Composers Datebook

The British composer Gustav Holst lived and worked in a West London neighborhood called Hammersmith for many years—and in 1930, Holst gave that name to a work for wind band he wrote on commission from the BBC.

“Hammersmith” opens with a "Prelude" representing the river Thames, which, said Holst, "goes on its way unnoticed and unconcerned." A “Scherzo” section represents the hustle and bustle of Hammersmith’s market, exemplified, according to Holst’s daughter, by a large woman at a fruit stand who always called her father 'dearie' when he bought oranges for their Sunday picnics

In 1931, “Hammersmith” was first performed in England in the composer’s own orchestral arrangement by the B. B. C. Symphony led by Adrian Boult—and the piece was booed. Holst’s bad luck continued the following year: He was scheduled to conduct the premiere of the original wind band version of “Hammersmith” on today’s date at the 1932 American Bandmasters Association Convention in Washington, D.C., but had to cancel his trip due to illness. The DC premiere took place as scheduled, but with the U.S. Marine Band led by Taylor Branson, rather than the composer.

For the next 22 years, the original, wind band version of “Hammersmith” remained neglected until Robert Cantrick and the Carnegie Institute of Technology Kiltie Band in Pittsburgh gave what they thought was its world premiere performance in 1954. It seems even Holst’s publisher had forgotten all about its 1932 American premiere.

In the years following the end of World War II, the “baby boom” led to a dramatic rise in the number of high school and college music programs across the country. By the mid-1950s, a number of well-known American composers started receiving commissions from these schools for new works for wind band.

In the past half-century, the Symphony for Band, by American composer Vincent Persichetti, has been one of the most frequently performed. It was commissioned by the Washington University Chamber Band, and received its first performance by the ensemble in St. Louis, Mo., on today’s date in 1956.

In keeping with this tradition, in the late 1990s the American Composers Forum started commissioning major composers to write new works for middle-school bands. The series was dubbed BandQuest, and in addition to new scores by composers like Chen Yi, Michael Colgrass, Libby Larsen, Robert X. Rodriguez, and Alvin Singleton, the series offers music teachers interactive CD-ROMs, which place each piece of music in a wider cultural and historical context.

This music is from Alegre, by Cuban-born composer Tania Leon. “Alegre” is a Spanish word meaning “joyful,” and Leon’s piece is meant to demonstrate the link in Latin culture between music and dance. That’s something the New York-based Leon knows more than a little about — she was a founding member and the first music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. A music educator as well as a composer, she also set up the theater’s music school and orchestra.

A few years back, when RCA records issued a boxed set of 100 favorite Boston Pops recordings made by Arthur Fiedler, they included Handel’s celebrated “Largo.”

Over a hundred years earlier, the Theodore Thomas Orchestra had established this melody as a favorite with 19th century American audiences. Back then, Handel was best-known for his sacred oratorios, and his “Largo” acquired a kind of honorary “halo” by association. Also, the Italian text for the melody began “Ombra mai fui,” and since “ombra” meant shade, many music lovers probably assumed it had something to do with the dear departed shade or spirit of a loved one—hence its melancholic solemnity.

In fact, this melody originated in a decidedly secular, downright whimsical context: as the opening aria of an opera by Handel that premiered in London on today’s date in 1738. The opera was entitled “Xerxes,” and dealt with the real-life Persian King who invaded ancient Greece. In the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes is depicted as an all-powerful despot, whose every whim became law. As evidence of the irrational effect of absolute power, Herodotus tells of Xerxes’ fondness for a certain plane tree that he ordered decorated with gold ornaments and put under perpetual military guard as a sign of royal favor. In Handel’s opera, the famous “Largo” is actually Xerxes’s dreamy song to this famous tree—and the “shade” referred to is the sort to be found under its gold-bedecked branches.

A number of the quintessentially “French” operas are set in other lands. Bizet’s “Carmen” is set in Spain and Gounod’s ”Faust” is in Germany, to cite just two examples. But Spain and Germany were familiar next-door neighbors for 19th century Frenchmen, and in that colonizing age, Parisian audiences also enjoyed traveling to much more exotic corners, all the while safely ensconced in their plush balcony seats, of course. One of the grandest of French grand operas, Meyerbeer’s “L’Africaine,” has as its eponymous heroine the African Queen of an imaginary East Indian isle, with none other than European Vasco da Gama as her love interest.

Another famous French opera set in the mysterious East had its premiere performance on today’s date in 1883, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. This was “Lakmé” by Leo Delibes. In this one, the title heroine is an East Indian priestess of Brahma whose taboo love for an English Colonial officer leads to tragedy and death—but not before lots of gorgeous singing.

The popular “Flower Duet” from “Lakmé” achieved a particularly late 20th-century brand of fame when it was used as the soundtrack to a British Airways TV commercial.

In 1952, the West Point Military Band celebrated that famous military academy’s Sesquicentennial by asking prominent composers to write celebratory works to mark the occasion. Among those who responded with a new piece was the American composer Morton Gould, whose “West Point Symphony” received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1952, at a gala concert featuring the West Point Academy Band conducted by Francis E. Resta.

There are two movements in Gould’s “West Point Symphony.” They are titled “Epitaphs” and “Marches,” and the composer himself provided these descriptive comments:

“The first movement is lyrical and dramatic… The general character is elegiac. The second and final movement is lusty… the texture a stylization of marching tunes and parades cast in an array of embellishments and rhythmic variations… At one point,” concludes Gould, “there is a simulation of a Fife and Drum Corp, which, incidentally, was the instrumentation of the original West Point Band.”

Of all the pieces written in honor of West Point’s Sesquicentennial in 1952, Gould’s Symphony is probably the best-known.

The score of the West Point Symphony calls for a “marching machine,” but on this classic 1959 recording under the late Frederick Fennell, the required sound was provided by the very real marching feet of 120 Eastman School of Music students.

Today’s date marks the birthday of a significant American composer with an intriguing name, sounding at once both French and Slavic. Henri Lazarof was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, on April 12, 1932, and began his musical studies at the age of 6. He graduated from the Sofia Academy at the age of 16, studied composition in Rome with the Italian modernist Goffredo Petrassi, came to the United States in 1957 for further study, and eventually settled in California, securing a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught not only composition, but French language and literature as well.

Lazarof organized L.A.’s first festival of contemporary music in 1963 and has continued enthusiastically promoting new music. In a Festival brochure, Lazarof once wrote that his music series was “dedicated to the presentation of the entire broad range of this historically evolving art without adopting a single ideology but the one of continuity—accepting tradition and altering it in terms of contemporary experimentation, which in turn is to become the legacy for the next generation to alter."

The American conductor Gerard Schwarz has championed Lazarof’s music on both coasts, making recordings with both the Seattle Symphony and New York Chamber Orchestra.

On today’s date in 1689, London celebrated the coronation of William and Mary of Orange as the new Protestant monarchs of Britain. Thirty-nine musicians participated in the ceremony at Westminster Abbey, all wearing specially-tailored scarlet robes. One of them was Henry Purcell, today regarded as the greatest British composer of his time.

That same date is sometimes offered as marking the premiere performance of Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas” a few miles away in Chelsea at Josias Priest’s School for Young Ladies. This exact date and circumstance of this work, widely regarded as the first great British opera and one of Purcell’s masterworks, remains very uncertain. April 30th is also cited as a possibility for its premiere, being the date of Queen Mary’s birthday. In any case, the premiere occurred sometime that year, as the libretto by Nahum Tate was published in London that December.

Three years earlier Tate had written a poem that compared the deposed Catholic King James II to Aeneas, and constructed an allegory implying that James had been led astray by witches, the result being that he abandoned the British people, just as the legendary Trojan Prince Aeneas had abandoned Queen Dido of Carthage in order to found a new empire in Rome. Since the Catholic King James II had also fled to Rome, some have speculated that Purcell’s opera was a political allegory, commissioned by Mr. Priest’s School for Young Ladies to celebrate either the coronation or birthday of the new Protestant Queen.

In 1960, composer and conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski emigrated from Poland to become the music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, as the Minnesota Orchestra was called in those days.

In the decades that followed, Skrowaczewski, or “Stan” as his friends and admirers affectionately called him, became one of the most respected conductors of our time, famous for his interpretations of a wide range of repertory from Bruckner, Bartok and Stravinsky to the works of his Polish contemporaries, Lutoslawski and Pendereceki.

Skrowaczewski was born in Lwow in 1923. He composed an orchestral overture at age 8, played a piano recital at age 11, and at 13 performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, conducting from the keyboard. His career as a budding piano virtuoso ended when his hands were injured by a collapsing brick wall during a World War II bombing near his home. After the war he won a French scholarship that enabled him to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and conducting with Paul Kletzki. His American debut occurred with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1958.

Skrowaczewski’s busy career as a conductor left little time to nuture his own talents as a composer, but even so he’s written a respectable number of chamber and orchestra works, including this one entitled “Passacaglia Immaginaria,” which received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1996, at a Minnesota Orchestra concert. A few of his works have made their way onto compact discs, including this recording of “Passacaglia Immaginaria” by the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony, conducted by Skrowaczewski himself.

In 1943, before allied bombing made it unsafe, Vienna was the primary residence of the German composer Richard Strauss. Now, in a city mad about music and opera, the presence of a composer of Strauss’s stature was not something that went unnoticed or unappreciated. The previous year, the Vienna City Council awarded Strauss its Beethoven Prize, and the composer, for his part, felt obliged to write a little something as a thank-you gesture.

The resulting piece was entitled “Festival Music for the City of Vienna,” and was scored for a brass ensemble sufficiently large to provide pomp and pageantry—and written in a style guaranteed to swell the breasts of the City Council with civic pride. Strauss himself conducted the Vienna Trumpet Corps in the premiere at the city’s Town Hall on April 9, 1943.

It’s a stirring piece, and went over so well that Strauss quickly made an arrangement for a smaller ensemble than the original, rather lavish, version for ten trumpets, seven trombones, two tubas, and timpani. It’s also quite possible that working on this piece reminded Strauss of some of his earliest compositions, which were also written for wind ensembles.

In any case, to keep himself busy while the disastrous course of the war meant the closure of theaters and fewer commissions for new music, Strauss began work on a piece for a small ensemble of wind and brass instruments, which would become his Sonatina No. 1.

Song settings form a significant part of the output of the American composer Libby Larsen. Like many other composers, she’s set poems of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke—but she has also penned a song-cycle entitled “Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII.” Another, for mezzo-soprano and handbell choir entitled “Hell’s Belles,” is set to words of formidable women such as Talulah Bankhead, Billy Jean King, and Gertrude Stein.

On today’s date in 1989, Larsen’s “Songs from Letters: Calamity Jane to her Daughter, Jenny” had its premiere performance in New York City. As the title indicates, the texts are drawn from the correspondence of Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as “Calamity Jane,” a hard-drinking, gun-toting woman of the Wild West, who lived from 1848 to 1903. Calamity Jane had a daughter, possibly by Wild Bill Hickok. Calamity Jane sent the child to live with a man she called a "normal daddy,” her friend Jim O'Neil, paying child support by both legal and not-so legal means. As Calamity Jane put it: “I ain’t no lady.”

Larsen says she was fascinated by “the struggle of an individual soul, a woman and pioneer on many frontiers.” As Larsen put it: “Calamity Jane was a working woman, good in her profession, doing what she loved and making choices because of her will to work. In her time she was odd and lonely. She chooses rough-tough words to describe her life to her daughter. I'm interested in that rough-toughness and in Calamity Jane's struggle to explain herself honestly.”