Composers Datebook

A question: do you see colors when you hear music? No, we’re not going psychedelic on you and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today’s edition of COMPOSERS DATEBOOK.

It’s just that many composers do—see colors, that is.

The late Romantic Russian composer Alexander Scriabin would describe the key of F-sharp Major as very definitely being “bright blue.” His colleague Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, however, thought F-sharp Major more a greyish-green hue. While many composers confess to seeing certain musical keys as certain colors, the fact is they don’t always agree on WHICH color matches which key.

Which brings us to the American composer Michael Torke, who gave the title “Bright Blue Music” to an orchestral piece that premiered on today’s date at Carnegie Hall at a concert of the New York Youth Symphony.

In 1985, when this music premiered, Torke was just 24 years old, but had already been composing music for most of his young life. In addition to a string of other “colorful” scores, with titles like “The Yellow Pages” and “Ecstatic Orange,” Torke has gone on to also write a number of ballet scores and vocal works, including a TV opera and, in 1999, a big choral symphony for the Disney Corporation to celebrate the Millennium.

The American composer Roger Sessions is an acquired taste for most classical music fans, and, truth be told, his works don’t show up on concert recital programs all that often.

He was born in the 19th century, 1896, when Grover Cleveland was president, and died in 1985, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

Session’s early music, written when he was in his twenties and thirties, was neo-classical in style, but as the 20th century progressed, Sessions’ style did also, moving from harmonically complex tonality to frankly atonal works. His music became increasingly “gnarly,” you might say, but there was always a lot of emotion in his music, whatever technique he employed.

Take for example his Piano Sonata No. 3, nicknamed “The Kennedy Sonata.” It was written in reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on today’s date in 1963. The last movement of Sessions’ Piano Sonata was written as an elegy for the slain president, and includes a climax of three sharply accented chords. For the American pianist William Grant Naboré, one of just a handful of artists who have recorded this work, those three chords suggest the three sharp rifle shots that shattered the air in Dallas the day Kennedy died.

Today, a letter: written on this date in 1615 by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi to a friend at the court of the Duke of Mantua.

The letter accompanied a vocal score that Monteverdi hoped would convice the Duke to commission a much larger work. After detailed instructions regarding the positioning of the singers and the instruments Monteverdi adds—almost as an afterthought—this line: “If you could let the singers and players see the music for an hour before His Highness hears it, it would be a very good thing indeed.”

Talk about “authentic performance practice!”

It probably took more than an hour’s rehearsal for the U.S. premiere of American composer Steve Reich’s intricate setting of four Hebrew psalm fragments—titled “Tehillim”—which took place in Houston, Texas, on today’s date in 1981. Back then, Reich was already famous as one of America’s leading “minimalist” composers, but a search for fresh directions coincided with Reich’s rediscovery of his Jewish heritage, and “Tehillim” was the result.

“For me,” says Reich, ”the most important aspect of a piece of music, mine or someone else’s, is its emotional and intellectual effect on performers and audiences—I find it basically impossible to separate the emotional and intellectual aspects of a piece of music.“

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 was first heard on this day in Budapest in 1889, with the 29-year-old composer conducting.

Originally billed as a “symphonic poem,” a newspaper in Budapest even printed a detailed program, obviously supplied by Mahler himself. For subsequent performance in Europe, Mahler quickly withdrew these “Cliff’s Notes” to his Symphony.

Twenty years later, in December of 1909, Mahler conducted its American premiere at Carnegie Hall, during his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic.

The symphony drew mixed reviews:

The New York Times wrote, “There are matters in it, that as absolute music, have no evident significance, and that serve merely to puzzle and perplex.” The critic for the Sun took a dislike to the symphony’s finale, suggesting (quote) “when the weather is bad in Tyrol, it is beyond the power of language to characterize.”

Mahler’s own reactions are recorded in a letter he sent from New York to Bruno Walter back in Europe: “The day before yesterday I did my First Symphony here, without getting much reaction. However, I myself was fairly pleased with that youthful effort… The audiences here are very lovable and relatively better mannered than in Vienna. They listen attentively and very sympathetically. The critics are the same as anywhere else. I don’t read any of them.”

The modern Hungarian city we know as Budapest is really three older settlements merged into one: Buda, on the west bank of the Danube, was the royal seat of the medieval Hungarian kings; Obuda, just to the north, was an ancient Roman provincial capital; and Pest, is a newer city situated on the east bank of the Danube. These three became the modern-day city Budapest in 1873.

In 1923, to celebrate modern Budapest’s 50th anniversary, the Hungarian government commissioned two of its greatest composers, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, to compose orchestral pieces which both premiered on today’s date that year.

Bartók’s contribution was a lively “Dance Suite,” with themes reminiscent of Hungarian folk melodies, although no actual folksongs are quoted. It’s one of his most genial and upbeat orchestral scores.

Kodály’s contribution was his “Psalmus Hungaricus” for tenor, chorus and orchestra, a free setting of a 16th century Hungarian translation of Psalm 55, in which the Psalmist pleads for deliverance from his persecutors.

That Psalm had a special political resonance for Zoltán Kodály, who had fallen out of favor with the right-wing Hungarian regime then in power. Despite its melancholy tone, “Psalmus Hungaricus” was an instant hit in Hungary and elsewhere, and helped established Kodály’s international reputation as one of his country’s greatest composers.

Today’s date marks the official birthday of a quintessential American form of 20th century music—for cartoons.

It was on November 18, 1928, that the first-ever animated cartoon with its own synchronized soundtrack debuted at the Colony Theater in New York City. This was Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” starring Mickey Mouse, who amazed audiences when he spoke up in a squeaky, falsetto voice provided by none other than Disney himself. Mickey pulled the whistle on his steamboat—a startling sonic effect in those days—and, oblivious of the impending animal rights movement, coaxed music from various squeezed and plucked barnyard colleagues.

That music was composed by a quiet, unassuming theater organist out of Kansas City named Carl Stalling, who was soon lured to Hollywood by Disney to work on subsequent Mickey Mouse and “Silly Symphony” cartoons. In 1936, Stalling joined the Warner Brothers studios, and for the next 22 years was the music director for classic Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Stalling’s wonderfully wacky and endlessly inventive music was usually ignored by “serious” music critics as beneath notice. Ironically, his scores feature the same dizzying shifts of mood, tempo and instrumentation as the most complex avant-garde scores of the post-war period: Stockhausen and Boulez meet Tweety and Sylvester?

On today’s date in 2005, the chancel of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis was transformed into a performance stage for vocal soloists, choirs, and the Minnesota Orchestra led by Osmo Vänksä.

The occasion was the world premiere performance of a new oratorio entitled “To Be Certain of the Dawn,” featuring music by the American composer Stephen Paulus and a text by the British-born poet Michael Dennis Browne. The Basilica had commissioned the oratorio as a gift to Temple Israel in Minneapolis in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945.

As Paulus explained, the idea for the oratorio began with a former rector of the Catholic basilica, who felt that Christians should acknowledge and teach about the Holocaust as much as—or more so—than Jews. “It was he,” wrote Paulus, “who decided that an oratorio would be a powerful vehicle for communicating… [and] that children are key to the prevention of genocide, both today and in the future.”

With telling effect, actual informal photographs of Jewish children taken in European ghettos during the 1930s and 40s were projected onto screens during the performance. As poet Michael Dennis Browne wrote, “The faces of children are the sun, moon, and stars of this work.”

On today’s date in 1777, the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck was baffled by Parisian audiences and wrote these lines to a friend:

“I am so much disgusted with music that at present that I would not write one single note for any amount of money… Never has a more keenly-fought battle been waged than by the enemies of my new opera, ‘Armide.’ The intrigues against my previous operas were no more than little skirmishes in comparison. Admirers tell me, ‘Sir, you are fortunate to be enjoying the honor of persecution’ and ‘every genius has had the same experience’— Bah! To the devil with their fine speeches!

“Still, yesterday, at the eighth performance of ‘Armide,’ the hall was so tightly packed that when a man was asked to take off his hat, he replied, ‘Come and take it off yourself, I can’t move my arms!’—which caused laughter. I have seen people coming out with their hair bedraggled and their clothes drenched as though they had fallen into a stream. Only the French would pay for such an experience!”

Gluck would ultimately triumph in Paris and could count among his most ardent supporters none other than the French queen, Marie Antoinette—who presumably had a much cooler and certainly less crowded box at the opera.

Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performance of Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat,” produced in 1927 at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. by Florenz Ziegfeld.

Show Boat’s book and lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein II, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, which had been published only the year before. It was a most unusual story for a musical, and dealt frankly with alcoholism and interracial marriage. Mixing tragic and comic elements was something simply unheard of in American musical theater of that time.

Ziegfeld’s secretary recalled that before the Washington premiere, he fretted that audiences would be disappointed that the girls on stage were wearing much too much clothing for a typical Ziegfeld show. There was little or no applause following the November 15th premiere, and Ziegfeld assumed that “Show Boat” was a flop. But the Washington audiences were simply too stunned to react.

When Ziegfeld’s secretary told his boss that there were long lines waiting to buy tickets for subsequent performances, at first Ziegfeld didn’t believe it. But by the time “Show Boat” opened on Broadway the following month, even the Great Ziegfeld knew he had a hit on his hands—and one based on great music and a powerful book, with nary a scantily-glad show girl in sight!

If ever there was a red-letter day in American music, November 14th must surely be it. For starters, it’s the birthday of Aaron Copland, who was born in New York City on today’s date in 1900—and then there’s all that happened on November 14th in the life of Leonard Bernstein.

Here’s how Bernstein himself explained it: “I never forget a Copland birthday. Two of the most important events of my life happened on November 14—the first in 1937 when Aaron and I met for the first time… Now, I worried and complained terrifically back then and always took my troubles to Aaron, who would tell me to ’stop whining.’ He seemed to have such complete confidence in me that he didn’t show a bit of surprise when on Sunday, November 14, 1943, I made a dramatic success by filling in for the ailing Bruno Walter and conducting the New York Philharmonic. All Aaron’s predications came true—and on his birthday!”

As if that weren’t enough, in 1954, again on Copland’s birthday, Bernstein made his TV debut presenting Beethoven’s draft sketches for the opening of his Fifth Symphony. It proved a smash success—and led to Bernstein’s televised “Young Person’s Concerts” that brought classical music to millions of Americans coast to coast.