Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 2002, the American Composers Orchestra put on a concert at Carnegie Hall inspired by the Hebrew Psalms. The program included the premiere of a new work by the American composer David Lang entitled “How to Pray.”

In his program note, Lang wrote: ““The reason why the Psalms are so central to religious experience is that they are a comprehensive catalogue of examples of how to talk to the Almighty, not by a prophet or a priest but in the voice of a single person… Of course, it's like reading one side of a correspondence… I am not a religious person. I don't know how to pray. I do, however, know some of the times and places and formulas that are supposed to help make prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending those messages out. And then I wait, secretly hoping that I will recognize the response.”

The minimalist-style, patterned repetition in Lang’s “How to Pray,” might remind some listeners of a “mandala”—those intricate graphic patterns intended to be an aid to meditation for Hindu or Buddhist believers.

Stravinsky fans with sharp ears might also recognize the running piano line from the beginning of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which Lang borrows and weaves into the pattern of “How to Pray” as both a tribute and inspiration.

On today’s date in 1979 a new play titled “Amadeus” opened at the National Theatre in London.

Peter Schaffer’s play retold the story of Mozart’s final years in Vienna, and the posthumous gossip that somehow it was the petty jealousy and back-stabbing intrigue of Mozart’s Italian contemporary Antonio Salieri that hastened Mozart’s untimely demise. There was even a Romantic legend that Salieri had actually poisoned Mozart, to which Shaffer gave his own psychological spin.

Music historians were quick to attack Shaffer’s play as wildly inaccurate and downright unfair to poor old Salieri, whom they defended as not all that bad a fellow. Accurate or not, Schaffer’s play was a big hit, and five years later was made into a wildly successful film. That movie version of “Amadeus” prompted millions of new converts to 18th century music to snap up any copies of Mozart’s “Requiem” they could find. Some of the new converts were even lured into concert halls to attend live performances of Mozart’s music—even if they weren’t allowed to eat popcorn while doing so.

And what about the Music Historians? They couldn’t even find comfort in the old public relations adage, “There’s no such thing as bad press as long as they spell your name right!” According to them, even Schaffer’s title was bogus. Mozart never signed his middle name “Amadeus,” in fact preferring the French version, “Amadé.”

On today’s date in 1830, the Polish composer Frederic Chopin said farewell to his native land—for good, as it turned out, although no one knew it at the time. The occasion was a bon voyage dinner thrown by the composer’s friends in Warsaw. It was all quite jolly, with singing, dancing and drinking lasting well into the night. But on a more melancholy note, Romantic legend has it that someone presented Chopin with a vessel of Polish soil, which ended up being buried with him when he died in Paris 19 years later.

No doubt Chopin was an ardent Polish patriot, and, thanks to the repressive new czar of Russia, Nicholas the First, things were looking bad for Poland, politically speaking, in 1830.

Musically, at least in Chopin’s view, things weren’t much better. “One thing’s for sure,” Chopin wrote to a friend, “I’m not staying in Warsaw. You have no idea how dreary it is here. If it weren’t for my family I simply couldn’t stand it.” Chopin kept himself busy by writing two piano concertos, bigger projects than anything he had tackled so far. “My second concerto is so original I’m afraid even I’ll never learn to play it right,” he confessed in a letter. Even so, these new works were well received in Warsaw, and one critic even suggested, with prophetic foresight, “Fate has blessed the Poles with Mr. Chopin just as she gave the Germans Mozart.”

On today's date in 1955, Leopold Stokowski gave his first concert as the new music director of the Houston Symphony—or, as Stoki pronounced it, the "HOOSTON Symphony." It was a major cultural event in those days. NBC even televised a bit of the famously white-maned conductor rehearsing the Texans in a brand-new work that Stokowski himself had commissioned for the occasion: the second symphony of Alan Hovhaness, subtitled "Mysterious Mountain."

At the time, Hovhaness explained his subtitle as follows: "Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual worlds."

The new piece proved to be a terrific success for all concerned. The next day, the Houston Post's music critic wrote, "The real mystery of Mysterious Mountain is that it should be so simple, sweetly, innocently lovely in an age that has tried so terribly hard to avoid those impressions in music."

For his part, Hovhaness once said, "Things that are complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy."

Before his death in the year 2000, Hovhaness would complete 67 symphonies. He conducted the premiere performance of one of the last in the series, his 65th, at Carnegie Hall in New York in October of 1991, on a program celebrating his 80th birthday.

In 1893, when Antonín Dvořák suggested that American composers look to Native American tribal songs and African-American spirituals as themes for original American concert music, not everyone necessarily agreed, including some prominent American composers and critics of the day.

Remember, this was the age of "progress," and, some argued, how could the primitive and "backward" folk cultures Dvořák recommended compete with the sophisticated and "advanced" concert music of Europe? As you might suspect, what we now call "racism" had a lot to do with it, too.

For her part, the Bostonian composer Amy Beach agreed with Dvořák that folk themes could and should be used as the basis of new American concert music, but disagreed that Indian and Negro melodies were the only possibilities. "We of the North," she wrote to the Boston Herald, "should be more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors."

And so, on today's date in 1896, Amy Beach put her ideas into practice, when her "Gaelic" Symphony had its first public performance by the Boston Symphony. As themes for her symphony, Beach used actual folk tunes found in an old collection of Irish melodies. "Their simple, rugged, and unpretentious beauty led me to try to develop their ideas in symphonic form."

On today's date in 1739, Mr. George Frideric Handel took out an advertisement, announcing that he was now accepting subscriptions for his new set of 12 Grand Concertos for strings. He had, in fact, finished the first concerto one month before, on September 29th, and spent the next five weeks polishing off the other 11 at the rate of one every two or three days. Handel's publisher was John Walsh, Jr, who had a shop in London at the sign of the harp and oboe in Catherine Street on the Strand. In addition to being a music publisher, Walsh also billed himself as "instrument maker to his Majesty." One hundred twenty-two copies of the music were to be printed and sold at a pre-publication price of two guineas each. His Royal Majesty, George II, and the Prince of Wales were not among the initial 100 subscribers, but the list did include three royal princesses and the Duke of Cumberland, and two copies each were sold to the Academy of Music in Dublin and a certain Mr. Charles Jennens. It was Mr. Jennens who was to provide the text for Handel's next major oratorio, "Messiah," and the city of Dublin the venue for its famous premiere. So, in 1739, just as today, it pays to advertise!

In St. Petersburg on today's date in 1893, Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance of his latest Symphony, his Sixth. From the beginning, this symphony has been commonly known by its French subtitle, the "Pathétique," a designation suggested by the composer's brother, Modest.

Now, in Russian, "Pathetique" translates into something like "passionate" or "emotional," with overtones of "pathos" and "suffering," but in plain old English, "pathétique" translates as "pathetic," a word with a whole slew of negative connotations. The French sounds MUCH better, thank you.

Tchaikovsky himself had originally intended to give his new work the generic title of "A Program Symphony" with, apparently, no intention of cluing anyone in on what that program might be. In any case, nine days after he conducted the premiere performance, Tchaikovsky was dead.

Was his death the result of a fatal glass of unboiled water recklessly drunk during the height of a cholera epidemic? Or was it a deliberate suicide to avoid the scandal of a homosexual affair becoming public? Did his "Pathétique" Symphony encode the answer? Was it Tchaikovsky's musical "Last Will and Testament?" Speculation has raged around Tchaikovsky's last symphony ever since, surrounding this last work with what one critic as called "voluptuous gloom."

Despite—or perhaps BECAUSE—of its "voluptuous gloom," Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" became one the most popular symphonies of all time.

On today's date in 1994, Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Chicago Symphony in the premiere performance of a 23-minute orchestral work by the American composer Steven Mackey. The new piece was titled "Eating Greens," after a painting of the same name that the composer purchased at an African art store in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Mackey's "Eating Greens" is a colorful orchestral suite of seven movements. The fourth movement is only 46 seconds long, and is playfully labeled "The Title is Almost as Long as The Piece Itself." Other movements' titles acknowledge the influence of the colorful and playful visual artist, Henri Matisse, and the quirky but brilliant jazz composer and pianist, Thelonious Monk.

In the liner notes for the recording of "Eating Greens," conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, Steven Mackey writes, "On more than one occasion, Michael has used the word 'wacky' to describe my music. Composers usually blanch at such attributions—nobody wants to be captured in a single word—but I can live with 'wacky.' It is not a common adjective, does not end with 'ism' and clearly the rhyme with my last name personalizes it."

So, for the record, here's how Mackey defines "wacky": "weird but with a sense of humor. In music, material of a quirky and offbeat quality, with a mercurial continuity."

Ask successful composers what the toughest part of their profession is, and some might say it's reading the first reviews of their brand-new works. All too often, after the heady champagne of opening night comes the strong black coffee of "the morning after"—sipped anxiously while reading the music section of the morning paper.

Imagine yourself the American composer Robert Ward, whose opera "The Crucible" was premiered by the New York City Opera on today's date in 1961. Here's what Mr. Ward would have read in The New York Times the following morning:

"Last night the audience heard an opera that, in philosophy and workmanship, could have been composed at the turn of the century, or before. And, judging from the response at the end of the work, the audience loved it." Hmmm. Not all that bad so far. But skimming down a few more lines, comes this zinger: "Mr. Ward is an experienced composer whose music fails to bear the impress of a really inventive mind. Melodically, his ideas had little distinction... [The opera's] powerful subject cried out for intensity, for brutality and shock... Instead, we had musical platitudes." Ouch.

Oh well, despite the nasty review in the Times, Robert Ward's opera did pretty well at the box office in 1961. And, for the record, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year.

On today's date in 1970, a new chamber work by the American composer John Corigliano received its premiere performance at a concert given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the group that had commissioned it.

The new piece, titled "Poem in October," was scored for tenor voice and eight instruments and was a setting of poetry by Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet who died in 1953.

"The thing that most appeals to me is the sound of his words," explained Corigliano. "Phrases from 'Poem in October' like 'a springful of larks in a rolling cloud' and 'the blue altered sky streamed again a wonder of summer' are in themselves musical."

"The music itself," says Corigliano, "is unabashedly lyrical. I sought to convey a pastoral feeling that would match the directness and simplicity of the text, to deal in understatement and succinctness rather than in complexity and theatrical effect."

Corigliano's chamber scoring includes three "pastoral" wind instruments—flute, oboe, and clarinet—plus strings, and, perhaps to give the work a slightly archaic feel, a harpsichord.