Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 2011, the Saint Louis Symphony under David Robertson premiered a new piano concerto by the American composer Steve Mackey. The soloist was Orli Shaham, Robertson’s wife, to whom the new work was dedicated.

The new concerto had an odd title, “Stumble to Grace,” which Mackey explained:

“There is a narrative running through the piece … the piano is all thumbs … as it stumbles in its first entrance, playing naïve and awkward plinks and plunks. By [the end], the piano plays sophisticated, virtuosic and, at times, graceful contrapuntal music—a fugue, in fact …

“The inspiration … came from observing my now two-and-a-half year old toddler learning to become human … when he was first experimenting with perambulation, and now a year later there is a confident lilt to his step … I wanted to open my compositional process to incorporate some of the whimsy and exuberance that he brings to his exploration of the world. Among his first phrases was ‘this, there’ spoken as he tried to insert a square peg into a round hole.”

Mackey concludes, “A preoccupation with one’s children is common among most new parents but this seemed a particularly appropriate … for a piece written for Orli Shaham. She and her conductor husband, David Robertson, have twins less than a year older than my son and we’ve had play dates and shared narrations about new parenthood.”

Now, it's something of a parlor game for historians of the American presidency to constantly reappraise and re-evaluate the status of past occupants of the Oval Office. For example, some recent historians have given President Dwight D. Eisenhower higher marks than others for his political accomplishments in the White House. But even Eisenhower's most vocal admirers would not credit his administration with a particularly ardent passion for the fine arts.

In the spring of 1960, conductor Leonard Bernstein performed a concert in Washington DC attended by President Eisenhower, who thanked Bernstein with these words, "I liked that last piece you played; it's got a tune. I like music with a tune, not all of them arias and barcarolles and things."

Bernstein never forgot the phrase. In fact, he even titled one of HIS last pieces "Arias and Barcarolles." Originally written in 1988 for vocal soloists and piano four-hands, one of Bernstein's protégés, the Chinese-born composer Bright Sheng, orchestrated the work with Bernstein's approval. The orchestral version of "Arias and Barcarolles" premiered on today's date in 1989, with the New York Chamber Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz and featuring vocalists Susan Graham and Kurt Ollmann. "Arias and Barcarolles" is a semi-autobiographical song-cycle dedicated to Bernstein's friends and family members, a sometimes humorous, sometimes touching summing-up of Bernstein's life and career.

On today's date in 1874, the English composer Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham. He was christened "Gustavus Theodore von Holst," and his early works were published under that name, but he removed the Germanic "von" after World War I broke out in 1914. At the Royal College of Music, Holst studied composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and became the close friend of his fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams. For a time, Holst earned his living by playing trombone in theater and light music ensembles, and later played with a British opera company and toured with the Scottish Orchestra. In 1905, he took on a teaching post at the St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, a post he kept until the end of his life. He took his teaching duties seriously, and only composed on weekends or during his summer vacations. It took him two years to write his most popular work, the orchestra suite "The Planets," whose success baffled and dismayed Holst. "If nobody likes your work," he argued, "you have to go on just for the sake of the work, and you are in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself." True to his word, Holst disappointed many of his most ardent admirers, who kept hoping he'd write another big orchestral showpiece like "The Planets." He died in London in 1934.

On today's date in 1975, the Kansas City Lyric Theater opened its 18th season with the world premiere performance of a new opera by Jack Beeson entitled "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines." As if to prove that everything IS "up-to-date" in Kansas City, even BEFORE this world premiere, this Missouri company could boast a long tradition of staging contemporary operas by American composers, and they continue to do so to this day. "Captain Jinks" was the sixth of some ten operas composed by Jack Beeson, who was born in Muncie, Indiana, in 1921. Beeson says the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera are to blame for his catching the opera bug. "When I was about 12," says Beeson, "the Met started regularly broadcasting on Saturday afternoons, and I was seduced. With what spending money I had, I bought scores, and I would place the score up on the piano, and with a little radio on the piano and a big radio across the room, I would accompany the Met." In addition to "Captain Jinks," some of Beeson's other operas include, "The Sweet Bye and Bye" from 1957, "Lizzie Borden" from 1965, and "Sorry, Wrong Number" from 1999. In addition to his career as an opera composer, Beeson taught for many years at Columbia University in New York City, mentoring hundreds of his composition students.

On today’s date in 1958, just nine days after his death, a funeral service was held for the great 20th century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams at Westminster Abbey in London, where his ashes were laid to rest. Now, thousands of famous people are buried at Westminster Abbey, but an actual funeral service there, especially for someone not of the royal family, is pretty rare. In fact, Vaughan Williams was the first commoner to be buried there for almost 300 years.

The previous funeral for a commoner had been for the great 17th English composer and sometime organist of the Abbey, Henry Purcell, whose grave, like Vaughan Williams, is in the Abbey’s north choir aisle, should you wish to pay your respects.

Vaughan Williams had left instructions for the music to be played, which included his anthem “O taste and see,” sung while his ashes were interred, and also his setting of the hymn, “All people that on earth do dwell,” written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which had taken place at Westminster Abbey just five years earlier, in 1953.

The service was broadcast live by the BBC, and the announcer noted that if all the submitted requests to attend had have been honored, the Abbey would have been filled twice over.

On today's date in 1930, at a recording session in Kingsway Hall in London, the British composer Sir Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5," the last in this popular series.

Two of the previous marches had been dedicated to organist friends of the composer, and so when organist Percy Hull asked Elgar for a new work for the 1930 Hereford Festival, he might just have had his fingers crossed for luck. In any case, he got what he wanted, and the "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5" is dedicated to him.

In 1930, Elgar was 73 years old and he liked to go for drives in the country. Hull had given Elgar some driving lessons. Appropriately enough, just the year before, Elgar got the idea for the musical themes of his new march while riding through the countryside with a friend. Elgar suddenly asked for something on which he could jot down his ideas. All the driver could produce was an Ordnance Survey map of Worcestershire—so on its margins the first notes of Elgar's new march were scribbled.

The march proved to be one of his last new orchestral works. Elgar planned to write a sixth "Pomp and Circumstance" March, a kind of soldier's funeral march, he said, but Elgar himself died in 1934.

On today's date in the year 1179, in the German convent of Ruppertsberg near Bingen, an 81-year-old abbess named Hildegard breathed her last. The 12th century was a time of great accomplishments in art, religion, and human thought, a kind of medieval Renaissance, and Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most remarkable women of that remarkable time.

She recorded the precise moment when her life became a part of that reawakening: "When I was 42 years and seven months old," she writes, "a burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind, like a flame that does not burn but enkindles. All at once I was able to taste of the understanding of books—the Psalter, the Evangelists, and the Books of the Old and New Testaments."

Hildegard of Bingen expressed her new awareness in music, and soon became famous throughout Europe as a major religious visionary and writer. She is one of the earliest Western composers we know by name, and left as her legacy a large body of highly original music. Largely forgotten for centuries by all but medieval specialists, in the late 20th century some recordings of Hildegard's music sparked renewed interest in her life and music, and her very old music seemed destined to resonate in a very new age.

On today's date in 1925, Vincent Youman's musical "No, No Nanette" opened on Broadway. The show had premiered in Detroit on April 21, 1924, and then had gone on to enjoy successful productions in Chicago and London before reaching New York City. So popular were some of the tunes from "No, No Nanette" that they even reached the Soviet Union, although occasionally something was lost in the translation. For example, in Russia, the musical's popular foxtrot, "Tea for Two," was called the "Tahiti Trot." Late in 1927, on a dare from the conductor Nikolai Malko, the 21-year old Soviet composer Dimtri Shostakovich orchestrated this tune in just one hour. Malko was so pleased with the result that he performed the orchestration the following year, and Shostakovich, who had a soft spot for musicals and operettas, incorporated the "Tahiti Trot" into his new ballet, "The Age of Gold." Just three years later, however, Soviet authorities apparently decided that the foxtrot was just one more vestige of Western decadence, and Shostakovich was quickly moved to disassociate himself from anything remotely connected to Broadway. His name even appeared on an open letter suggesting, "Only after thorough and widespread educational work on the class essence of light music will we succeed in liquidating it from Soviet society." In other words, "Nyet, Nyet!" to "Nanette!"

Today is the birthday of Henry Brant, born in Montreal in 1913 to American parents. In 1929, his family moved to New York, and young Henry studied composition with Wallingford Riegger and George Antheil, exponents of the then-current modernist and experimental trends in music.

Brant came of age during the Great Depression, however, and has said that in the 1930s avant-garde composers were faced with some hard choices. They could stop composing altogether, write for commercial films and radio, or simplify their cutting-edge music to make it more accessible to the general public. Satiric and comic music was also an option, and some of Henry Brant's early works fall into that category.

One 1938 chamber piece by Brant is entitled "Hommage aux Freres Marx," subtitled "Three Faithful Portraits." The portraits in question are of Chico, Groucho, and Harpo, the wildly popular "Marx Brothers" comedy team of the 1930s.

By the 1950s, Brant became fascinated with "spatial music"–the antiphonal brass choirs of the Renaissance composer, Giovanni Gabrieli, or the spectacular choral works of the Romantic composer, Hector Berlioz, involving groups of performers positioned at different spots in a concert hall or performing space. Brant began composing original works of his exploring this option. Brant's "Ice Fields" for pipe organ and a symphonic orchestra, scattered at different spots around the concert hall, won for its 88-year old composer the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2002.

On this date in 1973, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in music by Mozart, Brahms, and the American composer, Roy Harris. The program itself was nothing out of the ordinary, but the concert happened to take place in Beijing in the People's Republic of China. That concert marked the FIRST time an American symphony orchestra had performed in Communist China. The orchestra was invited to China following the famous visit of President and Mrs. Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In the audience for one of the Philadelphia Orchestra's subsequent concerts was a young student of traditional Chinese music named Tan Dun. When Tan heard the Philadelphians perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a work he had never heard before, he decided then and there to become a composer himself. In 1986, Tan Dun came to New York City, but rather than abandoning his Chinese roots, he managed to combine elements of East and West into his own musical works. In 1987, for example, he composed this work: a violin concerto entitled "Out of Peking Opera," which draws on both Chinese and European traditions. His work since then has won both critical and popular acclaim. In addition to prestigious awards and commissions from major foundations and orchestras, in March of 2001, Tan Dun won an Oscar for his film score to the Ang Lee film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."