Composers Datebook

While many great composers have also been great conductors, this can be the exception rather than the rule. On today’s date in 1959, the American composer Ned Rorem tried his hand at conducting the premiere of one of his own compositions, a chamber suite entitled “Eleven Studies for Eleven Players.”

Rorem recalled: “I learned that the first requisite to becoming a conductor is an inborn lust for absolute monarchy, and that I, alone among musicians, never got the bug. I was terrified. The first rehearsal was a model of how NOT to inspire confidence. I stood before the eleven players in all my virginal glory, and announced: ‘I’ve never conducted before, so if I give a wrong cue, do try to come in right anyway.’”

Fortunately for Rorem, his eleven musicians were accomplished faculty at Buffalo University, and, despite his inexperience, Rorem certainly knew how his new piece should sound. Rorem’s Suite incorporated a few bits recycled from music he had written for a successful Broadway hit—Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer”—plus a bit from an unsuccessful play entitled “Motel” that never made it past a Boston tryout.

Rorem’s own tryout as a conductor convinced him to stick to composing, although he proved to be a fine piano accompanist for singers performing his own songs. As for “Eleven Studies for Eleven Players,” it’s gone on to become one of Rorem’s most-often performed chamber works.

On today’s date in 1868, the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana helped lay the foundation stone for Prague’s future National Theatre. As the stone was driven into the soil with a ceremonial mallet, Smetana exclaimed, “In music is the life of the Czechs!” That same evening at Prague's New Town Theatre Smetana conducted the premiere performance of his new opera “Dalibor.” It’s worthy of note that one of the players in the orchestra was a 26-year old violist and fellow composer named Antonin Dvorak.

The subject matter of “Dalibor” seemed theatrically apt for the occasion: a Czech legend about a rebellious 15th century knight imprisoned for supporting a peasant uprising. During his imprisonment, according to the legend, Dalibor learned to play the violin so beautifully that people came to listen to him outside the window of the Prague Castle tower in which he was held.

Thirteen years after the premiere of “Dalibor,” the National Theatre opened on June 11, 1881. For that gala occasion, another Smetana opera, “Libuse,” received its premiere performance. Sadly, by that time Smetana was completely deaf, mentally ailing, and desperately poor.

To add insult to injury, the directors of the new theater had neglected to invite him to the gala premiere of his own opera! Despite the inexcusable snub, Smetana found his way into the theater, and, when called on the stage and recognized by the audience, was acknowledged with thunderous applause.

The American composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and its Composer-in-Residence. He was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and his chamber and orchestra works, all infused with themes and musical elements from his Native heritage, have been performed by major orchestras like the Detroit Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Colorado Ballet, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

But during the fall of 2011, Tate began working with a non-professional ensemble closer to home—at Dickson Middle School in Dickson, Oklahoma. Tate had been commissioned by the American Composers Forum to write a new work for their ChoralQuest series for middle-school choirs. The resulting work, entitled Taloowa' Chipota, which in the Chickasaw language means “Children’s Songs,” was premiered on May 15, 2012, by the children at the Dickson School.

“The songs,” explained Tate, “are reminiscent of traditional stomp dancing and are based on old Chickasaw melodies. Stomp dances begin at dusk and end at dawn. The first movement depicts the beginning sunlight of the morning. The second is full of abstracted textures emulating the shell shaking in stomp dances.”

For his part, Tate says he’s pleased how it all turned out: “I was able to introduce a Chickasaw experience to a diverse group of students… I strengthened my own relationship with my Chickasaw community and demonstrated to the Chickasaws in the chorus how our culture can positively impact classical music.”

On today’s date in 1897, John Philip Sousa was in Philadelphia and leading his band in the premiere performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” Sousa wrote his most famous march on Christmas Day, 1896, in a New York hotel room—completing the score, he said, in just a couple of hours. The work’s title was a tribute to one of Sousa’s mentors, another legendary bandmaster named Patrick S. Gilmore, whose favorite toast was, "Here's to the Stars and Stripes forever!”

The 1897 premiere of the march went over well, but at first sales didn’t surpass the other Sousa marches available at the time. It was the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the subsequent national eruption of patriotic fervor, and some cagey showmanship on Sousa’s part that catapulted “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” into its unique status. Sousa crafted a touring patriotic pageant involving hundreds of performers, which ended with “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” playing, as soldiers from all three branches of the military marched on-stage with flags unfurled, culminating in the entrance of an attractive local beauty decked out in red, white, and blue.

Despite the thousands of times Sousa and his band were required to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” they claimed they never tired of it. And in its now 100+ year history, it’s become one of the most frequently performed pieces of American music worldwide.

On today’s date in 1862, the front page of The New York Times offered some encouraging news to the Northern side in the American Civil War: Union troops had captured Norfolk, Virginia, and there were other advances being made by General McClellan’s troops.

Under “Amusements” on the inner pages of that same edition could be found an announcement of a “Grand Vocal and Orchestral Concert” at Irving Hall to be conducted by a 27-year-old musician named Theodore Thomas.

Thomas had been a major figure on the New York music scene since 1855, performing as the principal violinist in that city’s first ensemble giving a regular series of chamber concerts. That chamber group presented hot-off-the-press works by Brahms and other ultra-modern composers of the day. This big orchestral concert, which marked Thomas’s debut as a conductor, was no different.

The Times noted, “We have never before had so much musical novelty presented to us. Such plentiful instrumental music equally new to our musical world, under the capable conductorship of the young musician, must insure a crowded audience of the more critical as well as the more fashionable portion of our public.”

Tickets were $1 each—quite a lot of money in 1862—and the program offered the American premieres of orchestral pieces by Wagner, Meyerbeer, and Liszt’s flashy orchestration of Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy.”

The Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”—arguably the single most-influential piece of concert music composed in the 20th century—occurred in May of 1913. At is premiere, fist-fights broke out in the audience between those who liked – or loathed – the ground-breaking new score.

On today’s date in 2010, at Baltimore’s Metro Gallery, a new version of Stravinsky’s famous score had its premiere. Dubbed the “The RE-Write of Spring,” this was the work of Darryl Brenzel, who had been asked by Baltimore’s Mobtown Modern music series to create a jazz version of Stravinsky’s score.

From the start, Brenzel wanted his version to sound true to the original but also to sound like real jazz. “Uh-oh, I’m in big trouble!” was Brenzel’s reaction when he looked at Stravinsky’s original score. Some months later, that score was covered with what Brenzel described as “yellow highlighter marks, cryptic notes of all kinds, and many new bar lines drawn in to re-organize the music.”

What emerged is something that sounds very much like Stravinsky’s evocation of a primitive Russian ritual AND very much like some fine big-band jazz in a sophisticated modern vein.

Brenzel was pleased with the result, which was recorded live for compact disc release, allowing both classical and jazz enthusiasts the opportunity to compare and contrast Stravinsky’s “Rite” and Brenzel’s “RE-write.”

And whether you like or loathe what Brenzel has done – please, no fist-fights!

In 1987, Telarc Records asked the late conductor Lorin Maazel if he would make a purely orchestral distillation of the four operas that make up Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung.” Telarc wanted it all to fit on just one CD.

Now, with these four Wagner operas clocking in at about 15 hours, that’s a slimming-down assignment worthy of The Biggest Loser.

Maazel crafted a 75-minute sequence, played without pause, beginning with the opening pages of the first opera and ending with the closing pages of the last, with all the music appearing in the same order as it does in Wagner’s four operas.

For the Telarc CD release, Maazel recorded his “Ring without Words” with the Berlin Philharmonic. But what had started as a purely studio affair proved an attractive orchestral showcase for other ensembles, so on today’s date in 1990, Maazel led the Pittsburgh Symphony in the debut of his “Ring without Words” as a concert hall work. Since then, he has performed it with orchestras ranging from the New York to the Vienna Philharmonic.

Maazel confessed he resisted the idea at first. "I said… it would be desecrating a unique masterpiece. But they kept after me.” In the end, Maazel capitulated, but insisted there couldn't be one note by Lorin Maazel. When one instrumentalist shuddered at a particularly abrupt transition, Maazel told him, "Sorry! That's the composer."

In 1970, British composer Peter Maxwell Davies moved to the remote and rugged Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland. At first, he said, the natives thought he was just some weirdo from the south, and the more Puritanical islanders would pray the might find a more respectable means of earning a living than writing music.

But over time Davies and the islanders got used to each other. The composer found inspiration in the landscape and legends of the area, while the community warmed to the fact that the newcomer found them so fascinating. In 1978, Davies attended a neighbor’s wedding, which inspired a musical work he called “An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise.”

“It is a picture postcard,” said Davies, “We hear the guests arriving, out of extremely bad weather. This is followed by a processional and first glass of whiskey. The band tunes up and we get on with the dancing, which becomes ever wilder, until the lead fiddle can hardly hold the band together. We leave the hall into the cold night. As we walk home across the island, the sun rises to a glorious dawn.”

“The sun,” Maxwell Davies concluded, “is represented by the highland bagpipes, in full traditional splendor.”

Despite its local color, “An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise” was actually an AMERICAN commission from the Boston Pops, who gave its premiere on today’s date in 1985, with John Williams conducting.

On today’s date in 1998, a work by the British composer John Tavener received its European premiere at the Beauvais Cello Festival in France. It’s scored for solo cello and just the cello section of a symphony orchestra and was commissioned by Sony Classical to fill out a CD of Tavener’s music featuring that label’s star cellist, Yo-Yo Ma.

Two years earlier, in 1996, Yo-Yo Ma had recorded another Tavener piece for cello entitled “The Protecting Veil,” but since that piece ran only about 45 minutes, Sony needed something to fill out the disc and so – perhaps acting on the principle that there’s “always room for cello” -- this 20-minute work for cello and celli was commissioned to fill out the disc.

Tavener gave the new piece a VERY strange title, namely “Wake Up and Die.”

The mystically-minded Tavener explained he was referring to the spiritual paradox that, as he put it, “If you wake up spiritually, then you will die to all that is not of God.”

Perhaps Tavener knew first-hand what he was talking about: In 1990, during surgery to remove a tumor in his jaw, he actually DID die -- clinically speaking -- on the operating table but was fortunately resuscitated by the surgical team. “Before my illness,” Tavener wrote, “I'd always had a morbid fear of death, but since the operation it’s not terrifying anymore.”

Hold on tight—we’re about to cover 150 years of musical—and presidential—history in just 2 minutes!

On today’s date in 1821, back when James Monroe was president, Beethoven’s Second Symphony was performed in Philadelphia at a concert of the Musical Fund Society. That occasion marks the first documented performance of a complete Beethoven symphony in America and occurred when Beethoven was 50 years old and residing in Vienna.

In 1853, when Franklin Pierce was in the White House, the Germania Musical Society took Beethoven’s Second on its American tour, presenting it in St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago. That 1853 tour marked the first time an entire Beethoven Symphony was performed in the windy city. Additional 19th century “firsts” for the Second occurred over the next two decades in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and San Francisco, during the administrations of James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson.

Ulysses S. Grant was president in 1870, when Beethoven’s Second debuted in Washington DC, and Grant was still President in 1872, when the Second was the first symphony EVER to be performed in Minneapolis.

A hundred years later, in the NINETEEN-Seventies, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, you could hear performances of Beethoven’s Second from Maine to Hawaii, all while sitting comfortably in your own “Executive Mansion,” courtesy of your local government-assisted public radio station.

If you wish, you may now stand and salute your radio!