Composers Datebook

At Westminster Abbey on today’s date in 1998 a haunting new setting of the Latin mass written by the British composer Roxanna Panufnik received its premiere performance.

Roxanna Panufnik was born in London in 1968, and if her family name sounds familiar, it’s because her father was Andrzej Panufnik, one of the greatest Polish composers of the 20th century.

Roxanna’s interest in music began early: “I was three years old ... when I said ‘Mummy, I want a violin with a stick to make it sing!’ I started violin, piano and flute. But I only wanted to make up my own music. When I was 12, [the composer] Oliver Knussen, visiting my parents, told me I should write down my improvisations. It all went from there.”

And in response to questions about having a famous composer as her father, she says: “My father had enormous integrity, always teaching me to be myself... Early in my career I was very sensitive to being compared to him and a few stray remarks about nepotism dented my confidence. However, I plodded on and now I’m thrilled to be regularly programmed alongside him and I’m so proud of where and who I came from.”

These days composer John J. Becker is almost totally forgotten, but back in the 1930s his name was linked with Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Wallingford Riegger as one of the so-called "American Five" composers of what was dubbed "ultra-modern" music.

From 1928 to 1935, Becker taught at the College of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and briefly assembled a "Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra" to give Midwest premieres of works by Ives and other ultra-modernists. From 1935 to 1941, Becker was the Minnesota State director of the Federal Music Project, one of President Roosevelt's initiatives to provide work for American musicians during the Depression years.

On today's date in 1937, at the old St. Paul Auditorium, Becker conducted the Federal Music Project's Twin Cities Orchestra in a program that included the premiere performance of his own Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Symphonia Brevis."

This "ultra-modern" symphony was met with an "ultra-conservative" review in The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, whose critic wrote: "It consists of spasmodic little excursions… percussive barrages… ideas that seem to run out before the score comes to a close, with the consequent suggestion of that spurious vitality exhibited by decapitated fowls."

Decades later, three years before his death in 1961, Becker, along with a few other surviving members of the "American Five," was invited to take a bow from the stage of Carnegie Hall at one of Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic concerts which featured his "Sinfonia Brevis."

On today’s date in 2013, a new work by a 90-year old German-born American composer and teacher named Ursula Mamlok received its premiere performance in Switzerland. “Five Fantasy Pieces” for oboe, violin, viola, and cello, was given its first performance by the great Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and colleagues.

Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923, and began composing as a child, studying piano and composition. Her family was Jewish, and once the Nazis placed school music programs off limits to Jews, her family began holding musicales in their home, with Ursula writing the music.

After the “Crystal Night” pogrom in 1938, her family left Germany, and, via Ecuador, young Ursula came to America after being offered a full scholarship to study at the Mannes School of Music in New York. She became an American citizen and taught for many years at various schools, most notably the Manhattan School of Music, where she taught for four decades.

All the while she continued to compose, and described her own music as follows:

“My main concern is that [it] should convey the various emotions in it with clarity and conviction. It interests me to accomplish this with a minimum of material, transforming it in such multiple way so as to give the impression of ever-new ideas that are like the flowers of a plant, all related yet each one different.”

The bulk of Mamlok’s music is for small chamber ensembles, and only once she tried to create a purely electronic piece. In a 1996 interview, she confessed, “Unfortunately I have no connection to it … I put it together in the studio at Columbia in New York, but it took too long. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d rather use the pencil.”

Late in her life, in her 80s, Mamlok returned to Berlin, where she wrote her last works, including her “Five Fantasy Pieces.” She died there in May of 2016 at age 93.

In Costa Mesa, California, on today’s date in 2014, the Pacific Chorale premiered a new choral opera. And what exactly is a “choral opera” you ask? Good question – and one that puzzled Jake Heggie as well, since he was the composer commissioned for that occasion.

Heggie and his librettist Gene Sheer at first scratched their heads. As Heggie put it, “Operas require action, characters, conflicts, journeys, transformation movement. Choirs stand still and make beautiful sound.”

They came up with a unique solution involving one character, Nora, a silent, on- stage actress, whose inner thoughts are sung by half of the choir, while the other half expresses the sounds and surroundings of the outside world Nora chooses to hear on a day in her life on which everything seems to go wrong – starting with a returned, unopened, handwritten letter she had sent, pouring out her heart, to her jerk of a boyfriend. Even Nora’s apartment furniture gets in a word or two about her unhappy state. And where does Nora turn for comfort? Why, to the radio of course – hence the titled of the new choral opera: “The Radio Hour.”

Spoiler alert: the opera ends on a hopeful note for poor Nora.

Today, a tip of the hat to the persistence of one Ms. Elisa Hall, who lived in Boston from 1853-1924.

Ms. Hall was at the heart of that city's musical life for many years. She was a Francophile, and championed the best and the latest in French music. Sadly, Elisa Hall suffered from a hearing ailment, which would eventually result in complete deafness. At the advice of her doctor, who thought it might stimulate her ears, Hall took up the saxophone — and with typical enthusiasm soon began commissioning the leading French composers of the day for new pieces for her instrument. In all, she commissioned no less than 22 works, the most famous being by Claude Debussy. Debussy was at first reluctant to respond to Ms. Hall's persistence, pleading that the saxophone was (quote) “a reed animal with whose habits he was poorly acquainted.”

Debussy was paid in advance, but it was years before he finally set to work on a short saxophone rhapsody in a vaguely Moorish style. In fact, it wasn't until May of 1919, one year after Debussy's death, that the orchestration of the piece was completed by Debussy's friend, Jean Roger-Ducasse, and premiered in Paris.

Ms. Hall apparently never performed it herself. Maybe she was exasperated by the long delay or perhaps, by 1919, her own hearing had deteriorated to the point where she could simply no longer could.

Today we have a letter to read, written by Mozart in the middle of May in the year 1778. Mozart was in Paris, 22 years old, and had this to say to his father back in Salzburg: "I think I told you in my last letter," wrote Mozart, "that the Duc de Guines plays the flute extremely well, and that his daughter is my pupil in composition. She also plays the harp magnifique. She has a great deal of talent, even genius, and in particular a marvelous memory so that she can play all her pieces, actually about 200, by heart. It is, however, extremely doubtful as to whether she has any talent for composition, especially as regards invention or ideas." "Her father's intention," Mozart continued, "is not to make a great composer of her. 'She is not,' said the Duc De Guines, 'to compose operas, arias, concertos, symphonies, but only grand sonatas for her instrument and mine." The Duc de Guines was the former French ambassador to London, and believed by Mozart's father to be in the inner circle of the French Queen Marie Antoinette, and hence a contact well worth cultivating. De Guines commissioned Mozart to write a double concerto for himself on flute and daughter on harp. Mozart complied with this courtly Concerto in C Major. Four months after delivering the music, Mozart had to report to his father that he still hadn't seen any payment for his efforts!

Today we celebrate two premieres and one three-letter prefix: "neo, n-e-o, meaning "new". On today's date in 1920, Igor Stravinsky's ballet "Pulcinella" was produced for the first time in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Stravinsky incorporated into the score some instrumental pieces attributed to the 18th century Italian composer Pergolesi. For the next 30 years, Stravinsky turned again and again to 18th-century forms and styles for inspiration, and created a style that was soon dubbed "neo-classical." Fifty-two years after Pucinella, a "neo-Romantic" movement of sorts was born when, on May 15, 1972, at New York's Alice Tully Hall, the Concord Quartet gave the premiere performance of the String Quartet No. 3 written by American composer George Rochberg. Rochberg's new quartet took the critics by surprise. While his previous two quartets had been written in an aggressively atonal style, his new quartet contained melodies that might have come from a late Beethoven string quartet, or a lost work by Mahler. In a kind of manifesto, Rochberg explained his use of Romantic styles: "We bear the past in us. We do not, cannot, begin all over again in each generation. I came to realize that the music of the old masters was a living presence; that its spiritual values had not been displaced or destroyed by the new music. The shock wave of the enlargement of vision was to alter my whole attitude towards what was musically possible today."

"Alligator Alley" is the nickname for the east-west stretch of Interstate 75 between Naples and Fort Lauderdale that crosses through Florida Everglades National Park. This park is home to many endangered species, one of them being the American alligator, a critter that occasionally I-75 drivers might see perched on the roadside observing the traffic flow—or hunting for road kill.

"Alligator Alley" is also the title of a wind band score by the American composer Michael Daugherty, a work commissioned in 2003 by the American Composers Forum for their BandQuest series of new pieces written by leading American composers for middle and high school performers.

In the case of "Alligator Alley," Daugherty had a particular middle-schooler in mind, namely his own daughter who played bassoon in a middle school band.

Daugherty's "Alligator Alley" employs two main themes: the first, a slithery "alligator theme," is played at the beginning by bassoons; the second, a "hunter's theme," is performed by the brass, and the percussive sound of an alligator snapping its jaws is evoked by two pieces of wood being struck together.

Since its premiere performance on May 14, 2003, by band director Gene Bartley and the kids at Slausen Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Michael Daugherty's "Alligator Alley" has slithered its way into the band rooms and onto the music stands of young musicians all across the country.

On today's date in 1875, American conductor Theodore Thomas, a passionate advocate for both old and new music, led the Cincinnati May Festival chorus and orchestra in the first American performance of J.S. Bach's "Magnificat."

Bach composed this work in 1723, originally for Christmas use in Leipzig, then revised the score ten years later in 1733. The American premiere, 142 years after that, was also a reworking, since the original instrumentation was expanded for large 19th century orchestra and Bach probably would have been astonished at the size of the Cincinnati chorus performing his music.

Bach's "Magnificat" served as the opener for a Festival performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The Beethoven was a huge success, and Cincinnati newspapers of the day referred to "Ninth Symphomania" breaking out in their city.

The newspapers were less impressed with Bach's "Magnificat." The Cincinnati Commercial review opined: "The work is difficult in the extreme… most of the chorus abounds with rambling sub-divisions. We considering the 'Magnificat' the weakest thing the chorus has undertaken… possessing no dramatic character and incapable of conveying the magnitude of the labor that has been expended upon its inconsequential intricacies."

Well, no one who actually heard that 1875 performance is still alive to ask whether it was really as terrible as all that, and in any case, we suspect American audiences and performers have a gotten a little more used to Bach's "inconsequential intricacies" since then.

On this date in 1926, a 19-year old composer and sometime silent film piano accompanist named Dimitri Shostakovich saw his First Symphony performed in style by the Leningrad Philharmonic.

It must have been a heady experience for the young composer, who for the past two years had earned a living of sorts accompanying silent films at various Leningrad cinemas.

One evening, while accompanying a film titled "Swamp and Water Birds of Sweden," the young composer was so carried away by his own improvisations of bird song that he assumed the catcalls and noisy expressions of disapproval from the audience were directed at the film, not at him. Only afterwards was he told the audience had assumed he must have been drunk. In later years, Shostakovich would tell this story with some pride—at least they had noticed his music!

The Leningrad Philharmonic's performance of his Symphony, the first of his orchestral works to be performed in public, was a triumph and established Shostakovich as a major new talent. Shostakovich's teacher, Maximillian Steinberg wrote that at rehearsals, Shostakovich was: "in such indescribable raptures from hearing his own music that I found it hard to restrain him from an unbridled display of his feelings."

May 12th was a date Shostakovich would commemorate till the end of his life—if for no other reason than he would never again have to improvise piano accompaniment to cinematic masterworks like "Swamp and Water Birds of Sweden."