulatory, educational, persuasive, hortatory, instructive, dictatorial, magisterial, inauditory work.”

The score was completed at the Hertfordshire home of a wealthy banker named Edward Speyer, one of Elgar’s oldest friends, to whom the manuscript was given. When Elgar came to stay, Speyer had only one request, that the composer and his musician friends, “Kindly do not smoke in the hall or on the staircase.”

That’s also the full text of Elgar’s cantata.

In the middle of Elgar’s manuscript, he drew a medieval hell's mouth, belching smoke. The little score was discovered, performed, and recorded for the first time in July 2003.

On today’s date in 1982, a sci-fi movie titled “Tron” opened in theaters across the country, targeting an audience fascinated by the then still-new craze for computer gaming. In the movie, a programmer–played by Jeff Bridges–is transported from the real world into a fantastic digital universe INSIDE a computer program, where he becomes a kind of freedom fighter for the program’s oppressed and exploited components.

OK, the plot is far-fetched, but nonetheless “Tron” became a cult classic–in part because of its musical score created by Wendy Carlos, famous for her wildly successful “Switched-On Bach” album featuring Bach played on a Moog synthesizer.

Originally the idea was for Carlos to write synthesizer music for just the “computer world” scenes, and for another composer to write a conventional orchestral score for the “real world” scenes.

But Carlos convinced the producers to let her do it all, and so orchestral portions of her score were recorded in London by the London Philharmonic; the choral parts in California by the UCLA Chorus, and the synthesizer portions created in New York City by Carlos herself, with Carlos weaving all three elements into one unified and–for 1982– ground-breaking film score.

On today's date in the year 2000, amid the greenery of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, violinist Gil Shaham gave the outdoor, open-air premiere of this new concerto at the Tanglewood Festival. The concerto is entitled—appropriately enough—"TreeSong." Accompanying Shaham was the Boston Symphony, conducted by the concerto's composer, John Williams. Williams says this music was inspired by one particular tree in Boston's Public Garden, a kind of redwood that Botanists would identify as "metasequoia glyptostroboides," but which John Williams identified simply as "my favorite tree."

"For years," said Williams, "I loved to take walks in the Public Gardens, and I grew infatuated with this Chinese tree, the dawn redwood... It not only looked lovely, but it seemed animate, even intelligent." By chance, Williams met the retired Harvard University botanist Dr. Siu-Ying Hu, who had actually planted his favorite tree back in the late 1940's.

She told Williams the dawn redwood was thought to be extinct until 1945, when some standing forests of these trees were discovered in the western part of China, near Tibet. "When Dr. Hu came to America," says Williams, "she brought a pound of seeds and the trees have flourished here."

Curiously enough, Dr. Hu also told Williams that the dawn redwood is a survivor from the very same Jurassic era that John Williams helped to make so familiar to filmgoers via the recent series of dinosaur movies.

Unless you're a graduate student in 18th century European history, it's unlikely you know off the top of your head who the winners and losers were in the War of the Spanish Succession. Suffice it to say, on today's date in 1713, to celebrate the successful resolution of that conflict, a settlement known as the "Peace of Utrecht," this festive choral "Te Deum" was performed at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It was written by a very ambitious 28-year old German composer named George Friedrich Handel. Handel had come to England for a 6-month visit in 1710, and then for good in the spring of 1712. We're not sure if Handel wrote his "Utrecht Te Deum" in response to an invitation from the British royal family, or wrote it "on spec" to win their favor. In any case, when performed by the Royal Musicians and the choir of the Chapel Royal on July 7, 1713, it made a tremendous impression. Handel was commissioned to provide many more festive choral and instrumental works for British monarchy in the years that followed. Handel's first royal employer was King George the First, and three years after Handel's death, King George the THIRD sat on the throne. Now, King George the Third may have suffered from madness... He may have lost the American colonies, but at least he DID know a good composer when he heard one. He idolized Handel and saw to it that the composer was buried in Westminster Abbey.

On today's date in 1971, jazz great Louis Armstrong died in New York City at the age of 69. He was born in New Orleans, and for years, all the standard reference books listed his birthday as the Fourth of July, 1900. Well, it turned out that wonderfully symbolic date was cooked up by Armstrong's manager Joe Glaser. Louis himself wasn't sure when he was born, so the 4th of July seemed as good a date as any, and was accepted as fact for many years. Eventually documents were discovered that proved Armstrong was actually born on August 4, 1901.

Armstrong earned the nickname "Satchmo"—short for "Satchelmouth"—and in later years he was affectionately dubbed "Pops." If the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is to be believed, Armstrong was the central figure in the development of jazz in the 20th century.

In the 1960s, radical blacks criticized Armstrong as an "Uncle Tom" too eager to please white audiences, forgetting that it was Armstrong, alone among his jazz peers, who courageously criticized President Eisenhower for not defending the black children attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The British music critic Norman Lebrecht offered this assessment: "Armstrong never bowed his head nor sang from anywhere but the heart. He was a figure of enormous dignity and a musical innovator of universal importance."

Acknowledging his influence in American concert music, composer Libby Larsen subtitled one of her works, a 1990 Piano Concerto, "Since Armstrong."

On today's date in 1992, lovers of the tango had good reason to be sad. The great Argentinean composer and bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazolla had died in Buenos Aires at the age of 71.

Now, the bandoneón is a close relation of the accordion, and for his instrument Piazolla composed original music inspired by the tango, a dance form that originated in the working-class dancehalls and bordellos of Buenos Aires. While still a teen-ager, Piazolla had played bandoneón in the orchestra of Carlos Gardél, the most famous tango singer of the 1930s. Eventually, Piazolla formed his own band, which became famous throughout South America.

But Piazzola had a burning desire to write concert music, and won a scholarship to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to explore the possibilities inherent in the music he knew best, and so Piazzola set about "reinventing" the tango. The result was dubbed "nuevo tango." These "new" tangos were as vital as the old ones, but often dark and brooding.

Shortly before his death, someone asked Piazolla why his music was so melancholy. "Not because I'm sad," Piazolla replied. "Not at all. I'm a happy guy. I like to taste a good wine. I like to eat well. I like to live. No, my music is sad because the tango is sad—sad and dramatic, but not pessimistic."

On today's date in 1876, America was celebrating its Centennial, and the place to be was in Philadelphia, where a Centennial Exhibition was in progress. Officially known as "The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufacturers and Products of the Soil and Mine," this was the first World's Fair to be held in the United States. It drew 9 million visitors—this at a time when the entire population of the U.S. was only 46 million.

The Exhibition had opened in May with a concert attended by President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. After "Hail to the Chief," the orchestra premiered a specially commissioned "Centennial March" by the famous German opera composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was paid $5000 for the commission, an astronomically high fee in those days. Wagner did not bother to attend the Philadelphia premiere, and privately told friends back in Germany: "Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me."

The following month, the French composer Jacques Offenbach arrived in Philadelphia to conduct his music at a specially constructed open-air pavilion. "They asked my permission to call it 'Offenbach Gardens,'" the composer later wrote. "How could I refuse?" The concertmaster of Offenbach's orchestra, by the way, was a 21-year old violinist from Washington, D.C. by the name of John Philip Sousa, who would go on to write some festive music of his own.

"Country Gardens" is the best-known work of the Australian-born American composer, arranger, and pianist Percy Grainger. Its score bears this note: "Birthday-gift, Mother, July 3, 1918." Grainger's mother Rose was responsible for his excellent musical training that made him a successful concert pianist in Britain, Europe, and America. In 1918, Grainger arranged a folk tune given to him in 1908 by Cecil Sharp, a major figure in the folklore revival in England. Grainger titled his arrangement "Country Gardens," and it went over so well at his recitals that Grainger decided to have it published. It was a big hit and broke sales records. In fact, until his death in 1961, its sales generated a significant portion of Grainger's annual income. Like other composers with a mega-hit, Grainger came to resent being known for just one tune, and would say to audiences: "The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers. It's more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it". In 1931, "Country Gardens" was arranged for wind band by someone other than Grainger, but around 1950, at the special request of a Detroit band director named Graham Overgard, Grainger prepared his own arrangement, and wrote to Overgard: "I now have my own version, quite delicate and unlike the coarse-sounding score you rightly object to. The new setting is not based on the piano version, but on a chamber music sketch of 1908 and is a new piece in every way."

In the German, "Gluck" means luck, and today's date marks the birth anniversary of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with "reforming" the vocally ornate but dramatically static form of Baroque opera.

In the 18th century, opera was the biggest and most high-profile of all musical forms, and Gluck wrote 49 of them during his 67 years of life. Like many 18th century opera composers, the stories Gluck chose were often based on ancient Greek myths such as "Orpheus and Eurydice."

It wasn't the matter of Gluck's operas that was revolutionary, but the manner in which he set these stories to music. When the British music historian Charles Burney visited Gluck in 1771, he recorded the composer's own words on the subject.

"It was my design," said Gluck," to divest music of those abuses which the vanity of singers, or the complacency of composers, had so long disfigured Italian opera and made the most beautiful and magnificent of all public exhibitions into the most tiresome and ridiculous. It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression… without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornamentation."

To sum it all up, Gluck told Burney, "My first and chief care as a dramatic composer was to aim at a noble simplicity."

On today's date in 1937, some jaunty music by the French composer Darius Milhaud premiered in Paris. It was a suite for two pianos entitled "Scaramouche," after a stock character in the Italian commedia dell arte, an art form famous for thumbing its nose at authority. Its upbeat, carefree mood made "Scaramouche" an instant hit, much to the composer's surprise.

For his part, Milhaud was in an apprehensive mood that year. When he and his wife Madeleine had visited the 1937 Paris International Exposition, they saw premonitions of war reflected all-too clearly in many of its exhibits.

"Picasso's Guernica adorned the walls of the Spanish pavilion," recalled Milhaud, "but the Spanish Republic had been murdered. Placed face to face, the German and the Soviet pavilions seemed to challenge each other to mortal combat. One evening, as we watched the sun set behind the immense mass of flags of all nations, Madeleine clutched my arm in anguish and whispered 'This is the end of Europe!'"

In 1940, Milhaud was forced to leave France when the Germans occupied Paris. As a Jew, his music was promptly banned. But like Scaramouche himself, French musicians soon found ways of thumbing their noses at the unwelcome German authorities.

In 1943, two French pianists performed "Scaramouche" in concert, tricking the censors by listing its composer's name as "Hamid-al-Usurid"—a fictitious Arabic composer whose name just happens to be an anagram of "Darius Milhaud."