Composers Datebook

In the year 1929, October 24th fell on a Thursday, and that particular day has the dubious honor of being dubbed “Black Thursday” — for it was on that fateful day that the New York Stock Exchange crashed. A full-blown financial panic ensued, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s. For many who saw their fortunes wiped out overnight, it must have seemed like the end of the world.

Meanwhile, in Charleston, West Virginia, a baby boy was born on “Black Thursday” who would grow up to become one of America’s most original composers. By the 1970s, George Crumb was acknowledged as a masterful creator of impressionistic and mysterious soundscapes, with evocative titles like “Dream Sequence,” “Night of the Four Moons,” and “Eleven Echoes of Autumn.”

Most of Crumbs’ pieces are for small ensemble, but in 1977 he composed a large-scale work entitled “Star Child,” scored for antiphonal choirs, bell ringers, and a large symphony orchestra positioned for surround-sound effect in the concert hall. Crumb says it traces a “progression from darkness and despair to light or joy and spiritual realization.”

A recording of “Star Child” was issued to celebrate Crumb’s 70th birthday in 1999 — a year, curiously enough, in which the stock market enjoyed an all-time high, just before taking yet another downward plunge!

On today’s date in 1913, composer Frederick Delius was in Leipzig for the first performances of two orchestral pieces destined to become among his most popular works. These were “On hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring” and “Summer Night on the River,” premiered by the world-famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, led by one of the most charismatic conductors of that time, the legendary Artur Nikisch.

In a letter to his wife, Delius reported that the orchestra was “splendid” — as for Nikisch, Delius had this to say: “He played the first piece MUCH too slow, but very expressively. The second piece he played most beautifully — perfect!”

Eighty-four years later, on October 23, 1997, another atmospheric orchestra work received its first performance when conductor Zdenek Macal led the New Jersey Symphony in “Celestial Night,” a work by the American composer Richard Danielpour., who wrote:

“Part of the inspiration for Celestial Night came to me while star-gazing in New Hampshire and reflecting on the contrast inherent in my life: between summers in rural places where all the driven, frenetic life that I lead in New York City is temporarily suspended and I have a period of peace… [and] the possibility of personal transformation … of discovering something beyond one’s own immediate environment or experience in order to grow.”

On today’s date in 1942, Bruno Walter conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of the Second Symphony of the American composer John Alden Carpenter.

Like Charles Ives, Carpenter led a double life as a composer and successful businessman. He was born into a wealthy family, and from 1906 until his retirement in 1936, served as Vice President of George B. Carpenter & Co., his father’s railroad and shipping supply company.

Carpenter studied music at home and abroad, and even took composition lessons from Sir Edward Elgar. In 1914, Carpenter scored a national success with his first big orchestral work, a whimsical symphonic suite titled “Adventures in a Perambulator,” and in 1921 wrote a very popular jazz-inspired ballet titled “Krazy Kat,” based on a wildly popular newspaper comic strip of the day.

By the 1940s, Carpenter’s works were being performed by America’s leading orchestras and famous maestros like Bruno Walter and Fritz Reiner. To celebrate his 75th birthday, the newly-formed National Arts Foundation promoted performances of his music in the U.S, Europe, and Australia.

But in the decades following his death in 1951, much of Carpenter’s work has been forgotten. This first-ever recording of his Symphony No. 2 was released by Naxos of America in 2001 — 59 years after the work’s 1942 premiere.

In the year 1858, the Parisian composer Jacques Offenbach was, as usual, busy writing his next operetta and avoiding his creditors. He found it expedient to work in hotel rooms rather than at home, where he ran the risk of being cornered by bill collectors. Offenbach hoped that maybe, just maybe, one big box office success might clear his debts — and enable him to reupholster the tattered seats in his theater, Les Bouffes-Parisiens.

On today’s date in 1858, the audience in those tattered seats saw the premiere of Offenbach’s latest operetta: a farcical send-up of an old Greek myth. “Orpheus in the Underworld” was a modest success and ran well for several weeks.

But just as the production would normally be closing, an important Parisian music critic attended a performance, and was shocked, SHOCKED that Offenbach dared make fun of something so noble and edifying as Greek mythology. His outraged review generated a lively debate, especially when Offenbach slyly inserted direct quotes from the review into the operetta itself!

Suddenly “Orpheus in the Underworld” was the hottest ticket in Paris.

Box office revenue not only paid for new upholstery, but one tune from the show, an infectious ‘Infernal Galop” would, as M. Offenbach’s celebrated “Can-Can,” become a world-famous melody practically synonymous with Paris itself.

An unusual Piano Concerto by the American composer Lou Harrison had its premiere performance in New York on this day in 1985. The famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, for whom it was written, was the soloist.

Now, Lou Harrison’s music was often marked by its eclectic blending of East and West, and on occasion, Harrison employed non-Western or unusual instruments in his scores, including his own home-made Javanese-style gamelan constructed from old brake drums and clay flowerpots. But that wasn’t what made his Piano Concerto so singular.

“I’ve always wanted to write a piano concerto which utilizes two or three pianos on stage, each tuned differently,” said Harrison. “And Keith was willing to try that. But in the end, I decided to use one piano in a tuning I really enjoy.”

In Harrison’s concerto, the piano is not tuned to the “equal temperament” system in use in Western music since Bach’s day. The black keys are tuned to the medieval system of mathematically exact intervals of 4ths and 5ths, while the white keys reproduce the “just intonation” system common in the Renaissance and Baroque.

And so the familiar instrument has an unfamiliar ring, but one that Keith Jarret loved: “At times in the piece,” he said, “whole chords sound like bells.”

From the first millennium of the Common Era to the present day, the Mass have been chanted and sung to music both simple and complex. Most Mass settings are in the original Latin, since that liturgical language, after so many centuries, has the advantage of being very familiar and eminently suitable for singing.

On today’s date in 2010, the Kansas City Chorale gave the premiere of a brand-new “Mass for Double Choir” by the American composer René Clausen.

Now, Clausen is an established and well-regarded composer of choral works, but even so writing a Mass can be a daunting task, and Clausen’s was his first such attempt.

“Let's say it was a new challenge to set a text which has historically been set probably more than any other,” says Clausen. “I tend to be rather text-content driven, nearly always attempting to express the meaning and mood of the words. In the longer movements of the Mass, especially the Credo, it was challenging to express all the text, yet keep the music structurally integrated and proportioned.”

René Clausen’s new “Mass for Double Choir” was well-received at its American premiere, and subsequently recorded by the Kansas City Chorale for the British Chandos label. That recording won three Grammy Awards in 2013, including one for “Best Choral Performance.”

On this day in 1904, in Cologne, Germany, Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of his Fifth Symphony. It was not a success. Applause was light, with loud hissing from some in the audience. Even Mahler’s wife, Alma, complained so much about the orchestration that Mahler kept tinkering with the score until the last year of his life.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Mahler’s Fifth has become a popular showpiece for virtuoso orchestras and its slow movement, marked Adagietto -- supposedly Mahler’s musical love to Alma -- has become one of Mahler’s best-loved pieces.

The American composer Jerome Moross also had a symphony premiered on today’s date. The year was 1943, Moross was 30 years old, and Sir Thomas Beecham conducted its premiere performance with the Seattle Symphony. Unlike Mahler, Moross wrote only ONE symphony, and the slow movement of his was inspired by the American hobo tune “The Midnight Special.”

Jerome Moross is best known his work in Hollywood. His 1958 score for “The Big Country” was nominated for an Academy Award. Moross also wrote the music for “Wagon Train,” a popular TV Western. As Moross once said: “a composer must reflect his landscape and mine is the landscape of America. I don't do it consciously, it is simply the only way I can write.”

On this date in 1831, the 21-year old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a concert in Munich consisting entirely of his own works – a concert that included the premiere of his Piano Concerto in G Minor, with its composer as the soloist.

Mendelssohn was in high spirits and wrote these lines to family:

“It is a glorious feeling to waken in the morning and to know that you are going to write the score of a grand allegro with all sorts of instruments . . . while bright weather promises a cheering, long walk in the afternoon. On the evening of the October 17th at half-past six, think of me, for then I will dash off with thirty violins and two sets of wind instruments [for] my new concerto in G minor. Every morning I have to write, correct and score till one o’clock, when I go to Scheidel’s coffee house in Kaufinger Gasse, where I know each face by heart and find the same people every day in the same position: two playing chess, three looking on, five reading the newspapers, six eating their dinner — with me making up the seventh.”

Unfortunately for posterity, Mendelssohn never said if he recognized any of that coffeehouse crowd sitting in the audience for the performance of his new concerto!

Today’s date in 1956 marks the birthday of the Cuban composer Eduardo Martin, a name that might not be all that familiar to you – unless you play guitar, that is. Martin has written music for orchestra and films but is best known and admired for works he’s written for his own instrument, the guitar -- music infused with the flair and dance rhythms of his native Havana.

One of his popular pieces is titled “Hasta Alicia Baila,” roughly translated “Even Alicia Dances,” referencing the great Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, suggesting that even she couldn’t resist dancing to its beat.

“Guitar is my greatest passion,” said Martin in an interview for Cuban radio. “But I have other passions: my country and my family.

“In my work, it is easy to notice the attachment to my roots. Even when I travel and see something that I like, I say, ‘Of course, it looks just like home.’ I confess I am an eternal lover of Havana. I find it wonderful and irreplaceable. … And so I reflect in my work some of the impressions that this place has left in me … What I feel when I wake up in my city, when I walk in it, the mix of colors and the sounds that flood through it.”

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite “La Mer” or “The Sea” was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of “The Sea” Debussy should have titled his piece “Sea-Sickness.”

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give ANY impression of the sea… There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on “La Mer” from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood… There are no themes… There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music ” in the early 20th century!