Composers Datebook

Yes, Juliet, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a catchy title alone can’t help a piece of music that’s uninspired or just plain boring. An intriguing title, however can sometimes help put audiences into a more receptive frame of mind—or at least pique their curiosity.

From the very beginning of his career in the 1980s, the young American composer Michael Torke had the knack of coming up with quite evocative titles. His early works had titles like “Ecstatic Orange” and “Bright Blue Music.” A piece composed for the 1994 Olympic Games in Atlanta was titled “Javelin,” and this music, an orchestral suite that premiered in Amsterdam on today’s date in 1997, was titled “Overnight Mail.”

And each of the three movements of his orchestral suite had an additional title, as Torke explains:

“The titles of the suite’s three movements, ‘Priority,’ ‘Standard,’ and ‘Saturday Delivery,’ present the options for expediency when sending things, but musically, they represent different reactions to an abstract compositional problem I set up for myself: resolve dissonant notes (non chord tones) by leaps rather than steps. For me this was important, because I want to write music that follows all the old rules of voice leading and counterpoint, but sounds fresh.”

Today we celebrate the birthday of American composer Vivian Fine, who was born in Chicago on this date in 1913.

Already, at the age of five, she was a scholarship piano student at the Chicago Musical College. As she grew up she became enthralled with the great composers and performers she heard at her regular visits to the Chicago Symphony. Vivian Fine initially intended to be a concert pianist, but theory studies with American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger inclined her more and more towards composition.

She also became an avid follower of the emerging “Ultra-Modern” school of composers, including Henry Cowell, who later proved to be one of her early mentors. Fine’s debut as a composer came in Chicago when she was 16, and at 17 she went to New York City, where she studied composition with Roger Sessions, and orchestration with George Szell.

Fine wrote this “Concertante for Piano and Orchestra” in 1944, initially without any specific commission or likelihood of performance. When her teacher Roger Sessions saw her sketches for this music, he commented: “Now we are colleagues.” For his part, George Szell, a musician notoriously hard to please, complimented her on its orchestration.

Teaching also became an important part of Fine's professional life, first at New York University and Juilliard, and ultimately at Bennington College. Vivian Fine died in March of 2000, at the age of 86, following a traffic accident in Vermont.

On today’s date in 1956, the English composer Gerald Finzi died in Oxford. He was just 55 years old. Finzi suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, and three weeks before his death had caught chickenpox from some children he had visited, and the infection proved fatal.

Finzi was born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His mother was musical, and an amateur composer. Even with talent, wealth, support from the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Bernard Herrmann, and several golden opportunities for career advancement, Finzi proved to be a rather diffident soul who seemed to prefer to work in seclusion and relative obscurity.

He collected rare books and scores by 18th century English composers, but is most famous for his settings of poems by Thomas Hardy, a contemporary of his parent’s generation.

Himself an agnostic, Finzi produced a small body of sacred choral works, and two instrumental pieces that have endeared him to clarinetists: a set of clarinet “Bagatelles” from 1943 and his Clarinet Concerto from 1949.

Although never completely forgotten, a serious revival of interest in Finzi’s music had to wait for several decades after his death. The British critic Norman Lebrecht offers this assessment of Finzi’s appeal: “a confluence of Elgar without bluffness and Vaughan Williams at his most delicate. His concerto for clarinet and strings is a light and lovely lament for lost times.”

On today’s date in 1991, Herbert Blomstedt led the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus in the premiere of a cantata entitled “Genesis,” by the American composer Charles Wuorinen. This cantata was the culminating work of Wuorinen’s four-year association with the San Francisco Symphony as its composer-in-residence.

The most famous setting of the Biblical Genesis story is Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation” from 1798. But early on, Wuorinen decided his cantata would be a non-narrative, non-programmatic treatment of the subject, incorporating both a Latin version of the Genesis text and musical themes from Gregorian chant masses on the subject of the creation.

As the critic Michael Steinberg has noted, Wuorinen’s music fuses the physicality and punch of Stravinsky with Schoenberg’s struc¬tural principles. The resulting style, which some have dubbed “maximalist” is complex and demanding—just as its composer intended.

Wuorinen writes, “In any medium, entertainment is that which we can receive and enjoy passively, without effort, without our putting anything into the experience. Art is that which requires some initial effort from the receiver, after which the experience received may indeed be entertaining, but also transcending as well. Art is like nuclear fusion: you have to put something into it to get it started, but you get more out of it in the end than what you put in. Entertainment is its own reward, and generally doesn’t last.”

In the 1920s, the German composer Paul Hindemith wrote a set of seven concertos, which he collectively titled: “Kammermusik” or “Chamber Music.” This generic title was part of Hindemith’s goal to foster a more “objective” musical style, modeled on 18th century composers like J.S. Bach. Some have even called Hindemith’s “Kammermusik” the 20th century equivalent of Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos.”

Hindemith’s “Kammermusik” No. 4, a work for solo violin and chamber orchestra, had its first performance in Dessau on today’s date in 1925. The soloist was Licco Amar, the first violinist of the Amar String Quartet, an ensemble in which Hindemith played viola.

Hindemith’s father had been killed in the First World War, and Hindemith himself had been called up, but avoided being sent to the front by forming a string quartet that played nightly to ease the nerves of his commanding officer. Despite being one of the leading “Aryan” composers of his day, Hindemith fell out of favor with the Nazi regime and eventually immigrated to America, where he became a very influential teacher.

To address the role of music in society, Hindemith suggested composers should revive the idea of domestic music-making by writing “Gebrauchsmusik,” or “utility music” that amateur musicians could play at home with family and friends.

“People who make music together cannot be enemies,” he observed, “at least while the music lasts.”

On today’s date in 1947, the German composer Hans Eisler, who had been living in the United States since 1938, was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

This was some years before Joseph McCarthy headed such investigations, but one member of the committee was a first-term Californian congressman by the name of Richard M. Nixon. Nixon and other committee members were eager to expose Communist agents, who they believed were undermining American values by infiltrating and influencing the film industry.

Hans Eisler, who had been working in Hollywood since 1942, was a prime suspect. After all, his brother Gerhard was an ardent Communist, and Hanns himself a close artistic collaborator of the Marxist poet, Bertolt Brecht. As one newspaper reported, Hans Eisler was “the commissar of the West Coast Party activities on the movie front.”

While Hans Eilser did have leftist sympathies, there was absolutely no evidence of his being a Soviet agent, and as a film music composer, Eisler had no ideological influence on the scripts or even the topics of the films on which he worked. Celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland all rallied to his defense, but to no avail. The mood of the country in the early days of the Red Scare was such that Eisler was banned from working his Hollywood, and eventually forced out of the country.

Like his old friend Bertold Brecht, Eisler eventually settled in Communist East Germany, where he died in 1962.

It was on today’s date in 1835, that the great Romantic opera composer Vincenzo Bellini died at a country home near Paris. He was only 34 years old, but had achieved great fame in his brief lifetime.

The long, elegant melodic lines Bellini spun out in his greatest operas were imitated by many composers, and proved to be a major influence on the solo piano works of his contemporary, Frederic Chopin.

Bellini’s first successful opera was “Il Pirata” or “The Pirate” from 1827, and just three years later, he could truthfully report, “My style is now heard in the most important theatres in the world… and with the greatest enthusiasm.” He settled in Paris, where he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. It was there that his final opera, “I Puritani di Scozia” or “The Puritans of Scotland,” premiered early in 1835.

If Bellini’s real life had followed the Romantic story-lines of his operas, he would have been a dispossessed outcast who dies for love. In fact, Bellini was financially successful and moved in the highest social circles. Rather than die for love, it seems he was planning to marry for money at the time he fell ill, a victim of chronic gastro-enteritis.

At his requiem mass, four of the leading composers of his day, Paer, Cherubini, Carafa and Rossini, each held a corner of the coffin shroud. He was buried in Paris, but in 1876 his remains were moved to the cathedral of Catania, the Italian town where he was born.

Today we celebrate the birthday of Leonardo Balada, an American composer born in Barcelona, Spain, on Sept. 22nd, 1933.

After studying at the Barcelona conservatory, the 20-something composer came to New York on a musical scholarship.

Balada recalls his arrival as both a cultural and climatic shock: “When I landed in New York—on a freezing day in 1956—little did I know of the mental turmoil I would experience in the next few years. That city had become the focal point for the latest music and arts. New York shook my musically conservative upbringing to its roots.”

Like many composers of his generation, Balada felt he had to decide whether to follow the path of the abstract serialists who dominated music at that time, or find his own way and voice.

“I felt a strong necessity to become up to date aesthetically,” recalls Balada, “to look to the future and not be criticized as a reactionary. How could it be otherwise for a liberal young fellow brought up in Spain, opposed to Franco’s conservatism? On the other hand the music I was listening to in New York was not for me.”

Encouraged by the great Spanish guitarist Narciso Yepes, Balada began to draw on his own imagination and cultural heritage, eventually blending contemporary techniques with the elements of a more traditional language, often infused with Spanish themes.

“Are people still writing concertos for harpsichord?” you ask. Well, even if it’s not the most pressing question that has sprung into your mind today, we do have an answer, which is “Yes!”

On today’s date in 2002, for example, this new Concerto for Harpsichord and Chamber Orchestra by Philip Glass had its premiere performance at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Glass was asked to write a new Harpsichord Concerto for the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, and found the commission intriguing.

“For one,” wrote Glass, “I have always been an admirer of the literature for harpsichord and studied some of the music from the Baroque period quite thoroughly, and have played a bit of that music myself. Secondly, I knew that the modern day harpsichord was capable of a fuller, more robust sound than was available in ‘period’ instruments and might make a handsome partner to a modern chamber orchestra.”

Glass’s modern day concerto is in the traditional three movements of a Baroque era concerto, with a slower, more lyrical middle movement flanked by speedier, flashier outer movements. And perhaps surprisingly for a “minimalist” composer famous—or infamous—for his loping, seemingly endless repeated patterns, this Harpsichord Concerto, despite being recognizably a work by Philip Glass, is more varied and mercurial than usual, with a final movement in which the harpsichord soloist really needs to “go for Baroque!”

When we think of Russian music in Paris, the name Sergei Diaghilev comes first to mind. In the early years of the 20th century, that famous Russian impresario saw to it that not only the new music of Stravinsky was performed in the French capital, but also a historical panorama of earlier Russian works, including Mussorgsky’s opera, “Boris Godounov.”

But Russian music and musicians had been coming to Paris for decades, and for their part, notable French composers like Adolphe Adam, Hector Berlioz, and even the young Claude Debussy had all visited Russia.

Russian music also figured prominently at famous Universal Expositions held in Paris in the latter 19th century. On today’s date in 1878, for example, Tchaikovsky’s “Valse-Scherzo” for violin and orchestra received its premiere in Paris, at a Russian concert conducted by the composer’s colleague and compatriot Nicolai Rubinstein. In addition to this brand-new work, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and symphonic fantasia “The Tempest” were also performed during Russian concerts at the 1878 Exposition.

Tchaikovsky was back home in Russia, curious to know how his works fared in Paris. He wrote to a friend: “Have you been to any of the Russian concerts in Paris? According to some newspapers my compositions were a great success, to others a failure. I cannot get at the truth.” Fortunately, when Rubinstein returned to Russia, he was able to report first-hand that Tchaikovsky’s music had, indeed, been very well received.