Composers Datebook

Although contemporaries, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were two VERY different human beings. Mahler was tormented by self-doubt and existential angst; Strauss was a placid soul, self-confident to the point of complacency. Still, Mahler and Strauss admired and conducted each other’s music, and their odd friendship is reflected in their published correspondence.

On today’s date in 1911, for example, on learning that Mahler had been ill, but was recovering, Strauss wrote a gracious letter to his fellow composer-conductor:

“I learn with great pleasure that you are recovering from your long illness. Perhaps it might be a happy diversion for you during the melancholy hours of convalescence to know I plan to perform your Third Symphony with the Royal Orchestra in Berlin next winter. It is an excellent orchestra. If you would like to conduct yourself, it would be my pleasure to hear your lovely work again under your own direction – much as I would like to conduct it myself. I would be glad to rehearse the orchestra for you, so you would have no trouble and only the pleasure of conducting.”

Sadly, Strauss was poorly-informed about Mahler’s recovery and the gravity of his illness. Mahler died seven days after Strauss penned the letter.

The late Australian composer Barrington Pheloung’s music might not be familiar to concertgoers, but If you watch public television’s “Mystery” series, you’ve probably heard a lot of his work.

Pheloung composed music for the British “Inspector Morse” TV series, chronicling the cases of a Thames Valley police inspector and his loyal assistant, Robbie Lewis, and once explained how he came up with the haunting “Inspector Morse” theme:

“Morse is a very melancholic character … and he was a lover of classical music … He has a very cryptic mind and loves doing crosswords; we came up with the obvious idea – his name is Morse and so we used Morse code in the [theme] music.” Pheloung said the tapped code for M-O-R-S-E created a rhythm and even suggested a harmonic structure: “I picked up my guitar and there was the tune.”

Barrington Pheloung was born on today’s date in 1954 in Sydney, Australia, played drums and guitar as a kid, discovered Bach as a teen, and ended up earning a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. He composed music for dance, films, and TV, including “Lewis,” the sequel to the successful “Inspector Morse” series.

On today's date in 1911, the Independent Music Society of Paris sponsored "An Anonymous Concert" at which the audience was invited to guess the composers of a number of pieces presented without attribution. In the audience was the French composer Maurice Ravel, who had agreed to let a suite of his new piano pieces be performed as part of the experiment. Some professional music critics were also in attendance, although they prudently refused to reveal their guesses, fearing their professional reputations might suffer as a result. "The title Valses nobles et sentimentales is a sufficient indication that my intention was to compose a chain of waltzes following the example of Schubert," Ravel wrote. "They were performed for the first time, amidst protests and booing, at this concert." Even more droll, recalled Ravel, were the reactions of some his most ardent admirers, who attended the concert with him, but didn't know any of his own music would be played. They jeered at his waltzes, calling them "ridiculous pages," and ventured the guess the composer must be either Erik Satie or Zoltan Kodaly. Ravel accepted their comments in stoic silence. The majority of the audience proved more astute than Ravel's friends, however. "The paternity of the Waltzes was correctly attributed to me," recalled Ravel, "but by a weak majority." The following year, Ravel prepared this orchestral version of his waltz suite for use as a ballet score.

On today's date in 1938, a musical soirée was held at Dumbarton Oaks, a magnificent house on the crest of a wooded valley near Washington, D.C. This was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss.

Mr. Bliss had retired from a distinguished career in the U.S. Foreign Service, which included a posting in St. Petersburg in 1907, around the same time a young Russian composer name Igor Stravinsky was getting some of his first public performances there.

Mr. and Mrs. Bliss commissioned Stravinsky to write a Concerto for Chamber Orchestra to be premiered at their May 8, 1938 soirée in celebration of their 30th wedding anniversary, a work now known as the "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto."

"A little concerto in the style of the Brandenburg Concertos," was how Stravinsky put it, adding, "I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto, and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do."

On today’s date in 1937, the NBC radio network was carrying a live broadcast from the Cincinnati May Festival of a new oratorio entitled “The Ordering of Moses,” inspired by the Biblical Book of Exodus.

British conductor Eugene Goosens led soloists and a chorus of 350 in what was the world premiere performance of this music by a 54-year old Canadian-born American composer, organist, pianist, and music professor named Robert Nathaniel Dett.

Curiously, about 40 minutes into the live broadcast, which should have lasted a full hour, the NBC announcer broke in, stating, (quote), “We are sorry indeed, ladies and gentlemen, but due to previous commitments, we are unable to remain for the closing moments of this excellent performance."

A live recording of the broadcast, preserved on scratchy acetate discs, documents that moment for posterity. No one knows for certain why the broadcast was cut short, but some have speculated that angry calls to NBC’s Southern affiliate stations might have been the reason, because Dett was African-American.

77 years later, in 2014, the American conductor James Conlon led the Cincinnati May Festival Chorus in another live, broadcast performance of Dett’s oratorio, this time complete and uninterrupted from the stage of Carnegie Hall in New York City.

That live performance was also recorded, this time digitally, and made available for posterity on compact disc.

Reviewing the 2014 performance, New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote:

‘The uncanny radiance of this music is tied to a fundamental ambiguity: does the Exodus story serve as a metaphor for the black experience, or does that experience serve to amplify the religious text? When we hear the rattling of chains in the percussion, whose enslavement is being invoked? … The sadness of Dett’s career is that he began composing in earnest so late; he died, at the age of sixty, just six years after the première of 'The Ordering of Moses.'”

Do you believe in Angels?

Apparently the mystical Finnish composer Einojuhanni Rautavaara did. He produced a number of orchestral pieces with evocative titles like "Angels and Visitations" or "Angel of Light." One of these, a concerto for double-bass and orchestra, is titled "Angel of Dusk," and was given its premiere performance in on today's date in 1981, in Helsinki.

"Looking out the window of a plane," wrote Rautavaara, "I saw a strikingly shaped cloud, gray but pierced with color, rising above the Atlantic horizon. Suddenly, the words 'Angel of Dusk' came to mind." Rautavaara had been asked to write a double-bass concerto for a friend, who died before the composer could comply with the request. Some years later, when the idea of such a concerto was suggested by another soloist, Rautavaara recalled the vision of the cloud, and had his title.

In an interview, Rautavaara spoke of a scientist who wrote that "the existence of music is an intellectual scandal." "With that he meant," Rautavaara explained, "…that there is a message in music, and yet there are no words for that message. It's from another world. For a scientist that is a scandal. For me, it's a wonderful thing."

"In the end, I agree with Carl Jung," said Rautavaara. "The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him."

Benjamin Britten was the most famous English opera composer of the 20th century, but ironically his first opera, "Paul Bunyan," had an American theme and premiered at Columbia University in New York City on today's date in 1941.

Britten lived in America from 1939 to 1942. When his American publisher suggested he write something that could be performed by any high school, Britten's good friend, the British poet W. H. Auden, also living in the U.S., fashioned a libretto around the tall tales of the mythical American folk hero, the giant logger Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe.

The New York Times review of the premiere of "Paul Bunyan"— which shared its page with a picture of New York major Fiorello La Guardia sampling Camp Fire Girls' donuts — was a mixture of praise and pans. "Mr. Britten is a very clever young man," wrote Olin Downes, but firmly suggested the young composer was capable of much better things.

Britten's next opera, "Peter Grimes," would receive its premiere in London, in 1945, by which time Britten was back in England for good, but like "Paul Bunyan" had an American connection — it was originally commissioned for $1000 by the Koussevitsky Foundation of Boston, and so received its American premiere at the Berkshire Music Festival in 1946 under the baton of Serge Koussevitsky's young protege, Leonard Bernstein.

On today's date in 1953, at New York's 92nd Street "Y," Walden String Quartet tackled the difficult First String Quartet of American composer Elliott Carter. In Carter's 45-minute Quartet, the four voices enter one by one, in the style of a fugue, but each voice pursues its own very individual pace and character.

Carter's Quartet was as densely-packed with ideas as a page from James Joyce—an author the composer cited as an influence. But, writing for the Herald Tribune, composer Virgil Thomson gave the work a glowing review: "The piece is complex of texture, delicious in sound, richly expressive, and in every way grand—the audience loved it," wrote Thomson.

That same year Carter's Quartet won First Prize in the International String Quartet competition in Belgium, a contest Carter entered almost as an afterthought. "My First Quartet was written largely for my own satisfaction and grew out of an effort to understand myself," he said.

To escape from the distractions of New York, Carter had retreated to the desert near Tucson to write it. No one had commissioned the Quartet, and Carter initially feared its complexity would only baffle performers and audiences. His next quartet, equally challenging, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Complexity would characterize Carter's music for the next 50 years—although the composer himself insists that fantasy and invention, rather than difficulty for its own sake, had always been his goal.

Today marks the anniversary of the first performance of the best-known work of the Swiss-born American composer, Ernest Bloch, whose "Hebrew rhapsody—Schelomo," for cello and orchestra, premiered at Carnegie Hall on May 3 in 1917. "Schelomo" is a vivid meditation on the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, which describes King Solomon reflecting sadly on the vanity of human endeavor—"Schelomo" being the original Hebrew pronunciation of Solomon.

"Schelomo" premiered just a year after Bloch came to the United States. In America, Bloch had found encouragement and remarkable acceptance of his music. His "Schelomo" was just one of several works premiered at an all-Bloch concert at Carnegie Hall arranged by The Society of the Friends of Music, and performed by an orchestra made up chiefly of New York Philharmonic members with the Philadelphia orchestra's principal cellist Hans Kindler as soloist.

"Schelomo" was originally written with the Russian cellist Serge Alexander Barjansky in mind, and was dedicated to him and his wife; but it was not until a concert in Rome in 1933, a fateful year for the Jews of Europe, that Bloch got to conduct the work with Barjansky as soloist.

Despite his success in America, Bloch tried to resume his career in Europe in the 1930s, but, discouraged by the rise of anti-Semitism and threats of war, he returned to American for good in 1938, where he continued to compose, conduct, and teach until his death in 1959.

The marimba is a percussion instrument of tuned bars, usually made of wood, arranged like the keys of a piano. These bars are struck with mallets to produce resonate, rounded—and, well, "woody"—musical tones.

The marimba was developed in Mexico and Guatemala, inspired by instruments native to Africa reconstructed in the New World by unfortunate Africans brought over to Central America to work as slaves. By the mid-20th century, the marimba was showing up in jazz ensembles, and classical composers would, on occasion, even write a marimba concerto or two. More recently, massed marimbas make up a sonorous, albeit stationary, component of hyper-kinetic drum and bugle corps spectaculars.

The contemporary American composer Jennifer Higdon loves the sound of the marimba, and so in 2006 wrote a piece for three marimbas, entitled "Splendid Wood."

"'Splendid Wood' is a joyous celebration of the sound of wood, one of nature's most basic materials," says Higdon. "Wood is a part of all sorts of things in our world, but is used most thrillingly and gloriously in instruments. This work reflects the evolving patterns inside a piece of wood, always shifting, and yet every part is related and contributes to the magnificent of the whole."

"Splendid Wood" was commissioned by Bradford and Dorothea Endicott, for Frank Epstein and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, and had its New York premiere on today's date in 2007, by the Mannes Percussion Ensemble under the direction of James Preiss.