Composers Datebook

Like everyone else, young composers indulge in daydreams from time to time. One can easily imagine a 15-year-old composer wanna-be staring out the window and fantasizing that one day her music will be performed by big-name virtuosos and heard coast-to-coast on a national broadcast.

That is exactly what did happen on today’s date in 2002, when the 15-year-old composer Athena Adamopoulos heard Yo-Yo Ma and Christopher O’Riley perform her “Soliloquy” for cello and piano at a taping of “From the Top”—a nationally broadcast public radio program that showcases young classical musicians from around the country. Occasionally, the show also spotlights young composers as well, as it did the day Yo-Yo Ma stopped by as a special guest.

“When I heard the piece in my head originally,” commented Athena, “I heard it something like this, but this is about ten times better! It’s the most touching feeling in the world.”

Even at 15, Athena was already a somewhat “experienced” composer. She had written several other chamber works by that date, and had actually performed one of her very first pieces on the “Sally Jesse Raphael” TV show when she was just 8.

It has to rank among the top ten “notorious modern composer anecdotes” and it happened on today’s date in 1925.

The occasion was a concert by the New York Symphony at Aeolian Hall. On the program was the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra by the then still-young American composer Aaron Copland. The eminent (and elderly) German-born American composer and conductor Walter Damrosch had just finished conducting the new piece, and, turning to face the auditorium proclaimed, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will agree that if a gifted young man can write a symphony like this at twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder.”

That got a laugh, naturally, but backstage Damrosch apologized to Copland for the glib remark. But Copland had taken no offense.

“It was a joke, of course,” said Copland, “and I laughed along with the rest of the audience. It was just Damrosch’s way of smoothing the ruffled feathers of his conservative Sunday afternoon ladies faced with modern American music.”

Whatever Damrosch’s intention might have been, his comment made headlines and alerted opinion-makers to the originality of the young composer who was just then breaking on to the scene. One literal-minded newspaper went so far as to run its review of the Copland premiere under the headline, “Young Composer to Commit Murder!”

Today, we note two anniversaries concerning Handel and his music in London.

On today’s date in 1710, the German-born composer’s music was performed in London for the first time when excerpts from his opera “Rodrigo” were performed as incidental music during a revival of Ben Jonson’s play “The Alchemist.”

It’s a nice historical touch that the great 18th century composer’s music should be used to grace a play by the great 17th century playwright who was a friend and colleague of Shakespeare. In addition to his famous satirical comedies like “The Alchemist” and “Volpone,” Ben Jonson had supplied the poetic texts for elaborate masques staged at the court of King James the First. These were a kind of precursor of the lavish Baroque operas that would become so popular in Italy. Handel’s opera “Rodrigo” had, in fact, debuted in Italy in 1707, just three years before its tunes were recycled for use on the British stage.

By 1713, the vogue for Italian operas had reached London, and Handel himself was on hand to write and stage them. On today’s date in 1713, Handel’s opera “Teseo” had its premiere at the Queen’s Theater in London. And, just to show that off-stage events could prove every bit as dramatic as those on-stage, the theater manager, a certain Owen Swiney, ran off to Italy with the box office receipts after the second night’s performance!

In the musical world, there are many creative people with many creative ideas, but often just a handful who also have the skill, ability, and persistence to raise the funds necessary to realize their visions.

Today, a tip of the hat to the American composer John Duffy, who, in 1982, was President of Meet the Composer, an organization which secured funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and additional foundations for a large-scale residency program that paired rising American composers with major American orchestras. The composers included John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Rouse, Libby Larsen, and Alvin Singleton. Each wrote special works for their orchestras, works which were premiered and recorded as part of the program—a major career boost for any young composer.

For example, Alvin Singleton was the composer chosen for the Atlanta residency, and on today’s date in 1988, that orchestra premiered this piece titled “After Fallen Crumbs.”

The unusual title doesn’t refer to arts funding, however, apt as it may be in many cases. The title derives from an earlier choral piece by Singleton, whose text dealt with world hunger, and closed with the lines, “An ant can feed a family with the fallen crumbs of an elephant.”

Today’s date marks the birthday in 1937 of the American composer Robert Moran. A native of Denver, Moran studied in Berkley with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio, and in Vienna with Hans Apostel, a pupil of Schoenberg and Berg.

It was in Vienna that Moran overheard an unfamiliar waltz and was surprised to learn that Austrian composers were still writing them. Moran wrote one himself, and asked 24 other contemporary composers to write their own short piano waltzes. Moran’s “Waltz in Memoriam Maurice Ravel” was his contribution to this “Waltz Project,” which was recorded as a Nonesuch LP in 1980 and later choreographed by the New York Ballet.

Moran’s catalog of works includes a choral setting of “Winni Ille Pu,” a classical Latin translation of “Winnie the Pooh,” and a “Lunchbag Opera,” scored for VERY large, adult-size brown lunch bags, each concealing a performer armed with toy noise-makers to be played while strolling through—according to Moran’s instructions—“any important financial district or banking center at lunch time.” There’s an online video of the opera’s 1971 premiere in London, taped candid-camera style by the BBC!

One of Moran’s recent large-scale works from 2012 is entitled “The Game of the Antichrist,” based on a medieval mystery play from Bavaria. It’s scored for children’s chorus, adult vocalists, organ, and a small ensemble that includes an alpine horn and bar piano, alongside more traditional instruments like oboe and English horn.

Sometimes it’s all very personal: a piece of music is written for a particular orchestra or even a particular conductor.

That certainly was the case with this work, the Sixth Symphony of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, a work he gave the French title, “Fantasies symphoniques.”

The work was commissioned as part of the 75th anniversary season of the Boston Symphony, an orchestra for which Martinu must have had warm feelings. The long-time conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, had championed Martinu’s music in America, and even found Martinu a job teaching composition at the Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts.

In the early 1940s, Martinu had fled Paris as the German troops approached. He had already fled German-occupied Czechoslovakia, where his music had been banned, and was struggling to establish himself in America. Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony commissioned and premiered his First and Third in 1942 and 1945.

Martinu’s Sixth Symphony was dedicated to Koussevitzky’s successor in Boston, the French conductor Charles Munch. Munch was an old friend of Martinu’s from his days in Paris. Like Koussevitzky, Munch was a Martinu enthusiast, and was particularly famous for his dazzling interpretations of the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz. Martinu’s new symphony was intended to be something like a “new” version of Berlioz’s famous Symphonie fantastique, tailor-made for the French conductor.

On today’s date in 1755, “Montezuma,” a new opera by the German Baroque composer Carl Heinrich Graun, had its premiere performance at the Berlin Court Opera of Frederick II, King of Prussia. Frederick himself supervised the rehearsals, which isn’t all that surprising, since he drafted the opera’s libretto himself.

Despite his well-deserved reputation as a military leader, Frederick the Great would probably have been quite content to have gone down in the history books as a talented amateur composer, flute player, opera librettist, and arts patron. As a young prince he had tried to run away from home to pursue a musical career. His royal father was not amused. Heads rolled—one of them belonging to Frederick’s favorite music teacher—and Frederick focused on his military studies until he could ascend the Prussian throne himself. At that point, he built an opera house in Berlin and called to his court some of the best composers and musicians of his time. But, as King, Frederick also transformed Prussia into the military superpower of Europe.

Some speculate that Frederick’s choice of Montezuma as an opera subject might be psychologically revealing. Perhaps Frederick identified the artistic, peace-loving, passive side of his nature with the tragic Mexican King Montezuma, and his aggressive, military side with the Spanish invader, Cortez.

As Freud might have said a century or so later: “Very interesting…”

On today’s date in 1973, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center premiered a new work by Pierre Boulez, a piece for solo flute and seven instruments, plus interaction with an electronic computer program, which generated sounds that reacted to (and interacted with) the solo flute. The piece was titled “explosante-fixe,” which translates as “exploding-fixed.” At the time, however, Boulez was frustrated by the still primitive computer technology. “You still had connections with wires and so on,” he recalled. “It was clumsy and unreliable.”

Twenty years later, Boulez presented this new version of “explosante-fixe,” employing updated computer technology and midi-flute. This version was recorded, in effect “fixing the explosion.”

And “a fixed explosion” is perhaps the best description of the paradoxical nature of Boulez’s music. Boulez quotes with approval the French writer Artaud, who described music as “collective hysteria and spells.” Yet Boulez carefully plots out his compositions in obsessively meticulous detail, like, in fact, a “fixed explosion.”

As a composer, Boulez has been associated with the extreme avant-garde of music. And, speaking of explosions, he once suggested that as a radical break with the past, all opera houses should be blown up. Yet, as a conductor, Boulez is a devoted interpreter of some past composers, such as Debussy and Stravinsky—and, if you listen closely, some echoes of their music can perhaps be heard in his own.

In the 18th century, there was a distinct “French” style of dance music while the “Italian” style dominated vocal music and opera; in essence the music of that age was an international, cosmopolitan language. But just as a new concept of “nationalism” in language, culture, and politics came to the fore in the 19th century, so did the radical new idea that each nation should develop its own, distinct, “national” style of music.

On today’s date in 1840, a dramatic manifestation of this new trend occurred in the city of Pest. The Hungarian-born piano virtuoso and composer, Franz Liszt, had just returned in triumph to his native land for a gala concert at the old Hungarian National Theatre. After the performance, several Hungarian aristocrats, decked out in lavish native costumes, presented Liszt with a bejeweled “Sword of Honor,” and delivered a brief speech in Hungarian praising him as an artist and patriot.

For his part, Liszt delivered an impassioned speech calling for Hungarian cultural and political independence. The patriotic audience went berserk with joy. Liszt and the Hungarian nobles were escorted from the Theater through the chilly winter night at the head of a torchlight procession of some 5000 people.

It’s one of those nice, ironic touches of history, however, that Liszt, the standard bearer for the Hungarian national music, didn’t really speak Hungarian very well, and, for the record, delivered HIS impassioned, patriotic address in French.

On today’s date in 1941, the final orchestral work of the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff received its premiere performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by conductor Eugene Ormandy, to whom the work was dedicated.

It was an orchestral suite, entitled “Symphonic Dances,” and was originally planned as a triptych depicting the passage of time, with its three sections to be titled: Midday, Twilight, and Midnight. Rachmaninoff recycled some of the musical themes of the new work from a much older one: an unfinished ballet from 1915. Rachmaninoff’s lush and lyrical “Symphonic Dances” must have seemed a little old-fashioned in 1941, the musical equivalent of comfort food, perhaps.

Rachmaninoff was an unabashed and unrepentant Romantic at heart, with his musical style grounded very much in the late 19th century tradition. Oddly enough, in all other matters Rachmaninoff was very modern—even trendy. When living in Russia, he owned the first automobile in his rural part of the country. After settling in Switzerland, the home he built on Lake Lucerne was designed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus style, and Rachmaninoff liked to zoom around the lake in a snappy little speedboat.

And, speaking of “comfort food,” when in New York City, rather than sipping borscht at the Russian Tea Room, Rachmaninoff would more likely be seen at a corner drug store, indulging in a particularly modern addition: American ice-cream sodas.