Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1945, Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of an orchestral suite arranged from Aaron Copland's ballet score "Appalachian Spring." The whole country got to hear the work a day or two later when the Philharmonic's weekly radio broadcast from Carnegie Hall included the new Copland suite as part of the program. For the ballet's 1944 premiere at the Library of Congress, Copland called for a chamber orchestra of 13 players, but for most music lovers, it's as a work for a larger symphony orchestra that "Appalachian Spring" is most often remembered. Copland said he had conducted all of his own works, but knew his "Appalachian Spring" best of all. He also had some specific advice for other conductors of his score. "I have often admonished orchestras, professional and otherwise, not to get too sweet or too sentimental with it," said Copland, "and I have reminded performers that 'Appalachian Spring' should be played cooler than Tchaikovsky and lighter and happier than Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring.'" "My own favorite place in the whole piece," said Copland, "is toward the end where I have marked a misterioso. I would tell string players that we don't want to know where the up and down bows are. They must have a special sustained quality there, a kind of organ like sound, with each entry like an Amen."

On today's date in 1984, the Milwaukee Symphony and conductor Lukas Foss premiered a new work for narrator and orchestra by the American composer John Corigliano. The new piece was entitled "Creations," and was based on the creation story in the Biblical book of Genesis.

"Creations" began as a 1971 commission for a television pilot. The original idea was to have a variety of major composers illustrate in music selected chapters from the Bible, with the text narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The TV project fell through, and Corigliano thought this music for the pilot episode, "Genesis," would remain unheard. But then, in 1984, Lukas Foss commissioned a revised version for a concert with the Milwaukee Symphony.

"Creations challenged me to write specifically for a recorded medium," wrote Corigliano. "It also offered a chance to build music more abstractly than I'd done before… often out of pure sonority, rather than harmony and line. Much of my later work uses techniques I developed for the first time while scoring Creations… I envisioned the music as growing from abstract sounds into actual themes."

In the year 2001, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, commissioned American composer Steve Heitzeg to write a "Nobel Symphony." In 1866, the Swedish engineer and scientist Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite. This patent helped him amass a great fortune. Nobel was troubled by the destructive power and potential misuse of his invention, and passionate about furthering the cause of world peace. In his will, Nobel wrote, "I will not, I cannot allow my work to be remembered for the destruction others would have it cause." Nobel arranged that his estate would award annual prizes to those who made significant contributions to world peace. For his "Nobel Symphony," Heitzeg chose to set quotes and writings of a diverse array of Nobel laureates to music for vocal soloists and children's chorus. These Nobel laureates included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Dali Lama. Purely instrumental effects were used to convey something of their ideas and ideals. For example, in a section honoring a 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Heitzeg scored an eerie march for a percussion ensemble consisting of hollow artificial limbs. The October 2, 2001 premiere of Steve Heitzeg's "Nobel Symphony" came shortly after the tragic events of September 11th. Understandably, the music and its message had a special resonance for the performers and audiences present at its first performance.

On today’s date in 2010, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, the ALIAS ensemble gave the premiere performance of a new chamber world by the American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Her new work was entitled “Hilos,” the Spanish word for “threads,” and was an eight-movement quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet.

Now, it’s not unusual for composer to be inspired by or to tap into traditions inspired by their particular cultural background, but Gabriela Lena Frank has a pretty wide variety of options in that regard: Her father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s, and Franck herself grew up in Berkeley, California.

"There's usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character," says Frank. In comments for the premiere performance of “Hilos,” Frank noted, “There are similarities to [Mussorgsky’s] ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ in that each movement tells a different story … Hilos refers to the ‘threads’ that make up Andean textiles and how these threads weave together to portray tantalizing pictures.”

Each of the short movements of “Hilos” has an evocative title, such “Canto del Altiplano” (Song of the Highlands), “Zumballyu” (Spinning Top), or “Juegos de los Niños” (Games of the Children).

"This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you're on a through-route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable... Go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of mind itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, you're entering the wondrous dimension of imagination…"

Next stop The DATEBOOK Zone.

OK, all kidding aside, but "submitted for your approval" as Rod Serling used to say, this is the COMPOSERS DATEBOOK for September 30th. I'm John Zech.

On today's date in 1960, the opening installment of the second season of "The Twilight Zone," — the legendary sci-fi/fantasy TV series created by Mr. Serling — aired on CBS. For their second season, the producers added a new signature theme, the now-familiar one with bongo drums. It was written by Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French composer and conductor. In Paris, Constant had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger, and Nadia Boulanger. Constant had a very respectable career as a composer and teacher, but today he's best known for his brief but iconic "Twilight Zone" theme.

During its five-season run, that show also employed the talents of some other famous composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman, Fred Steiner, and Franz Waxman.

And just in case you're wondering who wrote the theme for the FIRST season of "The Twilight Zone" when the show debuted in 1959, well, that was another famous Hollywood composer by the name of Bernard Herrmann.

On today's date in 2000, a new cello concerto with an unusual title received its premiere performance at the Barbican Center in London. Billed as the "Crouching Tiger" Concerto, this score was by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, and was derived from Tan's film score for Ang Lee's mystical and magical martial arts film titled "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Tan Dun said he spent a whole year thinking about what sort of music the film demanded before he set one note to paper. In the end, the score featured a prominent cello part, tailor-made for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a variety of traditional Chinese instruments and a percussion battery that included a North African frame drum. The haunting score matched the film so effectively that it was nominated for—and won—an Academy Award.

It was director Ang Lee who suggested that Tan Dun rework his film score into a cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, and even offered to put together a special film to accompany the concerto. In effect, the director was saying, "Turnabout is fair play—you composed music to fit my film, now I'll compose a film to fit your concerto!" Ang Lee and his cinematic collaborators pulled together outtakes and production shots from the original film and mixed in real and imaginary scenes from New York's Chinatown and 19th century Beijing for the new film designed to accompany performances of the new concerto.

On today's date in 1951, the classic science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was playing in theaters across America. The film's opening sequence depicted a UFO hovering over Washington, D.C. In the early 1950s, flying saucer sightings were increasingly common, perhaps a result of mass hysteria spawned by cold war tensions and the potential threat of atomic bombs dropping from the skies. Or maybe we WERE being visited by other planets?

In any case, the movie made a big impression at the time, reinforced by a memorable film score composed by Bernard Herrmann. And countless kids—and probably a few adults as well—memorized the magic words "Gort: Klaatu barada nikto" which, in the film, prevented Washington DC's destruction by death-ray robots from outer space.

Fast forward some 50 years to 1999, when Washington DC's National Symphony premiered a concerto for percussion and orchestra, a work composed for percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie by the American composer Michael Daugherty.

Inspired by the outer-space look of Glennie's percussion gear, Daugherty titled his piece "UFO" and asked that the soloist arrive unexpectedly and dressed as a space alien! In performance, Glennie moves through the audience and around the stage while performing sleight-of-hand improvisations on a variety of flying saucer-like percussive instruments.

In September of 2001, the American composer Elliott Carter was just a few months shy of his 93rd birthday, but still busy composing new works for both large and small ensembles.

On today’s date that year, Carter’s Cello Concerto received its premiered performance in Chicago with virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony -- the orchestra that had commissioned the work.

Now, Elliott Carter’s music is technically challenging for performers, and its complexity can make it equally challenging for audiences, especially at first hearing. Despite all that, Carter’s comments on his music are often quite straightforward:

“In this score I have tried to find meaningful, personal ways of revealing the cello's vast array of wonderful possibilities,” he wrote. “My Cello Concerto is introduced by the soloist alone, playing a frequently interrupted cantilena that presents ideas later to be expanded into movements.”

A month after its premiere, Ma, Barenboim, and the Chicago Symphony brought the new work to Carnegie Hall, and The New York Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini wrote:

“For all its complexities (leaping double stops, metric modulations, rhythmic dislocations, long spans of sustained lyricism that get rashly interrupted by skittish figurations), the cello part has a rhapsodic, improvisatory quality …. At its conclusion, when Mr. Carter, who is 92, climbed the steps to the stage with a cane to steady him, he received a prolonged standing ovation.”

On today's date in 2000, King's Chapel in Boston arranged for a daylong festival of music by the early American composer William Billings in honor of the 200th anniversary of his death in 1800. At a pay of twelve shillings per session, Billings had taught singing at King's Chapel "to such persons of both sexes as incline to sing psalm-tunes" (as the Chapel's records of 1786 stated). They must have liked him, since in 1790, when Billings was in financial trouble, the Chapel held a benefit concert for him with tickets selling at two shillings a head.

When Billings was born in 1746, America was still a British colony. The last record we have of him as a composer dates from 1799, when he wrote music for a memorial concert for George Washington, the first president of the United States, who died in December of that year.

Today Billings is regarded as America's first truly original native composer. His contemporaries agreed. The Reverend William Bentley of Salem was moved to write these lines in his diary: "Many who have imitated him have excelled him, but none of them had better original powers… He was a singular man, of moderate size, short of one leg, with one eye, without any address, and with an uncommon negligence of person. Still, he spake and sung and thought as a man above the common abilities."

"Spaghetti Western" is a nickname given a genre of Italian films from the mid-1960s, most famously directed by Sergio Leone, and often starring Clint Eastwood as the taciturn, gun-toting anti-hero. "Spaghetti Western" is also the title of a 20-minute Concerto for English horn and Orchestra written by the American composer Michael Daugherty, a work that received its premiere performance on today's date in 1998 at a Pittsburgh Symphony concert conducted by Mariss Jansons. "Just as Leone's films redefined the Western genre from an Italian perspective," writes Michael Daugherty, "I redefine the European concerto by placing it within an American context. In my 'Spaghetti Western,' the English horn soloist is the 'Man with no Name,' moving through a series of musical landscapes. I create imaginary scenarios that evoke the sun-drenched panoramas, the barren deserts, and desolate towns of the Wild West, as well as the gun-slinging characters who haunt the landscape. The three movements of the concerto are my own original music compositions, without alluding to particular film scenes or following their plot." And, for the record, the three movements Daugherty refers to are titled, "Strade Vuote" (Empty Streets), "Assalto all'oro" (Gold Rush), and "Mezzogiorno di fuoco" (Noon of Fire). And since Clint Eastwood was not in a position to play the English horn for the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere, Harold Smoliar removed the cigar from his parched, suntanned lips, adjusted his poncho, and took up his English horn for the performance.