Composers Datebook

Recordings can be an effective calling card for composers – but the expense of recording an orchestral work in the U.S. is rather daunting, so composers often work with record labels that use orchestras abroad.

American composer Rain Worthington made a recording of her orchestral work “Tracing a Dream” with the Russian Philharmonic on today’s date in 2010, and, in quintessential 21st century fashion, planned to “attend” the Moscow recording session via Skype.

“But just as I was about to login,” recalls Worthington, “the recording assistant emailed the Russian authorities had revoked the permission to Skype. At the last minute an appeal by my American recording producer, Bob Lord, who was present in the studio, somehow convinced them to allow the connection. So I spent the morning ‘virtually’ in Moscow, listening to and participating in the three-hour recording session!”

“’Tracing a Dream’ taps into the impressionistic logic of dreams,” says Worthington. “Within this realm there is a fluidity of connections governed by emotional contexts, rather than rational order.“

Six years after its recording in Moscow, “Tracing a Dream” received its public premiere by the Missouri State University Orchestra conducted by Christopher Kelts and was awarded an Ernst Bacon Award for the Performance of American Music.

Composer Serge Prokofiev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich first met in 1947 when Prokofiev was 56 and already ailing, and Rostropovich, a fresh, skinny 20-year-old, was just at the start of his career. Rostropovich had played Prokofiev's long-neglected First Cello Concerto and, after the performance, the grateful composer said he would write something new for the talented young cellist.

Prokofiev completed a Cello Sonata, and in the summer of 1949 invited Rostropovich to his country dacha to play through the new piece. When Rostropovich arrived, he found Prokofiev dressed in a bathrobe with a towel on his head like a turban, surrounded by chickens and roosters. "Forgive my rustic appearance," said Prokofiev to the obviously embarrassed young cellist, and they promptly set to work.

The first public performance of the new Sonata took place on today's date in 1950, at the Moscow Conservatory, with Rostropovich joined by pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Ill health prevented Prokofiev from attending—but, fortunately, we can listen in via a recording that was made at that very performance.

Prokofiev rarely added epigraphs to his scores, but at the top of the score for his Cello Sonata he added some words of Maxim Gorky, "Man — that has a proud sound." Commentators have suggested the broad, sweeping warmth of Prokofiev's Sonata expresses a similar sentiment. In any case, the new work was an instant hit and rapidly became a staple in the cello repertory.

Happy Leap Year!

Once every four years we have the opportunity to wish the great Italian opera composer Giacomo Rossini a happy birthday—he was born on February 29th in 1792—and to note some other musical events that occurred on this unusual but recurring calendar date.

The American Bicentennial Year of 1976, for example, was also a Leap Year, and 12 months were cram-packed with specially commissioned works written on a grand scale to celebrate that major anniversary of our nation. But at Alice Tully Hall on the afternoon of February 29, 1976, a more modest celebration was in progress: an afternoon of new chamber works for flute and harp, including the premiere performance of piece by the American composer Ned Rorem.

This piece was entitled “Book of Hours,” referring to the prayers that the clergy read at various times of the day. In 1976, when the avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez was the music director of the New York Philharmonic and dense, complicated music was considered fashionable by the critics, and the reviewer for the New York Times was struck by Rorem’s deceptive simplicity:

“Many contemporary composers flaunt their abilities to make music complex,” he wrote, “but Rorem waves an altogether different flag. His ‘Book of Hours’ seemed determined to be uneventful. Its calculated simplicities and unassertive manner recalled the bare-walls asceticism of Erik Satie, though Mr. Rorem’s phrases and colors are more sensuous and do not quite evoke Satie’s mood of monastic rigor.”

Maurice Ravel’s orchestral suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin" was premiered in Paris this day in 1920. It had started out as a suite of solo piano pieces, intended as a tribute to the great French Baroque composer François Couperin—or, as Ravel wrote, “not so much to Couperin himself, as to 18th-century French music in general.” Although the French word “tombeau” translates literally as “tomb,” it also signifies a musical piece paying tribute to a past master, in the English sense of “in memoriam.”

As it turned out, Ravel’s piece would become a memorial not only to Couperin, but to seven of his friends killed during World War I. His original work on the piece began in 1914, but was interrupted by his service as an ambulance driver during the war. He returned to it after being discharged in 1917. Each movement was dedicated to a friend or two killed in battle.

Although the “tombeau” as a musical form has been associated almost exclusively with French composers, a contemporary American composer has used the idea as well, albeit with a more lighthearted spirit. His “Tombeau de Liberace” makes reference to the late pianist and showman, a kitschy icon of 20th century American pop culture.

Michael Daugherty says, “Starting from the vernacular idiom, I have composed ‘Le Tombeau de Liberace’ as a meditation on the American sublime: a lexicon of forbidden music. It is a piano concertino in four movements, each creating a distinct Liberace atmosphere.”

On this date in 1814, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 8 in F Major. As the scherzo movement of his new symphony, Beethoven recycled a tune he originally used as a musical salute to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome. For a time, Maelzel was Beethoven's friend and sometimes collaborator on concerts and various mechanical projects.

Beethoven used Maelzel's metronomes to add precise, if sometimes debatable, tempo markings to some of his earlier works. Some conductors choose to ignore these metronome markings, since they came after the fact of composition and at a time when Beethoven was increasingly deaf. In fact, in addition to metronomes, the versatile Maelzel also supplied the Beethoven with ear trumpets—the 19th-century version of hearing aids.

Perhaps Beethoven was using one of those ear trumpets when someone asked him why his Seventh Symphony was more popular in Vienna than his Eighth. "Because the Eighth is so much better," he growled in reply.

Closer to our own time, the American composer Leroy Anderson, who lived from 1908 to 1975, immortalized the tick-tock of a mechanical timekeeper in his piece entitled "The Syncopated Clock." Leroy Anderson was a master of the musical miniature, creating dozens of witty pieces with titled like "Plink, Plank, Plunk," "Bugler's Holiday," and "Fiddle Faddle."

Two interesting symphonies had their premieres on today's date just eight years apart. Oddly enough, they were composed nearly ninety years apart.

The first was the Symphony in C by George Bizet, written in 1855 when the composer was only 17. It was mislaid in his papers, ignored by Bizet himself as a naive youthful exercise, and not revived until 1935. It was performed for the first time on the 26th of February that year in Basel, Switzerland under the baton of Felix Weingartner, who found a copy of the score that had been kept in the Paris Conservatory.

The other work that premiered today was the Fifth Symphony of the American composer Roy Harris. It was written in 1942, during the Second World War, and was reportedly inspired by reports of heroic resistance by the Soviet Union to the Nazi invasion. Harris dedicated this symphony to the Red Army in honor of its 25th anniversary.

The first performance—given by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on February 26th, 1943—was broadcast via short wave to the Soviet Union. Ironically, despite Harris's unquestionable credentials as a loyal American and enthusiastic patriot, his pro-Soviet Symphony No. 5 was to become something of an embarrassment when our one-time Soviet allies became Public Enemy No. 1 during the long Cold War period that followed the end of the Second World War.

In London on today’s date in 1871 an audience gathered in the newly-finished Royal Albert Hall to attend the first-ever concert to be performed there. This occurred a month BEFORE the official opening of this famous Victorian edifice as a special thank-you for the workers who constructed the building.

The orchestra that played that concert was famous in its day – though now totally forgotten. It was called The Wandering Minstrels and its players were all British aristocrats – Lords, Right Honourables, and senior military – who from 1861 to 1896 played exclusively for charity events. One strict rule of membership was that only AMATEUR musicians were allowed. If you earned even one penny as a professional, you were out.

That happened to one member, the composer Frederick Clay, who had to leave The Wandering Minstrels when music he wrote for the stage started to pull in a few pennies. Clay even collaborated with W.S. Gilbert, the famous librettist for Sir Arthur Sullivan, who himself occasionally performed as a guest with The Wandering Minstrels.

And yes, it’s likely that the Gilbert & Sullivan song “A Wandering Minstrel I” from “The Mikado” was an in-joke reference to the aristocratic orchestra, especially since Nanki-Poo, who sings it, was (after all) a nobleman in disguise.

It's quite possible that you or someone you know is the caregiver for an ill or aging relative or friend. If so, you know the emotional rewards—and heavy emotional toll—that caretaking involves.

On today's date in 1989, the American composer John Adams led the Saint Paul Chamber orchestra and baritone Sanford Sylvan in the premiere performance of a powerful new chamber work he had composed inspired by—and in honor of—caretakers everywhere.

In 1988, John Adams's father had died after years of struggling with Alzheimer's, and Adams was haunted by images of his mother caring for her husband as the illness progressed. Living in San Francisco, Adams was also moved by Bay Area friends who nursed loved ones during those helpless early years of the AIDS epidemic.

Adams found that these 20th century experiences resonated in certain poems by the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, who had served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, initially to care for his own wounded brother, but subsequently to tend other wounded soldiers in those traumatic years.

Adams chose one Whitman poem, entitled "The Wound Dresser," as text and title for his new work. "The Wound-Dresser," said Adams, is about the power of "human compassion that is acted out on a daily basis." This work has become one of the most-performed and most-admired of all the compositions of John Adams.

In February of 1919, members of the New York Chamber Music Society gave the premiere performance of this music—an instrumental suite by the American composer Deems Taylor, titled "Through the Looking Glass." A few years later, Deems Taylor landed a job as music critic for the New York World, and following that, became known coast-to-coast as the radio commentator for New York Philharmonic broadcasts, and as the host of a popular quiz-show titled "Information, Please." His voice was also heard as the commentator for the 1940 Disney film, "Fantasia."

On today's date in 1980, another American composer premiered a musical work inspired by "Alice in Wonderland." This was David Del Tredici's "In Memory of a Summer's Day," first presented by the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin. By 1980, Del Tredici had already composed several successful works inspired by the Lewis Carroll books, but "In Memory of Summer's Day" capped the lot, and won that year's Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Del Tredici was a protégé of Aaron Copland, and recalled how Copland would react to Del Tredici's compositions. "He'd say something noncommittal at first, such as 'It's very nice.' Then maybe an hour or so later, at dinner, he would turn to me, apropos of nothing, and say, 'I think the bass line is too regular, and the percussion should not always underline the main beat and would you please pass the butter.'"

On today's date in 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of the Symphony No. 2 by Charles Ives. Ives was then 76 and living in Connecticut. Heart disease and diabetes left him far too weak to attend the Carnegie Hall premiere. Nicholas Slonimsky recalls once asking the thin and pale Ives how he was feeling, to which Ives replied he felt so weak that (quote): "I can't even spit into the fireplace." Ives didn't own a radio, so he visited his neighbors, the Ryders, to hear Bernstein conduct the Sunday afternoon broadcast performance of music he had composed some 50 years earlier. "There's not much to say about the Symphony," Ives said at the time. "I express the musical feelings of the Connecticut country in the 1890's. It's full of the tunes they sang and played then, and I thought it would be a sort of a joke to have some of these tunes in counterpoint with some Bach-like tunes." Ives' neighbor, Mrs. Ryder, recalled how he reacted to the radio broadcast: "Mr. Ives sat in the front room and listened as quietly as could be, and I sat way back behind him, because I didn't want him to think I was looking at him. After it was over, I'm sure he was very much moved. He stood up, walked over the fireplace, and spat! And then he walked out into the kitchen and said not a word."