Composers Datebook

Today marks the birthday of a much-loved American musical tradition: the Boston “Pops.” On July 11, 1885, the “Promenade” Orchestra (later dubbed the “Pops”) gave its first concert at Boston’s old Music Hall. The German conductor Adolf Neuendorff led a program that included Franz von Suppé’s “Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna” Overture, and Johann Strauss’s “Pizzicato Polka,” among other selections.

Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony, had proposed this new series in the hopes of re-creating the ambience of summer evenings in the concert gardens in Vienna, where he had been a music student. He also hoped to provide summer employment for the members of the Boston Symphony, who at that point had to search for other work six months out of the year.

By 1929, the American-born conductor Arthur Fiedler had started the first outdoor “Esplanade Concerts” in Boston, and the following year assumed the post of Pops director, a position he would hold until his death in July of 1979.

And we should note that it was also on today’s date in 1940 that a 22-year-old musician named Leonard Bernstein made his first appearance as conductor of a professional orchestra, leading the Boston Pops at an open-air Esplanade Concert.

Parents worry. That’s their job. Take the parents of the American composer John Corigliano, Jr., for example. Both were musicians, and both knew that earning a living as a composer would be no easy task.

For many years, Corigliano’s father was the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Corigliano Junior recalls: “He did everything he could to discourage me. He knew firsthand that the composer was the lowest man in the musical hierarchy. ‘Performers don’t want to bother with your work, and audiences don’t want to hear it. So what are doing it for?’ he would say.”

After her boy graduated from Columbia, Mrs. Corigliano was at the beauty parlor one day and ran into the mother of the chairman of the Lehman College music department, and asked about getting her son a job. The chairman called him in for an interview and eventually hired Corigliano as an adjunct professor. John Jr. also made ends meet by working at classical music radio stations, producing recordings for Columbia Masterworks, and assisting Leonard Bernstein with his Young People’s Concerts.

But on today’s date in 1964, one of Corigliano’s early chamber works, a Sonata for Violin and Piano, was premiered in Italy at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. It won a chamber music prize, and its success helped establish young Mr. Corigliano as an up-and-coming composer.

Corigliano’s parents probably continued to worry. But they must have been proud as well. And John Corigliano Senior even made a recording of John junior’s new Sonata. But then, maybe dad was just worried somebody else wouldn’t play it right...

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of the American composer David Diamond, born in Rochester, New York, on July 9, 1915, to Austrian and Polish immigrants. His father was a carpenter and his mother a dressmaker. When a little boy, Diamond taught himself violin and started composing tunes. In the 1930s, he studied composition with Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

In the 40s and 50s, Diamond’s music was commissioned and performed by major American orchestras and conductors, but even so, in leaner periods, Diamond would support himself by playing violin in Broadway pit bands.

Among Diamond’s major works are eleven symphonies. His neo-classical style, like that of other mid-20th-century mainstream American composers of symphonies like Howard Hanson and Walter Piston, fell out of favor somewhat by the 1960s, when serial composers became more fashionable with critics.

It’s ironic that in 1949 when Diamond asked Arnold Schoenberg for lessons in the serial method Schoenberg refused, reportedly saying, "Why do you want to do that? You're a young Bruckner. Besides, I never meant [my method] for everybody."

Fashionable or not, Diamond did have some champions, including conductor Gerard Schwarz, who made fine recordings of Diamond symphonies with the Seattle Symphony. In 1995, Diamond was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.

On June 13, 2005, a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday, Diamond died at his home in Brighton, New York.

On today’s date in 1882, George Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Victoria. Although born in Australia, Grainger died in America, at the age of 79, in White Plains, New York, in 1961.

Percy Grainger led a long and remarkable life as composer, concert pianist, and educator. He counted among his friends the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and the British composer Frederic Delius, and Grainger shared their enthusiasm for collecting and transforming folk music themes.

From 1917 to 1919 he served in the U.S. Army, first playing oboe and saxophone, and later as a band instructor. “Country Gardens,” a piano setting of a Morris dance tune, was completed during Grainger’s Army years, and became his best-known composition after its publication in 1919. His subsequent work with wind bands culminated in a 1937 folksong suite entitled “Lincolnshire Posy,” a work that Grainger once described as a “bunch of musical wildflowers.”

And with some justification, one could describe Grainger himself as a “wildman.” At the age of 29, he wrote to his mother: “I hardly ever think of ought else but sex, race, athletics, speech and art.” He claimed to reject all prudery when it came to sex, pursuing an equally vigorous physical and artistic life into old age, and idolized Nordic languages and culture.

In 1928 Grainger married a Swedish woman he dubbed his “Nordic Princess,” one Ella Ström, at a very public ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl concert featuring the première of one of his own orchestral pieces entitled (what else): To a Nordic Princess.

You might say that if anyone can claim credit for having written the “soundtrack of our times,” that person would be the American composer and conductor John Williams.

Somehow, in between writing dozens and dozens of film scores for movies ranging from “Star Wars” to “Schindler’s List,” and as conductor of the Boston Pops or the Hollywood Bowl, Williams has also found time to conduct other composers’ concert works—and occasionally a few of his own.

This is a Cello Concerto that Williams composed for Yo-Yo Ma, a work that received its premiere on today’s date in 1994 at a gala concert opening the new Seiji Ozawa Hall at the Boston’s Symphony summer home in Tanglewood, Massachusetts.

Williams recalls, “My cello concerto resulted from a suggestion by Seiji that I write a piece for cello and orchestra expressly with Yo-Yo Ma in mind. I began work at the end of 1993, and I conducted the first performance on July 7, 1994, on a celebratory concert that marked the dedication of Ozawa Hall. I had known Yo-Yo Ma for quite a few years before this event. Together we had performed concertos of Elgar, Dvorak, and Haydn, among others, and on several occasions I had accompanied him at the piano. Over the years we’ve become close friends, and given the broad technical and expressive arsenal available in Yo-Yo’s work, planning the concerto was a joy.”

For every person who has actually seen a production of Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” there are thousands more who could recognize or even or sing a phrase or two of its hit tunes.

In the 18th century, the same could be said of the operas of Mozart—in Prague they were so popular that their tunes were arranged for small wind bands to play on street corners so musicians could collect the 18th century equivalent of a buck or two tossed into an open instrument case.

Now, as famous as the contemporary opera composer Aulis Sallinen might be in his native Finland, we doubt the same motivation was at work in the minds of the Foundation for Sport and the Arts of Manchester, England, and the College Band Directors National Association of the United States when they commissioned Sallinen to write a piece for wind band. Sallinen did, however, craft the new work based on tunes from his satirical opera “The Palace.”

The premiere of Sallinen’s “Palace Rhapsody” was given by the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra at the Cheltenham Festival in the U.K. on today’s date 1997.

Sallinen freely confesses he was thinking of those wind band arrangements of Mozart when he fulfilled his commission, which is not all that surprising, since the libretto for Sallinen’s 20th century opera borrowed some characters from one of Mozart’s 18th century ones.

"Chamber music” is typically defined as “music written for and performed by a small ensemble, with one performer on a part, usually without a conductor.” To that description the Website of a Portland, Oregon, organization called Chamber Music Northwest, adds this description: “Music that is inspiring, stimulating and intensely personal.”

And they should know: Chamber Music Northwest performs both the classical chamber works of the past and commissions new ones. For example, it was on this date in 1990, at one of their concerts, that clarinetist David Shifrin premiered a Quintet for Clarinet and Strings by the American composer Ellen Taafe Zwillich.

Zwillich says, “In writing chamber music, I am particularly inspired by the electricity of a dialogue among equals. When a performer can be asked to be a brilliant soloist one moment and a responsive partner the next, the possibilities for musical discourse are seemingly endless.”

Today’s date also marks the debut of another chamber work born in the Great Northwest: “Partita Appasionata,” by Stephen Paulus, premiered by violinist William Preucil and pianist Arthur Rowe at the 1996 Seattle Chamber Music Festival.

“One of the joys of writing chamber music,” said Paulus, “is that quite often the composer also knows the performers. So, not only are you writing a work for an intimate gathering of musicians, but for your friends—and that relationship often encourages a deeper and more meaningful musical dimension as well.”

Once, when someone asked JFK what his favorite song might be, the waggish former president responded: “Well, ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.” As most people know, “Hail to the Chief” is the tune traditionally played to announce presidential arrivals at public events.

What most people don't know is that the composer of the tune was British: one James Sanderson, to be exact. Sanderson was an early 19th century violinist and the conductor of the Surrey Theatre in London. Sanderson wrote incidental music for a stage adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic poem The Lady of the Lake, which was published in 1810. The tune we know as “Hail to the Chief” must have been the hit from that London show, as it even made it way to America in short order.

Sanderson’s original tune "Wreaths for the Chieftain," with a new text and a new title, “Hail to the Chief,” was first sung in Boston in 1815, at a memorial service on Washington’s Birthday.

It was on today’s date in 1828, however, that the U.S. Marine Band first performed the song for a LIVING President. The occasion was the ground-breaking ceremony for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal attended by President John Quincy Adams. Subsequent First Ladies Julia Tyler and Sara Polk continued the tradition, asking the Marine Band to play “Hail to the Chief” to announce the arrival of their Presidential spouses.

By 1954, the Department of Defense established the tune as the official musical salute to their “Commander in Chief.”

Remember “Y2K”—the Millennial Year 2000? It was a time of extravagant hopes and dire predictions, as pundits weighed in with their spin as the 20th century hastened to its end.

Composers weighed in, too. The American Composers Forum and the National Endowment for the Arts collaborated on a project entitled “Continental Harmony,” which commissioned new musical works for public celebrations in communities large and small in all 50 states. The ambitious commissioning project was even endorsed by the “Millennium Council” of the Clinton White House.

Premieres of many “Continental Harmony” commissions occurred on or near the Fourth of July in the year 2000. On today’s date, for example, on the eve of the Fourth, the Richmond Symphony in Virginia premiered an orchestra work entitled “From Time to

Time: Fantasias on Two Appalachian Folksongs.”

Its composer was Anthony Iannaccone, who explained the title of his new piece as follows: “In the first fantasia, the extraordinary beauty of Virginia and the resilient spirit of its people provided the inspiration for an extended tone poem based on the folksong ‘Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair’... The second movement, entitled ‘Moving Time: A Millennial Ride,’ is a fast, brief launch into the new millennium, with the folk tune ‘Shenandoah’ presented in fragments... the orchestra extracts the folk melody and recasts it as a kind of Fourth of July fireworks display.”

There’s nothing better than being outdoors on a glorious summer’s day, listening to live music. At least that’s what American composer Libby Larsen believes.

“I grew up on outdoor concerts,” she recalls. “There was a bandstand by my house in Minneapolis and all summer long orchestras and bands would play there. There's really something special about being outside and hearing music fill the air with sound...”

On today’s date in 1983, one of Larsen’s own musical works entitled “Deep Summer Music” received its premiere outdoors when the Minnesota Orchestra visited the tiny rural community of Terrace, Minnesota.

Larsen says, “’Deep Summer Music’ was written for an outdoor occasion. That's why there are long trumpet solos that can ring out over the hills. Terrace is a small town of 70 people, but for the concert 8000 people came from western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. They brought lawn chairs and picnic baskets. The concert was paid for by those same communities and so they had a real stake in the whole experience.”

At first, says Larsen, she thought the large, festive crowd wouldn’t pay much attention to her new piece. Instead, she recalls, as the music began, “There was the most beautiful blanket of quiet you can imagine. And as the second trumpet solo happened a "V" formation of geese flew over and honked during the solo, seeming to echo the music. It was such a lovely and peaceful experience—and you couldn’t have cued the geese any better!”