Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1998 at King's Chapel in Boston, a new work by the American composer Daniel Pinkham received its premiere performance. The work was titled "Three Latin Motets" for baritone and organ, and Pinkham intended it as a birthday offering to his fellow composer and colleague Ned Rorem. And so the work's dedication read, "For Ned Rorem and a half century of friendship."

But the premiere occurred on the 75th anniversary of Pinkham's birth, as a surprise for the composer at a concert in HIS honor. Organist James David Christie and baritone Sanford Sylvan had sneakily persuaded Pinkham to write the motets for Rorem, who was born in the same year as Pinkham, namely 1923, but intended all along to premiere the music as a surprise at a 75th birthday concert in Pinkham's honor.

Pinkham was especially noted for this church music, and once quipped, "I just like to hear my pieces more than once, and when you write music for the church you have a better chance at that… I [tell people] am available for weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs."

Pinkham died in 2006, and Christie and Sylvan performed his "Three Latin Motets" once again in January of 2007—this time at Pinkham's memorial service.

In the early years of the 20th century, a hauntingly beautiful piece of Grecian sculpture, the head of the goddess Aphrodite, was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Art. There it inspired this orchestral work by Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick. Chadwick's symphonic tone poem "Aphrodite" was—in the words of the composer—"an attempt to suggest in music the poetic and tragic scenes which may have passed before the sightless eyes of such a goddess."

Chadwick composed this music during East Coast holidays on Martha's Vineyard, inspired, he said, by the play of light and wind on the sea before him. It received its premiere at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut on this date in 1912.

On today's date in 1999, at a summer musical festival on the opposite coast of America, another musical work inspired by ancient Greece received its first performance. This music was entitled "Five Images after Sappho," inspired by texts of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho, and written for the remarkable voice of a modern American soprano, Dawn Upshaw. It was premiered at the Ojai Festival in California, and written by the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

The "Musical Events" section of The New Yorker magazine dated June 3, 1939, boasted this headline, "Mr. Copland Here, There, and at the Fair." "Apparently there's no getting away from Mr. Copland's music," wrote The New Yorker's music critic. "He's been clicking at concerts, in films, on records, and in the theatre, and there aren't many people who'd make a point of escaping the excellent scores he's writing these days." In the summer of 1939, you could hear Copland's music daily, at not one, but TWO venues at the New York World's Fair, where the futuristic theme was "The World of Tomorrow." In the Science and Education Building Copland's music accompanied a documentary film entitled "The City," extolling the virtues of social engineering as the cure for urban problems. The music critic of The New Yorker had this wry comment: "The pensive optimism in the score reminds the listener that the delightful scenes which it accompanies are, for most city dwellers, still only pictures!" In the Hall of Pharmacy, meanwhile, Copland supplied music for an elaborate puppet show entitled "From Sorcery to Science," which was in fact nothing more than an "infomercial" for some big drug companies, including the makers of Ex-Lax!

You could say that when you listen to classical music, you are taking a trip in a time machine. Or, as Shirley MacLaine might put it, “Classical music is the soundtrack of your previous lives.”

The contemporary American composer Sebastian Currier goes even further, suggesting (quote):

“It's only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that music is made of nothing BUT time - well, and air too … melodic or rhythmic gestures are made of a series of events moving forward in time. … And the rest is air. A musician bows a string, blows air in a cylinder, strikes a metal object, and a series of sound waves take that information to our ears … It has always been fascinating to me that an art form that is so penetrating … is made of such ephemeral stuff.”

Sebastian Currier even gave the title “Time Machines” to one of his works, a piece for violin and orchestra, that received its premiere performance in New York City on today’s date in 2011 with the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert. Each of the work’s seven movements explores some aspect of the relationship between the perception of music and time, ranging from “Fragmented Time” at its opening to “Harmonic Time” at its close.

On today's date in 1988, Zubin Mehta led the New York Philharmonic in a concert at Bolshoi Hall in a city that was then called Leningrad and in a country that was then called the Soviet Union. For their visit to the city we now call St. Petersburg in a country today known as the Russian Federation, the Philharmonic had commissioned a brand-new work by the American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and so her orchestral piece entitled "Symbolon" received its premiere performance there. It was the first American symphonic work to be premiered in the USSR, in fact. "The word 'symbolon' comes from the Greek," explained Zwilich, "and refers to the ancient custom whereby two parties broke a piece of pottery (or a stone, or a coin) in two, each party retaining half. Each half (or symbolon) thus became a token of friendship." "From the beginning," continued Zwilich, "I knew this piece would receive its first performance in the Soviet Union, and I found this profoundly moving. I am sure that my complex feelings, embracing both hope and sadness about the state of the political world, have found their way into this work." After its premiere, Zwilich's "Symbolon" was performed in Moscow, New York, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Paris, and the former East Berlin, making it one of Zwilich's "most-travelled" orchestral works.

On today's date in 1998, in Purchase, New York, the Westchester Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new flute concerto by a 41-year old composer named Melinda Wagner. The soloist was Paul Lustig Dunkel, who had asked Wagner to write the concerto.

Wagner's concerto won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1999—a gratifying mark of recognition for Wagner, who claims she had developed 20 years of calluses from all the rejections and minor defeats that are the common experience of most young composers in America. Along with the bumps and scrapes, Wagner also had picked up a number of other honors along the way, including awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, Meet the Composer and ASCAP, to name just a few.

Wagner says her flute concerto took as its models the sound worlds of two famous 20th century compositions she admired: Bela Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste," and Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade, after Plato's Symposium." "Composition," says Wagner, "is like writing a kind of love letter to performers. They will be interpreting something that is incredibly personal, so it feels like a love affair. As for the audience, to try to try to second-guess them to figure out what they're going to like, and write that, would be an insult to them. I just hope they can plug into the communication that's happening between the performers and me."

On today's date in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach began his formal duties as the new Cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, a city that would remain his home for the next 27 years.

A newspaper item datelined "Leipzig" had appeared the previous day, noting: "This past Saturday at noon, four wagons loaded with household goods arrived here from Cöthen; they belonged to the former Princely Cappelmeister Johann Sebastian Bach, now called to Leipzig as Cantor. He himself arrived with his family on two carriages at 2 o'clock and moved into the newly renovated apartment in the St. Thomas School."

Bach was not the first choice for the appointment, and it's clear from the proceedings of the Leipzig Town Council that they were more concerned with Bach as a teacher rather than Bach as a composer. Providing quality music for services at St. Thomas Church might have been foremost in Bach's mind, but the council seemed to think that was definitely not as important as teaching Latin to the young students of the St. Thomas School.

One council member, a certain Dr. Steger, after reluctantly voting for Bach, even wanted it on record that in his opinion, (quote) "Bach should make compositions that were NOT theatrical." It's not on record what poor Dr. Steger thought of Bach's intensely dramatic "St. Matthew Passion," or the hundreds of brilliant crafted cantatas that Bach would provide, week in and week out, for the next 20 years.

Today's date marks the anniversary of one of the most famous—and notorious—premieres in the history of classical music, that of Stravinsky's "Le sacre du printemps" (The Rite of Spring), in Paris on May 29, 1913.

From its first note—sounded by the bassoon at the extreme end of its highest register—Stravinsky's score signaled the start of something radically different. It's also remembered as the occasion of one of the most emotional reactions by any audience: As the music got under way, catcalls and insults were hurled between the composer's supporters and detractors, fistfights broke out, and finally the police were called.

There were those, including Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the premiere, who felt the reactions were occasioned more by the dancing and the stage picture than by the music itself, and indeed "The Rite of Spring" has since fared far better in the concert hall than as a ballet.

Years later, when Monteux was asked what he thought of the original production, he confessed to everyone's amusement that he actually never saw it, because his eyes were glued to the score. "On hearing this near riot behind me," he wrote, "I decided to keep the orchestra together at any cost, in case of a lull in the hubbub. I did, and we played it to the end absolutely as we had rehearsed it in the peace of an empty theatre."

On today's date in 1938, "Mathis the Painter," an opera by the German composer Paul Hindemith, had its premiere performance in Zurich, Switzerland. This work had been scheduled to be premiered in Berlin four years earlier.

In 1934, the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler had scheduled it at the Berlin Opera, but the newly-installed Nazi regime canceled the premiere. In protest, Furtwangler then performed a concert suite from Hindemith's opera at a Berlin Philharmonic concert, which resulted in a wild pro-Hindemith demonstration on the part of the audience. The Nazi press responded with attacks on both Hindemith and Furtwangler. In reply, Furtwangler published a long article, titled "The Hindemith Case," which unleashed only more repercussions from none other than Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebels. By the end of 1934 it was clear to all in Germany that the Nazis would brook no opposition when it came to cultural matters.

So how had the quintessentially German Hindemith offended the new regime? In 1929 Hitler had attended the premiere of another Hindemith opera, titled "News of the Day," and hated it—labeling it "degenerate." Furthermore, Hindemith's wife and many of his closest musician friends were Jewish. By the end of the 1930s, Hindemith became persona non grata in Nazi Germany, and, shortly after the Zurich premiere of his new opera, he and his wife emigrated to the U.S., where he taught at Tangelwood and Yale, becoming an American citizen in 1946.

On today's date in 1992, during the bloody civil wars that shattered the former Yugoslavia, a hand grenade was thrown into the midst of a bread line in Sarajevo. Twenty-two people died. To most around the world it appeared to be just one more cruel and senseless act of violence amidst the thousands of such acts that had and would take place in that unhappy part of the world.

One Sarajevo resident thought otherwise. At four o'clock every day after the incident, Vedran Smailovic, a cellist with the orchestra of the Sarajevo Opera, went to the spot of the bombing in full evening dress and played his cello in memory of the dead, risking his own life amidst the continuing machine gun and mortar fire that surrounded him. A New York Times reporter wrote of the cellist's moving act of courage and faith in art and humanity—and the world took notice.

The English-born composer David Wilde read about the cellist while riding a train in Germany, where he lived and worked. "As I sat in the train, deeply moved," Wilde later recalled, "I listened; and somewhere deep within me a cello began to play a circular melody like a lament without end." That theme developed into a piece titled "The Cellist of Sarajevo," dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, and which cellist Yo-Yo Ma was soon performing around the world.