Composers Datebook

Jean Cocteau was a French novelist, playwright, stage and film director, poet, essayist, painter, set designer, and actor. And if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the First World War, Cocteau also became the unofficial spokesperson for “Les Six,” or “The Six,” a group of young composers that included Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre, and Georges Auric.

In 1945, Cocteau directed his own cinematic adaptation of the classic fairytale “Beauty and the Beast,” and in 1950, a modern-dress retelling of the ancient Greek myth of “Orpheus.”

Decades after Cocteau’s death in 1963, the American composer Philip Glass prepared new musical accompaniments to both these classic films.

In an interview Glass said, "For me, Cocteau has always been an artist whose work was central to the 'modern' art movement of the 20th century. More than any artist of his time, he again and again addressed questions of art, immortality and the creative process.”

This music is from Glass’s version of Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” which debuted in Gibellina, Italy on today’s date in 1994. The original soundtrack for Cocteau’s film was replaced by synchronized live performances by the singers and instrumentalists of the Philip Glass ensemble, who accompanied a screening of Cocteau’s uncut 95-minute film during a series of live performances.

TIME magazine called this new version of “Beauty and the Beast” (quote), "An exhilarating and original ride... Remarkable not only in conception but also in execution, brimming with freshets of melody and surging with Wagnerian power in conjuring up a magic kingdom."

It’s a mark of unusual success when a new musical work is recorded shortly after its premiere, and even more unusual when the recording session itself IS the premiere. But that was the case with many of the works written by the American composer Leroy Anderson, whose short and tuneful compositions from the 1940s, 50s and 60s proved enormously popular during his lifetime—many still are today.

On June 20, 1962, Anderson was at New York’s Manhattan Center, conducting for Decca Records the premiere of his “Clarinet Candy.” By recording in the summer months, when many of New York’s best symphonic players were available for studio work, Anderson was able to round up top-notch musicians for his recording sessions.

The contemporary Argentinean-born composer Osvaldo Golijov has also proved popular enough to have many of his brand-new works recorded either at their premieres or shortly thereafter.

This Klezmer-style clarinet piece is entitled “Rocketekya,” and was written for the 20th anniversary of New York’s Merkin Hall. Golijov explained: “I thought it would be interesting to write a different sort of celebratory piece, and I had an idea of a shofar blasting inside a rocket—an ancient sound propelled toward the future.”

On today’s date in 1869, a visitor to Boston’s Back Bay could have marveled at a huge, new wooden structure sporting American flags and surrounded by a mini-village of peanut vendors and lemonade stands.

Inside, an orchestra of 1000 sat surrounded by a chorus of 10,000. Over the stage hung giant portraits of Handel and Beethoven, and higher yet depictions of two angels gazing heavenwards by a banner reading “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.” “Christmas in June, you ask?” No, the audience of 12,000 had assembled for what was billed as a “Great National Peace Jubilee” organized by bandmaster Patrick Gilmore.

The June 19th concert marked the end of a 5-day festival of music and reconciliation, as America tried to mend the wounds caused by its recent Civil War. Former Union General and current President Ulysses S. Grant was on hand, and the New York Times opined that the Jubilee offered proof that, “our people can think of something beyond mechanical inventions and the almighty dollar.”

During the Jubilee, the massive orchestra and chorus performed selections ranging from “classical” works by Bach and Mozart to more recent works by Meyerbeer and Verdi.

A musical assessment of the Peace Jubilee appeared on today’s date that year from the pen of John S. Dwight, Boston’s leading music critic of that day, who found the great chorus “glorious and inspiring” and the huge orchestra “splendid but hard to hear.” However, he dismissed a performance of Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus,” accompanied by 100 real anvils, as a “childish, trivial thing for such a grand occasion.”

Drop the name “Pleyel” among a group of classical music aficionados and one of them might say, “Oh, yeah, Pleyel. He was a French piano maker. I think Chopin liked Pleyel pianos.” Another might add, “He was a composer, too, but... I don’t think he was really French…” Another might add, “Didn’t he have something to do with Haydn?”

Well, they’re ALL right. Ignace Joseph Pleyel was born near Vienna on today’s date in 1757. As a teenager, he became a pupil of Haydn, and in 1791, ended up in London, where, for a time, Pleyel’s orchestral concerts even competed with Haydn’s. The two remained friends, however, dined together and even attended each other’s programs.

In 1795, Pleyel set up shop in Paris, where he founded a publishing house and piano factory. His own compositions remained enormously popular. In 1805, Pleyel travelled to Vienna, visited the aging Haydn and heard that young upstart Beethoven improvising at the piano.

In 1822, the small town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, then still a whaling port, formed a Pleyel Society ‘to chasten the taste of listeners,’ in the words of a local newspaper. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, “The most telling evidence of the appeal of Pleyel’s music lies in the thousands of manuscript copies that filled the shelves of archives, libraries, churches, castles and private homes, and in the thousands of editions of his music produced in Europe and North America.” Pleyel died at his estate near Paris in 1831.

Back in 1714, today’s date fell on a Sunday, and, if you had happened to be attending a church service at the German Court of the Duke of Weimar, you might have heard some new music by the Duke’s court composer and organist, Johann Sebastian Bach.

It’s possible that Bach’s Cantata No. 21 was first performance that day: its first part performed before the sermon, its second part right afterwards. The opening text, which Bach sets as a fugue, begins “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” or, in English, I had much affliction.”

Now even in Bach’s day, composers were afflicted with critics, including snide remarks in print from fellow composers. In 1725, a then-famous composer—and critic—Johann Mattheson took Bach to task for the way in which he had set his text by quoting exactly what is being sung:

"I, I, I, I had much affliction, I had much affliction, in my heart, in my heart. I had much affliction, in my heart…” etc… Mattheson’s point, apparently, was that vocal music should not stutter, but flow gracefully in the “gallant” style that was becoming more fashionable and trendy back then.

Even so, Mattheson knew that Bach was the real deal, and earlier had praised Bach in print for church and keyboard music so well written that (quote), “we must certainly rate this man highly.”

The American composer Henry Brant was famous for his avant-garde “spatial” music—works that require groups of musicians stationed at various points around a performance space. But hard-core film music buffs might also know Brant as the master orchestrator of other composers’ scores for some big Hollywood productions in the 1960s.

On today’s date in 1995, Brant conducted the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, Canada, in the premiere of one of his orchestrations—in this case, a symphonic version of the “Concord” Piano Sonata of Charles Ives, first published in 1920. In the long preface to his Sonata, Ives wrote:

“The [Sonata] is an attempt to present [an] impression of the spirit of transcendentalism… associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts… undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality… found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.”

Henry Brant had been profoundly influenced by Ives’s music long before he got to know the “Concord” Sonata, but when he did, Brant set to work orchestrating it.

“I sensed that here, potentially, was a tremendous orchestral piece,” Brant wrote. “It seemed to me that the complete Sonata, in a symphonic orchestration, might well become the ‘Great American Symphony’ that we had been seeking for years… What better way to honor Ives.”

On today’s date in 1980, a week-long festival entitled “New Music America” came to a close in Minneapolis with a concert at that city’s Guthrie Theater. The program included the premiere of a piece entitled “High Life for Strings,” composed by David Byrne, a musician best known for his work with a rock band called The Talking Heads.

Byrne later recalled, “When I participated in the New Music America festival in Minneapolis, minimalism and New-Age noodling were making big in-roads into a scene that had been, for better or worse, more insular and academic. My piece, for a dozen strings and me as a timekeeper, was on a program with Philip Glass.” Byrne says he was fascinated by the intricate rhythms of West African pop music at the time, and that also influenced his “High Life for Strings.”

Brian Eno was another rock musician represented during the Festival in Minneapolis. Some years earlier, Eno had been so irritated by the inane, chirpy muzak he heard while traveling that he composed a soothing ambient synthesizer score he called “Music for Airports.” Appropriately enough, during the 8 days of the Festival, Eno’s score was broadcast 24 hours a day throughout the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Decades after its composition, composer Michael Gordon arranged Brian Eno’s synthesizer score for acoustic instruments, and recorded an arrangement of “Music for Airports” for the percussion ensemble Bang on a Can.

It’s summertime, the livin’ is easy, and all across the country music festivals large and small are getting underway. In addition to the big symphonic festivals at Ravinia and Tanglewood, there are smaller ones devoted exclusively to the intimate art of chamber music. In 1995, two American composers, Daniel S. Godfrey and Andrew Waggoner, started up the Seal Bay Festival, a two-week series of performances and workshops of recently composed chamber music in the Penobscot Bay area of Maine.

On June 14th, 2001, this newly revised string quartet by Daniel Godfrey received its premiere by the Cassatt Quartet at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport.

The quartet is inscribed to the memory of Godfrey’s mother, who died in 1997. “Her passing,” says Godfrey, “came to represent for me the losses, and the necessity of letting go, that have accompanied my arrival at late middle age. To oversimplify, perhaps, the first movement grieves, the second looks back wistfully, and the third looks ahead with determination and, ultimately, with hope.”

In 1944, the French composer Darius Milhaud was in California, teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California, and received a commission to write a piece suitable for school bands. With a world at war, the Jewish composer had found safe refuge in the U.S., and so eagerly accepted the commission for a number of reasons.

Milhaud, confined to a wheelchair for most of his adult life, sent his wife Madaleine to the College library to obtain a collection of French folk tunes. His idea was arrange of some these into a suite. As the composer himself explained after his “Suite Française” was finished:

“The five parts of [my] Suite are named after French Provinces, the very ones in which the American and Allied armies fought together with the French underground for the liberation of my country: Normandy, Brittany, Ile-de-France (of which Paris is the center), Alsace-Lorraine, and Provence (my birthplace). I used some folk tunes of these Provinces, as I wanted the young American to hear the popular melodies of those parts of France where their fathers and brothers fought on behalf of the peaceful and democratic people of France."

Milhaud’s “Suite Française” was premiered by the Goldman Band in New York City on today’s date in 1945, and rapidly became one the best-known and most often performed of Milhaud’s works, and one of the established classics of the wind-band repertory.

On today’s date in 2002, a high profile musical event occurred at Philadelphia’s new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The city was hosting the 57th National Conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League, and the Philadelphia Orchestra was celebrating its 100th anniversary with eight new commissions, all to be premiered in the Orchestra’s new Verizon Hall.

On June 12th, the new piece was a Concerto for Orchestra by a 39-year-old composer named Jennifer Higdon. Higdon’s “Concerto” opened the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program, followed by Richard Strauss’s big tone-poem “Ein Heldenleben.” Both pieces were performed before an audience of orchestral professionals from around the country—not to mention Higdon’s proud mother.

Higdon, understandably a little nervous, quipped to a newspaper reporter covering the event, "You'll know my mother because she'll be the one crying before the piece starts." Higdon needn’t have worried. Her “Concerto for Orchestra” was greeted with cheers from both its audience and performers—the latter in typically irreverent fashion, as the performers dubbed the new piece “Ein Higdonleben.”

Higdon, the only woman among the eight composers commissioned for the orchestra's centennial project, calls herself a "late bloomer" as a composer. She taught herself the flute at age 15 and didn't pursue formal music training until college. She was almost finished with her bachelor's degree requirements at Bowling Green State University when she started composing her own music. She now teaches at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, and is regarded as one of America’s most promising composers.