Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1692, London audiences at the Queen’s Theatre, Dorset Garden, were treated to a lavish theatrical entertainment entitled “The Fairy Queen.”

This show was loosely based on Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a play already 100 years old in 1692. To make it more in line with contemporary taste, characters were added or cut, and scenes were shifted around to such an extent that Shakespeare, if he were alive to see it, would be hard put to recognize much of his original concept.

In Shakespeare’s day, music played a role in all stage presentations, but “The Fairy Queen” featured greatly expanded musical sequences, and the leading British composer of the day was called in to write them.

His name was Henry Purcell, and “The Fairy Queen” would turn out to be the biggest success of his career. In addition to writing the show’s songs and dances, Purcell provided music to entertain the audience as they entered and exited the theater, or stretched their legs during the intermission.

The theater orchestra consisted mostly of strings, but bassoons, oboes, flutes and trumpets also varied the instrumental color at the appropriate dramatic moments.

The good news is that no expense was spared in the show’s production. The bad news was the show’s producers barely recovered their expenses. Subsequent productions, they decided, would be less flashy, but, recognizing the quality of Purcell’s music, they signed him on once again for their next extravaganza.

Today’s date marks two important anniversaries in the life of American composer, teacher, and organist Leo Sowerby, who lived from 1895 to 1968. Sowerby was born on May 1st in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, on his 32nd birthday in 1927, was hired as the permanent organist and choirmaster at St. James’ Church in Chicago, where he remained on the job for the next 35 years.

A prolific composer, Sowerby wrote hundreds of pieces of church music for organ and chorus, plus an impressive body of chamber and symphonic works, which are only recently receiving proper attention.

It’s not that Sowerby was exactly neglected during his lifetime – he won a number of musical awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 – but the critics of his day seemed “put off” by both his unabashedly Romantic style and his unprepossessing physical appearance. The younger American composer Ned Rorem, who took theory lessons from Sowerby, puts it this way:

“Leo Sowerby was, with John Alden Carpenter, the most distinguished composer of the Middle West ... Of my parents’ generation, a bachelor, reddish-complexioned and milky skinned, chain smoker of Fatima cigarettes, unglamorous and non-mysterious, likeable with a perpetual worried frown, overweight and wearing rimless glasses, earthy, practical, interested in others even when they were talentless; a stickler for basic training, Sowerby was the first composer I knew and the last thing a composer was supposed to resemble. He was a friendly pedagogue.”

On today’s date in 2003, the Wind Ensemble of the University of Texas at Austin, led by Jerry Junkin, premiered a new work for wind band by the American composer David Del Tredici.

Its title was “In Wartime,” as its composition and premiere coincided with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States alongside the United Kingdom and smaller contingents from Australia, Denmark, and Poland.

“’In Wartime,’ my first piece for wind symphony, was begun on November 16, 2002, and completed on March 16 (my birthday), in 2003—as momentous a four-month period in U.S. history as I have experienced,” recalled Del Tredici.

“With my TV blaring, I composed throughout this period, feeling both irresistibly drawn to the developing news and more than a little guilty to be unable to turn the tube off. Composing music at such a time may have seemed an irrelevant pursuit, but it nevertheless served to keep me sane, stable and sanguine, despite the world's spiraling maelstrom.”

Del Tredici’s “In Wartime” has two sections: “Hymn” and “Battlemarch.” The first has the character of a choral prelude, with fragments of “Abide with Me” sounding through a welter of contrasting material. An ominous drum roll introduces the “Battlemarch” section, with the confrontation of East vs. West symbolized by musical quotes from “Salamti, Shah!” (the national song of Persia) and the opening of Wagner’s opera, “Tristan und Isolde.”

April 29th fell on Sunday in the year 1906, and readers of The New York Times photogravure supplement were able to view scenes of the terrible destruction in San Francisco that followed the great earthquake that struck that city just 11 days before. The paper was filled with accounts of the suffering caused by the quake, and undoubtedly, many New Yorkers asked themselves what they could do to help. The New York musical community provided one answer by quickly arranging a number of benefit concerts.

The largest of these occurred on today’s date that year at New York’s Hippodrome, and was organized by the popular composer Victor Herbert, who conducted his orchestra with Metropolitan Opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink as a featured soloist. The vast Hippodrome was completely sold out, with standing-room-only tickets filling the aisles. Seven thousand dollars were raised, which by today’s standards seems a rather modest sum, but by 1906 standards was impressive enough to make newspaper headlines.

Perhaps New York musicians and their audiences felt a personal affinity with the quake victims, as their own Metropolitan Opera Company, including its star tenor Enrico Caruso, was on tour in San Francisco when the quake struck on April 18th, and, as the Times reported, the Met’s touring orchestral musicians, almost without exception, lost their instruments.

That bit of news must have struck a special chord with Victor Herbert. In 1886, both he and his wife had come to America from Europe to join the Metropolitan Opera—he as an orchestral cellist, and she as a soprano soloist.

Despite its relation to both the physics of sound and pure mathematics, music, for most people—including composers—is essentially an emotional language.

Despite its abstract sound, that’s the case of this orchestral piece, which premiered in Rochester, New York, on today’s date in 1938. The music was by a then 22-year-old American composer named David Diamond, and bears the title: “Elegy in Memory of Ravel.”

Nine years earlier, as a precocious adolescent, Diamond had met Ravel during the French composer’s American tour of 1928. Ravel was impressed with the lad’s talent, and encouraged Diamond to pursue a career in music, as did George Gershwin who served on a jury that awarded one of Diamond’s works first prize. Diamond lost both these important mentors in 1937, with the sudden deaths of first Gershwin, then Ravel. The day after learning of Ravel’s death, Diamond began work on his “Elegy.”

“It is an expression of terrible loss,” recalled Diamond in an interview many decades later. “As the piece began to take shape, almost unconsciously, I heard it as a ritual—an elegy, but a ritualistic one. I asked that there be no applause at the end.”

The work’s 1938 premiere performance was conducted by Howard Hanson, then the head of the Eastman School of Music and the conductor of its famous orchestra. Diamond’s modern, frankly dissonant idiom didn’t sit well with Hanson’s more conservative tastes. Diamond recalled Hanson asking “David, why do you have to write such modern music?” Even so, Hanson respected both Diamond and his music enough to conduct the new piece.

We have a special DATEBOOK birthday to note today, for on this date in 1894, one of music’s great “date-meisters,” Nicholas Slonimsky, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A self-described “failed wunderkind,” Slonimsky became an accomplished conductor and relentless new music promoter, giving the first performances of avant-garde works by Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Edgard Varese, to name just a few. A composer himself, Slonimsky’s own works include settings of actual advertisements he found in the Saturday Evening Post circa 1925, and a symphonic work that culminates in the triple-forte explosion of 100 colored balloons.

Slonimsky was an obsessive collector of the dates, venues, and premiere performers of concert music in the 20th century. Slonimsky’s chronicle, entitled Music Since 1900, runs well over 1000 pages and went through several editions during his long lifetime. Slonimsky also served as the editor for several editions of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, writing many of the wittiest contributions himself.

Slonimsky’s scholarly writings include a 1947 Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, an inventory of all conceivable and inconceivable tonal combinations, a work that became a cult classic among BeBop jazz musicians, including the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane. In 1952, Slonimsky published his Lexicon of Musical Invective, a collection of some of the juiciest bits from the devastatingly bad reviews many musical masterpieces received at the hands of contemporary critics, and in 1968, for the Music Library Association of America, a painstakingly researched report entitled Sex and the Music Librarian.

Nicolas Slonimsky died in Los Angeles in 1995, just 4 months shy of his 102nd birthday.

On today’s date in 1891, a small group of music patrons gathered at one of New York’s docks to greet the Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who had been invited to America to take part in the grand opening of a new music hall. Back then, it was just called “The Music Hall,” but over time it took on the name of the wealthy steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded its construction.

“Carnegie is an amazing eccentric,” wrote Tchaikovsky to his friends back in Russia. “He rose from being a telegraph boy, transformed with the passing of years into one of America’s richest men, but one who has remained a simple, modest man who does not at all turn up his nose at anyone.”

And, despite his legendary melancholic funks and chronic bouts of homesickness, Tchaikovsky admitted he found the rest of New York rather impressive: “American customs, American hospitality, the very appearance of the town, the remarkable comfort of my accommodations—this is all very much to my taste and if I were younger I would probably be greatly enjoying my stay in an interesting new country.”

On the down side, Tchaikovsky reported you couldn’t buy cigarettes on a Sunday, and it was sometimes hard to find a public bathroom when you needed one—a common complaint of New York tourists even today!

“All told,” Tchaikovsky concluded, “I am a much bigger fish here than in Europe. Incidentally, Central Park in magnificent.”

Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performances of two 20th century chamber works.

On April 25, 1931, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 1 received its premiere performance by the Brosa Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Accepting the commission from the Library’s Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, Prokofiev set about studying pocket scores of the string quartets of Beethoven, which he perused on trains while shuttling between concert engagements.

Prokofiev himself described the work’s opening as “rather classical,” but when the new quartet was premiered in Moscow, the verdict of the all-powerful Association of Proletarian Musicians was that it was too “cosmopolitan,” a pejorative adjective in Soviet arts criticism in the Stalinist Era that meant something like “unacceptably modern.”

Our second chamber music premiere occurred on April 25th in 1980, when the Octet for Winds and Strings by the American composer George Rochberg was performed for the first time at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. The occasion was a concert by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, who had commissioned the new piece.

At the time, Rochberg was a rather controversial figure for shifting from his earlier, strictly atonal style into a more emotionally charged neo-Romantic approach to music making, often referencing earlier composers and musical styles of the past. The music critic of The New York Times thought he heard a touch of Rachmaninoff in Rochberg’s new piece—an observation that some at the time would translate as really meaning the work was “unacceptably old-fashioned.”

“In an ideal musical world,” says Joan Tower, “a composer should have a friendly, creative, and ongoing working relationship with performers for whom she writes.”

For Tower, who has emerged as one of the most successful American composers of her generation, a friendly, creative, and ongoing relationship with chamber ensembles, symphony orchestras, and soloists has resulted in a number of musical works.

Tower’s Violin Concerto, for example, was written for the American violin virtuoso Elmar Oliveira, who gave its premiere performance on today’s date in 1992, at a Utah Symphony concert.

Tower wrote the piece with Oliveria in mind: “A lot of violinists are speed freaks,” she wrote, “but Elmar can play both virtuosically and with an innate singing ability.” The more lyrical and emotional heart of the work was written as memorial to Olivera’s older brother, also a violinist, who died of cancer during work on the new concerto. That’s not to say Tower didn’t supply some flashy, pyrotechnical passages for her star soloist, however.

As Oliviera put it: “It’s the kind of flashiness an audience can relate to. Joan doesn’t need avant-garde gimmicks, because now she’s completely comfortable speaking her own language, one that is expressive and natural to her.”

Or, as Tower herself put it: “Sometimes it’s a struggle to find out what you’re good at. It took me a number of years to decide how I wanted to write with my own voice.”

On today’s date in 2004, the Utah Symphony and conductor Keith Lockhart premiered “Three Latin-American Dances” by the American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Just a few days later, the same forces recorded Frank’s music for a compact disc release, to be sandwiched between Bernstein’s Symphony Dances from “West Side Story” and Rachmaninoff’s “Symphony Dances.”

Frank’s first dance, entitled “Jungle Jaunt” opens with what she calls “an unabashed tribute” to the URBAN jungle evoked in Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” Her second dance, “Highland Harawi,” is more melancholy, perhaps a nod to that strain in Rachmaninoff’s music, and evokes the sounds of the bamboo quena flute of the Andes.

Her third dance is titled “The Mestizo Waltz,” a pun on the famous “Mephisto Waltz” by Franz Liszt. As Frank explains: “This final [dance] is a lighthearted tribute to the mestizo or mixed-race music of the South American Pacific coast. It evokes the romancero tradition of popular songs and dances that mix influences from indigenous Indian cultures, African slave cultures, and western brass bands.”

Frank herself is of mixed Peruvian and Jewish background. When asked about how her heritage affects her music, she replied: “Sometimes the Latin influences are quite evident, and sometimes they are quite subtle. And of course, ‘Latin’ can mean so many different things. There is no one single Latin identity, as any Latino/Latinoamericano would tell you.”