Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1919, the eminent French conductor Pierre Monteux, led the Boston Symphony in the premiere performance of “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” a new orchestral score written by the American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

This music was inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous Romantic poem of that name, but owes its exotic orchestral coloring to Griffes’ interest in the music of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Although Griffes himself never traveled there, he knew someone who had: the influential Canadian soprano Eva Gauthier, famous for her avant-garde song recitals that included music by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and her later association with Gershwin and Ravel. It was the well-traveled Gauthier who introduced Griffes to the musical traditions of Japan and Java.

In describing an earlier ballet score inspired by Asian themes, Griffes wrote: “It is developed Japanese music – I purposely do not use the term idealized. Modern music tends more and more toward the archaic, especially the archaisms of the East.”

The 1919 Boston premiere of “Kubla Khan” was the highpoint of Griffes’ career, and all the critics agreed a major new talent had arrived on the American music scene.

Unfortunately, one month later, Griffes took ill and in a few months died from a severe lung infection. He was just 35 years old. How his music would have developed had Griffes lived remains one of the most intriguing “what might have beens” of American music.

On today’s date in 1972, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp received its first successful concert performance by the Munich Philharmonic led by Rudolf Kempe. A recording was made of the work following their performance, supervised and produced by the composer’s son, George Korngold.

The composer himself had died in 1959, so was not able to enjoy the eventual success of this major work. He completed his Symphony in 1950, and its premiere performance in 1954 as part of an Austrian Radio broadcast had been a disaster. As the composer himself put it: “The performance, which was an execution in every sense of the term, took place under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable, with inadequate rehearsals and an exhausted and overworked orchestra.”

“Nonetheless,” Korngold added hopefully, “there was genuine enthusiasm on the part of those listeners who like a good tune and others rather more progressively inclined.”

Korngold had become an American citizen during the 1940s, and dedicated his Symphony to the memory of America’s wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The postwar European premiere of his Symphony came at a time when shifting tastes in music made such lush late-Romantic music seem hopelessly old-fashioned to many of the “progressively inclined” Korngold mentions. “More corn than gold” was one dismissive appraisal of his style.

With the passage of time, however, Korngold’s “good tunes” seem more and more appealing, and belatedly, his big Symphony in F-sharp has found a place in the concert repertory.

On today’s date in 1937, a gala concert in Berlin presented the premiere performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D-minor, a work composed in the fall of 1853, shortly before Schumann’s tragic mental collapse.

The Concerto was never given a public performance during Schumann’s lifetime, although the great 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim read through the score during an orchestral rehearsal early in 1854, and played the work privately in 1855, with piano accompaniment provided by Schumann’s wife, Clara. Schumann died in 1856, and for the next 80 years, the Concerto was forgotten. Clara, Joachim and their mutual friend Johannes Brahms all judged it sub-par and perhaps embarrassing evidence of Schumann’s declining mental state.

Oddly enough, the 1937 premiere in Berlin, attended by none other than Adolf Hitler, was presented as part of the Nazi’s “Strength Through Joy” cultural program. German commentators touted Schumann’s ties to the German “folk,” while American critics bemoaned that most of the great German violinists of the day were unavailable for this important premiere, having all left Germany for racial or political reasons.

That honor fell to the acceptably Aryan, if hardly world-class violinist Georg Kullenkampf, supported by the Berlin Philharmonic under the Austrian conductor Karl Bőhm. The premiere was broadcast on short-wave, so American audiences could compare Kullenkampf’s reading with that of Yehudi Menuhin, who gave the American premiere of Schumann’s long-neglected Concerto on December 6th, first with piano accompaniment at Carnegie Hall, then later that month with the St. Louis Symphony.

In the course of his life as a church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach probably wrote 300 sacred cantatas. That seems like a high number to us, but consider that his contemporaries Telemann and Graupner composed well over a thousand cantatas each!

In what surviving documents we have, Bach himself rarely uses the Italian term “cantata” to describe these pieces, preferring “concertos,” “pieces” or simply “the music” to describe these works for Lutheran church services. It was only in the 19th century, as Bach’s music was being collected and catalogued, that the term “cantata” would become the official label for this sizeable chunk of Bach’s output.

Most of Bach’s cantatas were written for performance in Leipzig, where Bach was expected to provide sacred music for not one, but TWO churches, each Sunday.

On today’s date in 1731, the 27th Sunday after Trinity that year, Bach presented what would become one of his most popular cantatas: “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”, or “Awake, the Voice calls to us.” In the catalog of Bach’s work compiled long after his death, this is his Cantata No. 140.

The text is based on a parable from the Gospel of St. Matthew recounting the story of the wise and foolish virgins, who are called, ready or not, to participate in a wedding feast. The opening choral melody may have been already familiar to Bach’s performers and congregation, but his dramatic setting of it is downright ingenious.

In 1944, while the Second World War ground on in Europe and Asia, the American composer David Diamond received a commission from Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was then the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony.

“Write me a happy work,” asked Mitropolous. “These are distressing times, most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.”

The resulting work was entitled “Rounds for String Orchestra.” To some, it sounded as if Diamond had turned to traditional American folk music, but, as Diamond put it, “the tunes are original. They sound like folk tunes, but they are really the essence of a style that must have been absorbed by osmosis.”

Diamond’s “Rounds” received its premiere performance by Mitropolous and the Minneapolis Symphony on today’s date in 1944. Even the stodgy conservative music critic of the St. Paul Pioneer Press expressed her grudging admiration: “it reveals a good deal of talent and resourcefulness” was her verdict. Reviewing a subsequent Boston Symphony performance under Koussevitzky, New York Times critic Olin Downes was much more enthusiastic. He wrote: “It is admirably fashioned, joyous and vernal. There is laughter in the music.”

“Rounds” has gone on to become one of Diamond’s most frequently performed works. Perhaps joy and laughter in music remains as rare and precious a commodity now as it was back in those distressed days of 1944.

On today’s date in 1934, after 10 intense rehearsals, the Orquestra Sinfonica de Mexico, conducted by the Mexican Carlos Chávez, gave the premiere performance of the Symphony No. 2 of the American composer Aaron Copland.

Copland’s Second was titled ‘The Short Symphony,” but there was a lot packed into its 15-minute duration. “The Short Symphony’s preoccupation is with complex rhythms, combined with clear textures,” said Copland. “Sonority-wise, the most rhythmically complex moments have a certain lightness and clarity.”

“I had briefly considered naming the piece (at Chavez’s suggestion) ‘The Bounding Line,’” said Copland, “until another friend wisely advised me against it, pointing out that ‘bounding’ seemed more like ‘boundary’ than the ‘bounce’ I had in mind.”

“Shortly after its Mexican introduction,” recalled Copland, “the piece was announced for an American premiere by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but was never given. A similarly announced performance by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzsky was also cancelled. Both told me subsequently that they had announced performances because they had admired the work, but that the composition was so intricate from a rhythmic standpoint that they dared not attempt a performance within the allotted period.”

In 1937, Copland recast his “Short Symphony” as a chamber sextet, leaving the music fundamentally unchanged, but re-barring the score to make it less challenging for performers. It wasn’t until the 1980s, some four decades after its Mexican premiere, that Copland’s 15-minute Symphony became increasingly performed by American orchestras in its original form.

Today is the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, an early Christian martyr. Her story dates back to Roman times, when the new religion was still punishable by death.

It wasn’t until the 15th century, however, that St. Cecilia became the patron saint of music and musicians. Over time her Feast Day came to be celebrated with special works composed in her honor, all extolling the power of music. Of these, pieces by three British composers are the most famous.

In the 17th century, Henry Purcell wrote four cantatas, or “Odes” for St. Cecilia’s Day. The most famous of these, entitled “Hail! Bright Cecilia!” was written in 1692.

The British poet John Dryden, a contemporary of Purcell’s, wrote two poems in praise of St. Cecilia. These attracted the attention of the great British composer of the following century, George Frederick Handel. The first of these, “Alexander’s Feast” premiered in 1736, oddly enough not on St. Cecilia’s Day, but proved so popular that Handel set Dryden’s other Ode to St. Cecilia, entitled “From Harmony, Heavenly Harmony,” and performed both pieces on today’s date in 1739.

The great 20th century British composer, Benjamin Britten was actually born on St. Cecilia’s Day in 1913. In the early 1940s, the British poet W.H. Auden wrote a piece entitled "Anthem for St. Cecilia's Day" especially for Britten, who set it to music in 1942.

On today’s date in 1986, at the New England Conservatory of Music’s Jordan Hall, a new choral work by the American composer John Harbison received its premiere performance.

This work, for soprano, baritone, chorus, and chamber orchestra, was entitled “The Flight into Egypt,” and would win the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year.

The text for Harbison’s cantata is taken from the Gospel of Matthew -- Chapter 2, verses 13-23 in the King James Version -- and describes the Holy Family’s escape into Egypt after the birth of Jesus and King Herod’s subsequent slaughter of all new-born male children in an attempt to kill this newly-arrived threat to his throne.

“'The Flight,'" recalled Harbison, “began in a conversation with colleagues about Christmas texts. We talked about counseling experiences during Christmas season at Emmanuel Church, Boston, where we were all involved as musicians -- a time when need, isolation, and anxiety increase. We agreed that the darker side of Christmas needs representation, especially now, as the distance widens between the privileged and the less fortunate.

“At the beginning of 'The Flight into Egypt,'" Harbison continues, “is an oboe melody, long and florid, even rather exotic and forlorn, which is imitated by the other reed players. I subtitled this work a ‘sacred ricercar’ (ricercar meaning something in the texture to be searched out), the piece constantly hides and reveals its loyalty to the first elaborate oboe melody that guides the whole journey.”

Today is the birthday of the American composer, singer, dancer and choreographer Meredith Monk, who was born in New York City on today’s date in 1942.

Monk attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied theatre, dance and music. On graduation in 1964, she began performing pieces that combined gesture and movement with vocal and visual elements, in the company of like-minded artists based in New York. Around that time, a number of contemporary composers had begun stretching the boundaries of instrumental music, but, as Monk recalls, there really wasn’t much happening regarding “extended vocal techniques.”

Monk began testing how she could stretch the range, timbre and character of her own singing, inventing a vocabulary based on her particular voice -- as she explains it, just as a dancer would develop a vocabulary of movement particular to their body.

Considering her long-standing interest in integrating music with movement and visuals, opera seemed a natural outlet for Monk’s talents, and in 1991 she premiered a full-length opera entitled “Atlas.”

“Atlas” was inspired by the life of Alexandra David-Neel, a scientist who was the first Western woman to travel in Tibet. It seemed a natural choice for Monk, for whom exploration and curiosity are so important. “If I knew what I was looking for,” says Monk “it wouldn’t be that interesting.” Her opera “Atlas” tells its story via a wordless libretto set to music that employs a number of the extended vocal techniques Monk had developed over the years.

In the summer of 1936, the songwriting team of George and Ira Geshwin settled their affairs in New York, put their furniture in storage, and flew off to Hollywood to fulfill a contract with the RKO Studios. The Gershwins were to supply music for a series of new movies, some starring an old friend of theirs, dancer Fred Astaire.

In those days the big movie studios moved quickly, and so did the Gershwins. The first film in the contracted series, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the romantic leads, was entitled “Shall We Dance” and was completed, scored and released in less than a year.

On today’s date in 1937, RKO Studios released their second Gershwin collaboration, “Damsel in Distress.” This starred Astaire and Joan Fontaine, and included two songs that would become Gershwin classics: “A Foggy Day in London Town” and “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”

The release of “Damsel in Distress,” however, must have been a bittersweet event for the friends and family of George Gershwin. The composer had died suddenly on July 11 that year following surgery to remove a brain tumor. The musical world was shocked, and there were funeral services and memorial concerts arranged on both the East and West Coast.

“Damsel in Distress” proved to be the last major project Gershwin had completed before his death.