Composers Datebook

To most music lovers, the name Jean-Baptise Lully calls to mind pompous and courtly music for Louis XIV, the French “Sun King” who was his great patron. The Italian-born Lully is credited with “creating” French opera in the 17th century — and some of these works, usually based on subjects from classical mythology and poetry, are occasionally revived and recorded today.

But that was only one side of Lully’s personality, the, shall we say, “stuffy and serious” side, because Lully was also something of a clown — literally.

For over seven years he worked with the great French comedian and playwright Moliere to create joint stage works. In addition to composing the music, Lully acted, sang and danced in these satirical and slap-stick affairs. The most famous of the Lully-Moliere collaborations debuted on today’s date in 1670, when, to cheer up King Louis after an embarrassing incident involving a bogus ambassador from Turkey, Lully and Moliere concocted a ballet spoof they called “Le Turc ridicule” preceded by a musical play about a wealthy upstart from the middle class, titled “Le bourgeois gentilhomme.”

Lully played the role of the Grand Mufti, and Moliere the middle-class upstart with upper-class aspirations. Think of Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy in powdered wigs, and you get the idea.

Today we have a “Tale of THREE Cities” to tell: Boston, Minneapolis, and Seattle — and the coast-to-coast saga of a symphony by the American composer David Diamond.

On today’s date in 1944, Diamond’s Second Symphony was given its first performance by the Boston Symphony, with the legendary Russian-born Serge Koussevitzky conducting. Now, Koussevitzky was a famous patron of new music, and in the 1930s and ‘40s, the Boston Symphony premiered many new works, but in this case, Diamond’s symphony was originally written for Minneapolis.

The famous Greek-born conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, admired Diamond’s music and had intended to premiere the new work with his orchestra, the Minneapolis Symphony. Mitropoulos had even personally paid for the preparation of the symphony’s orchestral parts. But when it seemed the premiere would have to be postponed, Mitropolous suggested Diamond offer the first performance to Koussevitzky in Boston, who gave the work’s premiere to great acclaim.

In 1990, after decades of relative neglect, Diamond’s Symphony came to Seattle. To celebrate the composer’s 75th birthday, a new compact disc recording of Diamond’s Second symphony was made by the Seattle Symphony and its conductor, Gerard Schwarz. The disc sparked renewed interest in Diamond’s work. In 1995, in recognition of his lifetime achievements, Diamond received the National Medal of Arts from then-President Bill Clinton.

Today’s date marks the original Columbus Day, honoring the Spanish explorer who for decades was unquestioningly described as the man who “discovered America.” In recent years Native American leaders have pointed out that indigenous peoples had been living on the continent for thousands of years, and Columbus didn’t “discover” anything — in fact, he didn’t even know where he was, which is why he called the people he found here “Indians.” Some historians now think that Viking explorers from Scandinavia arrived in America long before Columbus – and others suggest the Chinese arrived before those Europeans.

Even so, it’s Columbus who has a national holiday (now always observed on the closest Monday in October), and concert music written to celebrate it. For example, there’s a “Columbus Suite” by Victor Herbert, originally commissioned for the 1893 Chicago World Fair to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Columbus voyage, but not actually premiered until 1903.

A much more recent “Columbus-inspired” work, and much more elegiac in tone, is by the Native American composer James DeMars. It’s titled: “Premonitions of Christopher Columbus” and is scored for Native American flute, African drum, and chamber orchestra. In this work, DeMars blends sounds of the various ethnic traditions that would come to make up modern America.

On today’s date in 1928, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen conducted the first public performance of his new Clarinet Concerto in Copenhagen.

“The clarinet,” said Nielsen, “can, at one and the same time seem utterly hysterical, gentle as balsam, or as screechy as a streetcar on badly greased rails.” Nielsen set himself the task of covering that whole range of the instrument’s conflicting emotions and colors. He wrote it for a Danish clarinetist he admired named Aage Oxenvad, who played both the public premiere on today’s date and a private reading a few weeks earlier.

After the private performance Oxenvad is supposed to have muttered: “Nielsen must be able to play the clarinet himself — otherwise he would hardly have been able to find all the instrument’s WORST notes.” The concerto’s wild mood-swings puzzled audiences in 1928, but today it’s regarded as one of Nielsen’s most original works.

In October of 1996, another Clarinet Concerto received its premiere when American composer John Adams conducted the first performance of his work entitled “Gnarly Buttons” with soloist Michael Collins. This concerto contains a bittersweet tribute to Adams’ father, a clarinetist who fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease. In Adams’ concerto the swing tunes slide into dementia, but the concerto ends with a kind of benediction.

In James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” the thoughts of its major characters keep shifting from the sights and sounds they encounter in and around Dublin to their private, non-stop interior monologues. This narrative technique came to be called “stream of consciousness” writing.

In music, something similar occurred on today’s date in 1968, when the Italian composer Luciano Berio conducted the Swingle Singers and the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of his new work entitled “Sinfonia.”

“Sinfonia” included music quotes from Bach to Mahler intermingled with sung and spoken texts ranging from Claude Levi-Strauss to Samuel Beckett. There’s even a bit of Joyce’s “Ulysses” tossed in as well, alongside slogans from the student protests of 1968. The text of Sinfonia’s second movement was a tribute to the recently-assassinated Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King – and consisted of nothing but the intoned syllables of his name.

“Sinfonia” was Berio’s “stream of consciousness” interior monologue on the year 1968 made public with great theatrical flair: a dizzying mix of poignant music and political text. Berio was quoted as saying, “The juxtaposition of contrasting elements, in fact, is part of the whole point.”

Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, “Sinfonia” turned out to be a hit, and Columbia Records even released a recording of the work with its premiere performers.

John Lennon was born on today’s date in the year 1940, in Liverpool, England — during a German air raid on that city, as it happened. With three other young lads from Liverpool, Lennon would eventually become world-famous, courtesy of the band he helped formed in 1959 called the Beatles.

The Beatles started out in a Liverpool nightclub called the Cavern, playing pop tunes of the day, but soon began performing original material of their own. Before disbanding in 1970, some recognizable elements of classical music were incorporated into some Beatles songs, including a string quartet, a Baroque trumpet, and even an orchestra.

And it wasn’t just a one-sided exchange: Leonard Bernstein played a Beatles song on one of his “Young People’s Concerts” to demonstrate sonata form. Arthur Fiedler performed symphonic arrangements of Beatles tunes at his Boston Pops concerts. And decades after the Beatles disbanded, former member Paul McCartney began composing original chamber works and big concert hall pieces, including a semi-autobiographical “Liverpool Oratorio.”

Not surprisingly, some young British and American composers coming of age in the 1960s and 70s credit the Beatles as an influence. One elegant set of solo guitar arrangements of Lennon-McCartney tunes even came from Japan, courtesy of the eminent Japanese composer (and Beatles fan) Toru Takemitsu.

1991 was a big year for American composer John Corigliano. The Metropolitan Opera premiered his opera “The Ghosts of Versailles” and the 53-year old composer won two Grammys and the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No. 1. Corigliano was increasingly recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation, and was deluged with commissions for new works.

But about 10 years before all that, guitarist Sharon Isbin had asked Corigliano to write a concerto for her, and kept on asking him. On today’s date in 1993, her persistence paid off when, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and conductor Hugh Wolff, she gave the premiere performance of Corigliano’s “Troubadours — Variations for Guitar and Orchestra.” This piece was inspired by the courtly love tradition of the medieval troubadours, whose songs combined sophisticated word play with simple but elegantly communicative melodies.

“For composers the idea of true simplicity — in contrast to chic simple-mindedness — is mistrusted and scorned,” wrote Corigliano. “But the guitar has a natural innocence about it… So the idea of a guitar concerto was, for me, like a nostalgic return to all the feelings I had when I started composing — before the commissions and deadlines and reviews. A time when discovery and optimistic enthusiasm ruled my senses… Troubadours is a lyrical concerto.”

On today’s date* in 1909, “The Golden Cockerel,” the last opera of the Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, had its premiere in Moscow. Rimsky-Korsakov had died the previous year, after a bitter battle with government censors who objected to the opera’s thinly disguised satire against the bumbling administration of Czarist Russia. For the premiere, the censors won — the opera was performed with all the changes that Rimsky-Korsakov had so stubbornly resisted while alive.

The original text was not restored until after the Russian revolution of 1917.

Closer to our own time, in October of 1987, American composer John Adam’s “Nixon in China,” debuted at Houston Grand Opera. Alice Goodman’s libretto depicts the historic visit to Red China of President Nixon and then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Adams says he was completely indifferent to what the real-life personages in his opera might have thought of it.

No government censors objected, in any case, but Adams said that Richard Nixon’s lawyer, Leonard Garment, did attend a performance of “Nixon in China,” and probably reported back to the former President. Nixon’s reaction is not known — nor that of Henry Kissinger. We’re happy to report, however, that according to John Adams, Leonard Garment DID subsequently became something of a fan of his music.

COMPOSERS DATEBOOK is produced by APM, American Public Media, in conjunction with the American Composers Forum, reminding you that "all music was once new."

*Julian calendar date September 24.

The first performance of the “Liebeslieder — or the “Love Song” Waltzes — for piano four-hands by Johannes Brahms took place on today’s date in 1869. The performers were two distinguished soloists: Clara Schumann, widow of composer Robert Schumann, and Hermann Levi, a famous conductor of his day. But in fact, the “Liebeslieder Waltzes” were intended for amateur musicians to play. These popular scores provided Brahms with some steady income, certainly more than he earned from performances of his symphonies, which some of his contemporaries considered difficult “new” music.

Brahms wrote to his publisher: “I must admit that, for the first time, I grinned at the sight of a work of mine in print. Moreover, I gladly risk being called an ass if our ‘Liebeslieder’ don’t give more than a few people pleasure.”

Some much more recent piano music designed for amateur performers was collected into a volume titled “Carnegie Hall Millennium Piano Book.” This volume was conceived by composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and the artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Judith Arron. They were concerned about the lack of contemporary piano works that intermediate-level piano students could perform, so commissioned ten composers to write suitable piano pieces from composers ranging from Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carte to Chen Yi and Tan Dun.

It was on this day in 1972 that “A Ring of Time” by American composer Dominick Argento was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis. The work was commissioned to celebrate that orchestra’s 70th anniversary. “A Ring of Time” is subtitled “Preludes and Pageants for Orchestra and Bells,” and evokes the hours of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the seasons of the year.

Though born in York, Pennsylvania, Argento was of Italian heritage, and after spending a year studying in Italy, returned there often to reflect and compose. Argento said: “On one level the title of ‘A Ring of Time’ refers to the predominant role assigned to bells... those aural signals of time’s passing. But it should also be mentioned the work was wholly composed in Florence where the hourly ringing of church bells is inescapable.”

Bells figured prominently in another 20th-century work by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu entitled “From Me Flows What You Call Time,” which was premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1990, in New York City, as a commission to celebrate the centennial of Carnegie Hall. Again, bells play a significant role, and Takemitsu directs that at the end of his piece, a series of small bells be rung gently from the balcony above and around the audience.