Composers Datebook

The American composer Jennifer Higdon is used to having her new works premiered by some of this country’s major orchestras. The Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, gave the premiere performance of her “Concerto for Orchestra” in 2002.

The following year, another Higdon work, a piece for wind band entitled “Rhythm Stand,” premiered in Philadelphia. Now, if Higdon’s “Concerto for Orchestra” was composed for the virtuoso members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, “Rhythm Stand” was intended for amateur musicians—middle-school students, to be precise, and its premiere was given by the kids of the Baldi Middle School Band, led by Sandra Dylan.

“Rhythm Stand” was commissioned by the American Composers Forum for their “BandQuest” series of new scores, all written by leading composers, but intended for young performers.

Higdon explains the title of her new piece as follows: “Composing is merely the job of combining interesting sounds into interesting patterns. And interesting patterns create cool rhythms. So... I'm making a STAND FOR RHYTHM… rhythm is everywhere… ever listened to the tires of a car running across pavement, or a train on railroad tracks? Because music can be any kind of sound arranged into an interesting pattern, I added sounds that you normally wouldn’t hear coming from band instruments, sounds created out of ordinary things that might be nearby… like music stands and pencils, for example…. And some performers in this piece get even more basic...they snap their fingers.”

In 1923, the Chicago North Shore Festival sponsored a competition for new orchestral works. Of the 47 scores submitted, five finalists were selected by a distinguished panel of judges that included two leading American composers of that day: George W. Chadwick and Henry Hadley. Two of the five works that made the final cut were by the same composer, a 33-year-old Illinois native named Edward Collins.

On today’s date in 1923, conductor Frederick Stock and his Chicago Symphony played through the five finalists’ scores at a public event at Northwestern University, with Collins in attendance to hear his two contrasting pieces. The first was called “Mardi Gras,” and, as you might expect, it was an upbeat work in a party mood.

The second Collins piece was entitled “1914”—a grim orchestral evocation of World War I that Collins later retitled “Tragic Overture.” It was that work that won the competition’s $1000 first prize, and so impressed conductor Stock that he performed the piece in New York and Chicago.

Although Collins was famous in his day, after his death in 1951, his music was largely forgotten. Perhaps his unabashedly Romantic style seemed dated in the avant-garde 50s and 60s. After more than half a century after his death, a series of new recordings of Collins’ orchestral works made by the Concordia Orchestra under Marin Alsop have helped to reintroduce his music to a new generation.

When the United States entered World War I, American animosity against all things German resulted in a ban on German symphonic music and operas. During the Second World War however, musically-speaking, things were VERY different. With America at war with Germany and Italy, music by Wagner and Verdi, for example, continued to be performed in our concert halls and opera houses.

In fact, just as the Nazis tried to appropriate German classical music for their propaganda purposes, the Allies adopted the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth as a Morse Code "V" for Victory motive, and in OUR wartime propaganda, Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," accompanied images of Allied bombers racing through the clouds to strike German cities.

On May 25, 1944, the combined orchestras of the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony presented a Red Cross Benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. The first half of the program was all-Wagner, the second half, all-Verdi. During the intermission, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia auctioned off maestro Toscanini's baton.

As a grand finale, after the German and Italian music, Toscanini closed with a rousing all-American encore—his own arrangement of John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."

So, as Walter Cronkite would put it: "That's the way it was, May 25, 1944."

In 1935, a 26-year-old American named Elliott Carter returned to the States after composition studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Carter found work as the music director of Ballet Caravan, an ambitious and enterprising touring ensemble whose mission was to present specially-commissioned new dance works on quintessentially American themes. Virgil Thomson, for example, wrote a ballet entitled "Filling Station," and Carter himself, decades before the animated Disney movie, wrote a ballet version of the story of Pocahontas and John Smith.

While on tour, these new scores were presented in two-piano versions, but on today's date in 1939, the orchestral version of Carter's "Pocahontas" Ballet was presented by the Ballet Caravan at its home base at the Martin Beck Theater in New York.

The New York Times reviewer didn't much care for the staging or Carter’s music: "The costumes are in the manner of the old-fashioned cigar box Indian," he wrote, "and after the first amusing glimpse their psuedo-naiveté begins to grow irksome. Mr. Carter's music is so thick it is hard to see the stage through it."

The Times reviewer DID like another new ballet also receiving its orchestral debut that same night. This was Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid.” "A perfectly delightful piece of work," enthused the same critic, concluding, "Aaron Copland has furnished an admirable score, warm and human, and with not a wasted note about it anywhere."

An old music dictionary’s definition of “nocturne” reads as follows: “A night piece, a musical composition that suggests a nocturnal atmosphere, for example Haydn’s ‘Notturno’ or Mozart’s ‘Serenata Notturna,’ but more specifically a short piece of romantic character. First to use this title for this genre was John Field, followed by Chopin.”

Hundreds of composers since Field and Chopin have tried their hand at writing nocturnes. This particular one was written for flute and guitar by the Boston-based composer Daniel Pinkham, as part of a five-movement suite of Nocturnes, all premiered on today’s date in 1993, at the First and Second Church in Boston.

Now, as any insomniac will tell you, there are all sorts of night moods, and the descriptive titles of Pinkham’s set of five “Nocturnes” ranges from the sprightly to the serene, with others entitled “brooding,” “sultry,” and “restless” tossed in for good measure.

Daniel Pinkham was particularly fortunate in his teachers. Imagine studying composition with Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Samuel Barber, or harpsichord with Wanda Landowska and organ with E. Power Biggs. Pinkham did -- and in turn became a successful teacher himself, with a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music. He served as music director of Boston’s historic King’s Chapel, and as a composer was particularly honored by his church musician colleagues for his many works for chorus and organ.

Today’s date marks the anniversary Richard Wagner’s birth in 1813. During Wagner’s lifetime, his most famous—and perhaps most perceptive—critic was a Prague-born Viennese writer on music named Eduard Hanslick.

Hanslick knew Wagner personally, and described him as follows: “A stranger would have seen in his face not so much an artistic genius as a dry Leipzig professor or lawyer. He spoke incredibly much—and fast—in a monotonous sing-song Saxon dialect and always of himself, his works, his reforms, his plans. If he mentioned the name of another composer it was always in a tone of disparagement.”

For Wagnerians, Hanslick was a crusty old conservative who preferred Brahms and was too thick-headed to appreciate the “Music of the Future” epitomized by Wagner’s operas. But if one actually reads Hanslick’s writings on Wagner, a more nuanced and balanced picture emerges.

“I know very well,” wrote Hanslick, “that Wagner is the greatest living opera composer and the only one in Germany worth talking about in a historical sense … But between this admission and the repulsive idolatry which has grown up in connection with Wagner and which he has encouraged, there is an infinite chasm.”

Upon learning of Wagner’s death in 1883, Hanslick wrote: “Wagner stands at the head of the moving forces of modern art. He shook opera and all its associated theoretical and practical issues from a comfortable state of repose bordering on stagnation.”

In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas penned a Latin hymn in praise of the holy sacrament of the last supper in which bread and wine are mystically changed into the body and blood of Christ. Aquinas’s text begins, “Pange lingua, gloriosi” or “Sing, my tongue, the Savior’s Glory.” Aquinas’s words have been set to a melody much older than his text, possibly derived from a Roman marching song or an even earlier Hebrew chant.

On May 21, 1983, this ancient text and tune underwent yet another transformation at the hands of the American composer and jazzman Dave Brubeck, when his “Pange Lingua Variations” for chorus, jazz ensemble and orchestra had its premiere at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento, California.

In Brubeck’s setting, each stanza is sung first in original Gregorian chant style, followed by a variation. Brubeck said, “I searched for the meaning of each stanza, and tried to convey that thought musically, so that each variation is a miniature meditation.” The third variation, taking its cue from the music’s possible origin as a Roman marching tune, is given an appropriately martial treatment by both the chorus and jazz ensemble.

While jazz fans associate Dave Brubeck with the sophisticated jazz he developed in the 50s and 60s, many church musicians also know him as the composer of many oratorios on sacred themes, which often incorporate jazz elements into their scoring.

It was the fashion in the late 19th century to decorate concert halls with the names of famous composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Of course, over time some composers once very popular fell out of favor, and many old concert hall walls included names like Cherubini and Meyerbeer, composers who nowadays are performed only on rare occasions.

In Amsterdam, the main hall of the acoustically famous Concertgebouw boats a pantheon of over two dozen composers’ names as part of its interior decoration, and, not surprisingly, a few Dutch composers are included in the mix. Most of the native sons so honored are probably unfamiliar outside of the Netherlands, however. Take for example Alfons Diepenbrock, a self-taught composer and conductor born in Amsterdam who lived from 1862 to 1921. Diepenbrock composed a small body of big orchestral works in the late Romantic style of Gustav Mahler, who was a close friend.

In Amsterdam on today’s date in 1906, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Willem Mengelberg premiered a work of Diepenbrock’s entitled “In Great Silence – a Mood Poem based on an Aphorism of Friedrich Nietszche.” This music sounds a little like a lost movement from some big Mahler symphony, and while these days the name Diepenbrock might not be as familiar as Mahler, maybe that’s something we should work on correcting!

Australian composer Jodie Blackshaw is passionate about music for wind band and is fond of quoting her famous compatriot composer Percy Grainger on the subject:

“Why this cold-shouldering of the wind band?” asked Grainger. “Is the wind band – with its varied assortments of reeds (so much richer that the reeds of the symphony orchestra), its complete saxophone family that is found nowhere else ... its army of brass – not the equal of any medium ever conceived? As a vehicle of deeply emotional expression it seems to me unrivalled.”

For her part, Blackshaw has chosen to compose primarily for wind band. She also appears as a guest clinician and adjudicator for band festivals throughout Australia. “The Wind Band offers a varied and colorful contribution to instrumental music,” says Bradshaw, “and with literally millions of children world-wide entering musical performance through this medium, it is worthy of our serious attention.”

On today’s date in 2014, a new work by Blackshaw intended for middle-school band students was premiered by the Rosemount Middle School Band of Rosemont, Minn., under the direction of John Zschunke. The new piece, “Letter from Sado," was inspired by a Japanese haiku and traditional Japanese taiko drumming. This work is part of the BandQuest series commissioned by the American Composers Forum, intended to offer young musicians a diverse variety of fresh new wind band works by leading composers of our day.

Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco is one of America’s foremost reform congregations. For some 50 years its cantor was Reuben Rinder, who, in addition to his liturgical duties, was a composer, impresario, and musical mentor. Cantor Rinder influenced the careers of two of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern, and also commissioned two of the 20th century’s most famous concert versions of the Jewish liturgy, the Evening and Morning Sabbath Service settings of Ernst Bloch and Darius Milhaud.

Milhaud’s Sabbath Morning Service was first heard at Temple Emanu-El on today’s date in 1949, with its composer conducting.

Milhaud was born in Provence and wrote that the Provencal Jewish tradition evoked in his score differs somewhat from the more standard Ashkenazi liturgy prevalent in most American synagogues then and now. The composer’s intention was to create a personal musical statement that could serve as both an actual liturgy for the faithful and as an ecumenical musical experience for any and all who hear the work, whether in temple or concert hall.

In that respect, Milhaud’s Sacred Service was a great success. Alongside Bloch’s setting, written in the early 1930s, shortly before the onset of the Holocaust, Milhaud’s setting, written in the years following the conclusion of World War II, remains a powerful and moving affirmation of religious faith.