Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1838, the crew of the American brig Otis, docked in the harbor of La Guiara, Venezuela, was about to set sail for Philadelphia, when they discovered that one of their passengers had died in his cabin. He was the German inventor and one-time business associate of Beethoven, Johann Nepomuk Maelzel.

Maelzel was born in Regensburg in 1772, the son of an organ builder. Perhaps a childhood spent among the inner workings of pipe organs predisposed young Johann to become an inventor of mechanical instruments, similar to this old Viennese flute clock. At the age of 20, Maelzel came to Vienna, and if you had 3000 florins of disposable income, you could buy one of Maelzel’s mechanical wonders and hear it play short tunes by Haydn and Mozart on demand.

But Maezel didn’t stop there: he invented entire mechanical orchestras, and other wonders, all to be displayed in a museum he opened in Vienna in 1812. Beethoven composed a piece for Maelzel’s mechanical orchestra entitled “Wellington’s Victory.” The two collaborators fell out over who owned what, and in any case, Beethoven re-orchestrated his piece for conventional, human performers. Maelzel took his contraptions on tour, and spent a good deal of his later life exhibiting them in the United States and even the West Indies.

Today, Maelzel’s musical inventions are regarded as obsolete curios—with one exception: he’s credited with finessing and popularizing the use of the metronome.

Today’s date marks the premiere of two chamber works from the 1920s, both landmark and transitional works of two of the 20th century’s most influential composers.

Today in 1920, at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet led the first performance of a “Grand Suite” of instrumental selections from Igor Stravinsky’s biting anti-war stage fable entitled “The Soldier’s Tale.” During and immediately following the First World War, Stravinsky had developed a spiky, jagged, and occasionally jazzy style, and music from “The Soldier’s Tale” is typical of this period in his development.

But Stravinsky did a compositional about-face after his “Soldier’s Tale,” and that same year came out with one of his earliest “neo-classical” scores: the ballet “Pulcinella,” based on musical themes by 18th century composers. Stravinsky’s “neo-classical” period would last for another three decades until the 1950s, when he became fascinated with the 12-tone method of composition developed by the Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg.

And speaking of Schoenberg, on today’s date in 1924, his “Serenade” received its premiere at the Fourth Festival of Chamber Music in the German town of Donaueschingen. “Serenade” was the first work in which Schoenberg employed his strict “12-tone” method of composition, avoiding traditional 18th century rules of melody and harmony… and only its Mozartean sounding title could be considered “neo-classical.”

In 1961, a new and difficult work for strings announced the arrival of a composer with a new and difficult name: Krzysztof Penderecki. Having lived as a young man under Nazi occupation and then under Poland’s repressive and ultra-conservative Communist regime, it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as a young composer Penderecki developed an ultra-modern, rebelliously-experimental musical style.

The success of his “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” made Penderecki famous worldwide. Subsequent choral works, operas, and more experimental orchestral works followed for the next dozen years or so.

By 1973, however, he accepted a commission for a symphony—a rather traditional form for a rebellious composer. On today’s date that year, Penderercki himself conducted its first performance, with the London Symphony at Peterbourough Cathedral in central England. While his First Symphony remained in his aggressively experimental style, Penderecki would go on to write several more, each in much more conservative musical language, influenced by more traditional composers like Bruckner and Shostakovich.

This music is from the finale to his Symphony No. 3, for example… "[My composing in this style],” explained Penderecki, “maybe goes a little back in time, but it goes back in order to go forward. With all the complications of the new discoveries in music, many composers, myself included, had to stop and think about history, about tradition. Sometimes music has to stop and relax a little bit. Sometimes it's good to look back and to learn from the past."

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of Dvorak’s composition pupils: one Julius Fucik, who was born in Prague on today’s date in 1872.

Fucik studied with Dvorak at the Prague Conservatory, where he also took lessons in violin and bassoon—and perhaps only a bassoonist could have conceived of a work with a prominent bassoon part entitled “The Old Bear with a Sore Head.” Is this possibly a musical recollection of one of his old Conservatory teachers in a particularly grumpy mood?

In any case, the bassoon was the instrument Fucik played at the German Theater in Prague, and he was also the bassoonist of the Czech Wind Trio. In 1897 he was appointed bandmaster of the 86th Austro-Hungarian Regiment, and started writing works for wind band. Fucik’s first appointment with the Regiment took him to Sarajevo, and in 1910 he became bandmaster of the 92nd Regiment stationed at Theresienstadt, or Terezin as the town is now called.

Now, in the years before World War I, “Sarajevo” and “Theresienstadt” did not have the ominous connotations of political assassination, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing that they do for us today. In any case, Fucik retired from the military in 1913 and died in Berlin in 1916.

But speaking of connotations, one wind band composition by Fucik, entitled “Entry of the Gladiators,” has a quite specific connotation for most Americans... Even if you’ve never heard of Julius Fuick, chances are you’ve heard this music, since it was taken up by American circus bands as the unofficial anthem of life under the big top.

Today’s date marks the birthday of the American composer Peter Schickele, best known for his outrageous musical parodies supposedly penned by the fictional P.D.Q. Bach, the "youngest and the oddest of the many children of J.S. Bach.”

Some public radio listeners also have fond memories of the inventive radio series he created and hosted entitled Schickele Mix, dedicated to “the proposition that all musics are created equal.”

Schickele was born in Ames, Iowa, on July 17, 1935, and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, where he began his study of composition. He later attended Swarthmore College and the Juilliard School, where one of his classmates was fellow-composer Philip Glass.

It was at Juilliard that Schickele’s talent for parody created the works of P.D.Q. Bach, and these humorous pieces proved so popular at early school concerts that they were eventually presented at Lincoln Center and even Carnegie Hall, and continue to delight new audiences on many recordings and compact discs.

The tremendous success of P.D.Q. Bach’s music has overshadowed the more serious concert works written under Schickele’s own name. That’s not to say there’s a lack of wit in Schickele’s more “serious” music—far from it. But while P.D.Q. Bach’s works may elicit belly laughs, Schickele’s music can evoke more pensive emotions, not without an occasional smile, of course.

Happy Birthday Peter! Thank you and Many Happy Ritornellos of this day!

These days, in the opinion of most music lovers, the towering genius of Johann Sebastian Bach far overshadows all but a handful of other Baroque Age composers. But in his own time, there were many other composers far more famous than Bach, a few who are today all but forgotten.

Take the case of Johann David Heinichen, who was buried in Dresden on today’s date in 1729. At the time, his royal patron, August the Strong of Saxony, made no attempt to fill the suddenly vacant post of Dresden court composer because, to his ears, no one’s music could possible have been as good as Heinichen’s.

The great 18th century music historian Charles Burney, impressed by Heinichen’s skill at colorful instrumentation, called him “the Rameau of Germany,” and in 1739, ten years after Heinichen’s death, and longf before talk of the “Three B’s,” another contemporary music historian coined the phrase "the three H's” to describe the importance of Hasse, Handel, and Heinichen” to 18th century German music.

During most of the 19th century, Heinichen’s music lay forgotten in a Dresden Library. Miraculously, these scores survived the Dresden fire-bombing by Allied forces during World War II. The post-war revival of interest in music by Bach’s contemporaries and the success of the period-instrument movement of more recent times piqued musicians’ interest, and some of the old scores were pulled off the shelves.

In 1993, a CD of some of Heinichen’s “Grand Concertos” performed by Musica Antiqua Koeln won—belatedly—several awards and some renewed attention for the long-neglected Johann David Heinichen.

On today’s date in 1959, the Swiss-born American composer Ernest Bloch died in Portland, Oregon, about a week short of his 79th birthday.

Bloch first came to America in 1916, when he was 36 years old. His music made an immediate impression, and a year later an all-Bloch orchestral concert in New York presented the premiere performance of his most famous work, a rhapsody for cello and orchestra entitled “Schelomo,” after the Hebrew name for King Solomon.

The success of that concert led to a contract with the publisher G. Schirmer, who published Bloch’s compositions with what was to become a trademark logo—the six-pointed Star of David with the initials E.B. in the center, an imprimatur that firmly established for Bloch a Jewish identity in the public mind.

In 1924, Bloch became a naturalized American citizen, and taught in Cleveland and San Francisco. In 1928, he composed this music: an orchestral piece entitled “America,” which was selected as the winner of a Musical America competition for the best symphonic work glorifying American ideals.

In the 1930s, Bloch returned to Switzerland for a time, but, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Italy, Bloch returned to America, and eventually settled in Agate Beach, Oregon. He lived in semi-retirement, continued to compose, and to pursue his lifelong hobbies of photography and mushroom collecting, plus a new Oregon coast hobby: collecting and polishing agates.

A new guitar concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis received its premiere at a Minnesota Orchestra “Sommerfest” concert conducted by David Alan Miller on today’s date in 1999.

The idea for this concerto was prompted by a friend of Kernis’s, guitarist David Tanenbaum, who was looking for a new work for guitar and orchestra that he could pair with the most performed of all such works, Joaquín Rodrigo's “Concierto de Aranjuez,” which premiered back in 1940.

For his new concerto, Kernis reworked parts of two earlier works he had composed for Tannenbaum: part of a Partita for solo guitar became the concerto’s opening movement, followed by two movements drawn from this Kernis chamber work for guitar and string quartet 100 Greatest Dance Hits.

The middle movement, entitled "Slow Dance Ballad" is, says Kernis, "the kind of music my parents would like—what they hope to find on the radio dial." In its original form, as part of the chamber 100 Greatest Dance Hits, this movement was entitled “MOR, i.e. Middle of the Road: East Listening.” The concerto’s finale is entitled "Salsa Posada," a Spanish pun referring both to the craze for old fashioned salsa dancing and the condiment of the same name, perhaps a little “off” or past its prime.

In writing his “Dance Hits,” Kernis explains he originally intended to imitate the pops sound of the 1990s, but found the passé pop styles of the 70s kept mentally intruding as he wrote.

In 1949, while on his deathbed, the German composer Richard Strauss supposedly turned to his beloved daughter-in-law, and said: “Funny thing, Alice. Dying is just the way I composed it in ‘Death and Transfiguration.” Strauss was referring to a tone-poem he had written some 60 years earlier, when he himself was in the pink of health.

“Death and Transfiguration” was a musical depiction of an artist on his deathbed, reviewing his life in art between bouts of an eventually fatal fever.

On today’s date in 1951, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg was on HIS deathbed in Los Angeles, on a Friday the 13th, in fact. Now, as most music lovers know, Schoenberg had a “thing” about numbers. He developed an atonal “12-tone” style of composition, and assigned a mystical, quasi-religious significance to numbers in general and musical mathematics in particular.

We’re not sure if, before he departed, Schoenberg turned to someone he loved and said: “Funny thing: I’m dying on Friday the 13th at the age of 76, which, numerically speaking, is 7+6, or 13, don’t you see... ”

We are sure, though, that in 1946, after suffering a near-fatal heart attack, Schoenberg wrote this String Trio. He told his friend Thomas Mann it was a musical representation of both that coronary incident and its subsequent medical treatment. Schoenberg even claimed at one point his Trio depicted the penetration of a hypodermic needle!

Among the more enduring souvenirs of the Paris World Exposition of 1889 was an impressive tower designed by a gentleman named Gustave Eiffel. Originally blasted as a grotesque eyesore by leading French artists—including the opera composer Charles Gounod—it was a smash hit with those attending the 1889 Exposition.

Another great hit with attendees, including the impressionable French composer Claude Debussy, was the chance to hear exotic music from around the world. In addition to strange sounds from Java, Siam, and Egypt, the audience at an orchestra concert at the Exposition’s Trocadero Palace on today’s date in 1889 could have heard the exotic sounds of music by several composers from the United States as well.

It was something of a milestone in the history of American music. Charles Whitefield Chadwick was a 45-year-old composer whose tone poem entitled “Melpomene” was one of the works performed in Paris, along with orchestral pieces by Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, Dudley Buck, and John Paine, just to mention a few.

A perceptive French critic noted at the time there seemed to be a veritable “young American school” of composers, obviously influenced by German models ranging from Mendelssohn to Wagner. “Except for the lack of originality,” concluded the French critic, “the workmanship is serious, correct, solid, and always practical. And these young Americans appeared blessed with much energy. Their school has scarcely been formed and already they have a significant repertoire.”