Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1923, the comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles were the star attraction in a new musical they had written called “Runnin’ Wild,” which opened at the Colonial Theater at Broadway and 62nd Street.

In their day, Miller and Lyles were the African-American equivalent of Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy. The plot of “Runnin’ Wild,” like many Broadway musicals of that day, was flimsy: two Southern con-men on the run head north to St. Paul, Minnesota, but find the natives too strange and the climate too cold, so they return home disguised as famous spiritualists. This “plot” provided an excuse for comic sketches to be sandwiched in between snappy song and dance numbers, the latter invariably involving leggy showgirls.

Prior to its opening night, everyone predicted that one of the songs from “Runnin’ Wild” entitled “Old Fashioned Love” would be the show’s big musical hit. As luck would have it, it was a totally different dance number that struck gold for the show’s composer, James P. Johnson.*

Johnson called this tune “Charleston,” after the dockside hometown of many recent African-American immigrants to New York City’s west side. Scholars have traced this dance step back to the west side of Africa, however—an Ashanti Ancestor dance, to be exact.

But whatever its source, this catchy rhythm made Johnson famous, and rapidly became the signature tune for the “Roaring Twenties,” a decade of flappers, bathtub gin, and all that jazz!

On today’s date in 2001, this music helped open a new art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The building was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and its roof looks a little like the wings of a large, graceful bird in flight—at least that’s the impression that composer Kamran Ince got viewing the new structure on several visits to Milwaukee.

Kamran Ince was born in Montana in 1960 to American and Turkish parents, and lived in Turkey between 1966 and 1980. Not surprisingly, elements of traditional Turkish music crop up in his original works, including the piece he entitled “Flight Box,” which was premiered by the Present Music at the new museum in Milwaukee. Ince notes that he himself flew between America and Europe some seven times while working on the new piece.

“Flight Box” is scored for three saxophones, two trumpets, two trombones, percussion, electric bass guitar, keyboards, violin, and cello. The performers are also asked to sing and speak occasionally, intoning words based on the sounds of the Turkish language.

Ince says he completed “Flight Box” early in 2001, months before the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Its October premiere, coming just one month after those traumatic events, added some sinister overtones to the work’s title, but Ince insists it was based on his own, far happier memories of flying, or, as he put it, “it’s the diary of a flight that SAFELY reaches its destination.”

On today’s date in 1993, the American composer Daniel Asia conducted the Phoenix Symphony in the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 4. The work included a slow movement, written as an orchestral elegy for Asia’s friend and composer colleague, Stephen Albert, who had died in a car crash the previous year.

But Asia cast his symphony in the traditional four-movements familiar from the symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven. And, as in the symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven, Asia left room for a wide range of emotions—including humor. So, in addition to a slow, elegiac movement, Asia’s Symphony has a second movement Scherzo, with a traditional, but jaunty and very American-sounding trio section.

“In this piece,” writes Asia, “I was rediscovering old formal ideas, and perhaps laying bare the primary motivic ideas and their development. The second movement is a true scherzo. There are refractions of Beethoven scherzos, but sometimes a beat is chopped off, creating a skipping effect. Also everything is in threes in the trio-section; the harmony is three-voiced, and the instrumentation is also in threesomes.”

For three years, during 1991-1994, the American composer Daniel Asia served as composer-in-residence with the Phoenix Symphony, a residency funded by Meet the Composer. As both composer and conductor, Daniel Asia has been meeting with a number of major American orchestras for coast-to-coast performances of his orchestral works, ranging from his hometown Seattle Symphony to the American Composers Orchestra in New York.

On today’s date in 1930, “The Age of Gold,” a new ballet by the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich opened at the State Academic Theater in Leningrad. At that time, it was trendy for Soviet Art to extol sporting events, and contrast the wholesome values of the new Soviet society with those of the decadent, bourgeois West.

And so, the plot of this new Soviet ballet ran as follows: a Russian soccer team arrives in a Western city to play a match during an industrial exposition, only to find their heroic endeavors thwarted by a hostile hotel staff, a seductive Western opera diva, and, of course, corrupt police and city officials.

Dutifully following the Party line, Shostakovich wrote: “Throwing into contrast the two cultures was my main aim. The dances for the Europeans breathe the decadent spirit of depraved eroticism which is characteristic of contemporary bourgeois culture, but I tried to imbue the Soviet dances with the wholesome elements of sport and physical culture.”

One of the lasting hits of his ballet score was this sardonic little Polka, which Shostakovich subtitled “Once upon a time in Geneva, or, The Angel of Peace,” a mocking political reference to the Geneva disarmament conference of the 1920s.

Despite all this political subtext, Shostakovich seemed to be having a whale of a time, as if he rather enjoyed spending a little time—if only musically—in the decadent West.”

The real story behind Richard Strauss’ decision to use a chamber orchestra for his opera “Ariadne on Naxos” is rather complicated and frankly mundane. We prefer a much more “colorful” version, even though it may be as imaginary as the Greek myth of poor Ariadne herself.

In any case, here’s how some fanciful Germans claim it all came about when Strauss’s opera was premiered in Stuttgart on today’s date in 1912:

Back when a new opera house was being planned for that city, Strauss was asked how large the orchestral pit should be. “Oh, it should hold about 100 players,” he suggested. So, to determine the size required for the new theater’s pit, the architects rather naively asked the local military band to assemble 100 players, have them stand at attention, and measured the amount of space they occupied.

Now, as you might expect, soldiers standing at attention take up a lot less space than an equal number of seated string players, not to mention trombonists and timpanists. And so, the resulting space in the new theater could only accommodate a chamber orchestra.

And as luck would have it, the Stuttgart Opera was also eager to launch the brand-new opera by Strauss. When he learned what had happened, Strauss had a good laugh, but, being the eminently practical sort he was, simply wrote his new opera for chamber ensemble of about 40 players.

Fact or fantasy, that’s how they like to tell it in Stuttgart.

On a number of occasions, the American composer Steve Reich has suggested that his intensely personal brand of music-making works best in small-ensemble situations. But on today’s date in 2001, at the urging of conductor David Robertson, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered a “big-band” string orchestra version of Reich’s “Different Trains.”

In its original form, “Different Trains” was scored for a string quartet and tape. As in many of his pieces, Reich based its musical themes on the rhythms and cadences of taped recorded speech patterns and pitches. “The basic idea is that speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments,” says Reich.

“The concept of this piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently from 1930 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”

Reich’s musical meditation combined purely instrumental sounds with interviews—clips from his governess, a Pullman porter, and Holocaust survivors—mixed with ambience sounds of American and European trains. In 1988, Reich wrote: “The piece presents both a documentary and a musical reality, and a new musical direction for me.”

On today's date in 1959, the Detroit Symphony under the eminent French conductor Paul Paray gave the first performance of some music by the eminent American composer Walter Piston.

Piston had studied in Paris with the famous French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and the great French composer Paul Dukas, so perhaps this was a very astute and stylish paring of composer and conductor.

In any case, to help celebrate the 100th Worcester Festival, Paray and the Detroit orchestra were on hand in Massachusetts for the premiere of Piston's "Three New England Sketches," an orchestral suite whose movements were entitled: "Seaside," "Summer Evening," and "Mountains."

Piston didn't intend for listeners to take these titles too literally: "The programmatic titles serve in a broad sense to tell the source of the inspirations, reminiscences, even dreams that pervaded the otherwise musical thoughts of one New England composer," he noted.

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1894, taught for many years at Harvard, had a summer vacation home in Vermont, and died in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1976, so he certainly qualified as a bone-fide "New England" composer.

"Is the Dust Bowl more American than, say, a corner in the Boston Athenaeum?" he once asked, arguing: "Would not a Vermont village furnish as American a background for a composition as the Great Plains?"

Even so, the most striking hallmark of Piston's music remains its quite cosmopolitan style and neo-classical form—the lasting influence, perhaps, of his two famous French teachers.

George Frideric Handel is the composer credited with “inventing” the organ concerto back in the 18th century.

Handel was a virtuoso performer on the organ, and, as a special added attraction during the London performances of some of his Biblical oratorios, one of Handel’s concertos would be featured as a kind of intermission feature. This served to showcase the Handel’s skill as an organist—and perhaps to give his singers a chance to catch their breath between sections of the full-length oratorio.

Since then, a number of composers have added to the organ concerto repertory started by Handel.

On today’s date in 1990, on a CBC radio broadcast from the Calgary Organ Festival Competition, a brand-new organ concerto by the American composer Michael Colgrass had its premiere performance. Colgrass’ concerto was entitled “Snow Walker,” and is cast as an impressionistic musical picture of the Far North and the fortitude, humor, and spirituality of Canada’s native Inuit peoples.

The work is dedicated to Farley Mowat, the author of a true-life story of life in the Far North, “Never Cry Wolf,” familiar from a popular Disney movie. Howling wolf cries from a trombone do appear in Colgrass’ score, along with surging winds of a polar landscape and evocations of Inuit throat singing, culminated in a rambunctious dance-finale.

It’s all a very far cry from 18th century London, but recognizably in the tradition of Handel’s virtuoso showpieces for a master organist.

Let’s face it. Brevity and wit are not always qualities one associates with new music.

But today we offer a sample: this comic overture is less than 5 minutes long, and opens, as you just heard, with a Fellini-esque duet for piccolo and contrabassoon.

The overture is entitled “Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark,” and is purportedly a rather burlesque celebration of modern theoretical physics. Its alliterative title evokes those subatomic particles known as “quarks” that, we’re told, make up our universe. And, since this music changes its changes time signature so often, perhaps Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” is thrown in for good measure.

Its composer is an American, Marga Richter, who was born on this date in 1926 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. Richter received her early music training in Minneapolis, and then moved to New York’s Juilliard School for further composition study with two distinguished American composers, Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma.

Marga Richter has written over 75 works including an opera and two ballets, as well as two piano concertos and a variety of solo, chamber and symphonic works, including the 1991 overture “Quantum Quirks of a Quick, Quaint Quark.”

"Composing,” says Richter,” is my response to a constant desire to transform my perceptions and emotions into music. Everything that touches me, everything beautiful, or mysterious, or painful, or joyful, or unknowable becomes an immediate or eventual source of inspiration. Music is the way I speak to the silence of the universe."

On today’s date in 1950, the famous oboist Marcel Tabuteau gave the premiere performance of this “Pastorale” for solo oboe, harp, and strings, with his colleagues from the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy conducting.

The music was by Howard Hanson, who dedicated the piece to his wife Peggy.

Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska in 1896. As a talented teenager, Hanson recalls a German-born musician in New York asking him: “Well, now, Hanson, why do you waste your time at futile efforts in composition when you could became a great concert pianist?” This, said Hanson, from someone who had never heard one note he had written. “In the true German tradition,” Hanson recalled, “he figured that nobody from Nebraska could possibly write good music. It took 40 years to get rid of that kind of thinking in the U.S.,—and we’re not over it yet.”

Hanson was in his early 80s when he made those comments, with a 40 year career as a successful composer, conductor and educator behind him. Hanson had just completed his seventh and final symphony, and was commonly referred to as “The Dean of American Music.”

Despite all that, Hanson retained his sense of humor, as evidence by this comment from the octogenarian: “Peggy will say to me, ‘What are you going to do now? ’ and I’ll say, ‘I’m going upstairs to waste my time in futile efforts at composition.’”