Composers Datebook

One of the greatest of all Italian operas had its first performance on this day in 1887. "Otello," by Giuseppe Verdi, was a musical version of Shakespeare's tragedy, "Othello." The opera was written when Verdi was in his 70s, years after he had supposedly retired from a long and successful career as Italy's most famous opera composer. It was one of the greatest triumphs of Verdi's career.

The premiere took place at La Scala, Milan, with famous singers in the lead roles, and the cream of international society and the music world in the audience. Even the orchestra was distinguished: among the cellists was a young fellow named Arturo Toscanini, who would later become one of the world's most famous conductors. Two of the violinists had the last name of Barbirolli—they were the father and grandfather of another famous conductor-to-be, Sir John Barbirolli. Both Toscanini and Barbirolli would eventually make classic recordings of Verdi's "Otello."

And speaking of recordings, in the early years of the 20th century, the Italian tenor Francesco Tamago, who created the role of Otello, and the French baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago, both recorded acoustical phonograph excerpts from Verdi's "Otello"—the technological marvel of the 20th century—preserving, belatedly, a sonic souvenir of a 19th century Verdi premiere.

Many 20th century composers were scarred by the violence and turmoil of their times—but none quite so literally as the Greek composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis, who died at the age of 78 on today's date in the year 2001.

In the early 1940s, Xenakis was a member of the Communist resistance in Greece, fighting first the German occupation, then, as the war ended, the British. In 1945, when Xenakis was 23, his face was horribly disfigured by a shell fragment fired by a British tank, resulting in the loss of one of his eyes. Two years later he was forced to flee to Paris. As he himself laconically put it: "In Greece, the Resistance lost, so I left. In France, the Resistance won."

Xenakis wanted to write music, but earned his living as an architect and engineer in Paris at Le Courbusier's studio. Xenakis designed and was involved in major architectural projects for Le Courbusier, including the famous Philips pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.

As a composer, Xenakis wrote highly original music that was meticulously ordered according to mathematical and scientific principles, but sounded intensely emotional, almost primeval. His music might even be described as "Pre-Socratic," as Xenakis seemed to echo the theories of the early Greek thinker Pythagoras, who saw a relationship between music, mathematics, and religion.

The American composer Michael Torke was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1961. In the 1980s, while still a 20-something composition student at Yale, Torke wrote two orchestral works with playful, "colorful" titles: "Ecstatic Orange" and "The Yellow Pages." Both proved successful, and a string of other works with color-themed titles followed, such as "Bright Blue Music" and "Green." All these pieces might be described as "post-minimalist," meaning they employed the repetitive musical structures and patterns of Torke's slightly-older "minimalist" contemporaries Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, but also added something new. That "something new" might be due to Torke's upbeat Midwestern personality and his wide range of musical interests and curiosity. For example: what might happen, Torke wondered, if a 20th century minimalist mindset somehow merged with the sound-world of an early 19th century Beethoven symphony? Well, on today's date in 1989, we all found out. That's when fellow composer John Adams led the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in the premiere performance of a new Torke work entitled "Ash." Presented originally as a purely orchestral work, "Ash" also serves a successful ballet score. Its punchy, energetic forward motion sounds like Beethoven, but the shifting structural patterns are pure Torke. A critic for the Los Angeles Times described "Ash" as being "an ingenious homage to Beethoven, a quarter hour of trickily juxtaposed shards of melody, rhythm and (mostly) two-chord fragments, a gallop in search of a bolero."

On today's date in 1795, Haydn was in England and about to conduct one of his new symphonies at The King's Theater in London. An early biographer recounts what happened next: "When Haydn entered to conduct the symphony, the curious audience left their seats and crowded towards the orchestra the better to see the famous Haydn. The seats in the middle of the floor were thus empty, and hardly anyone was there when the theater's great chandelier crashed down and broke into bits, throwing the numerous gathering into great consternation. As soon as the first moment of fright was over and those who had pressed forward could think of the danger they had luckily escaped and find words to express it, several persons uttered the state of their feelings with loud cries of 'Miracle!' 'Miracle.'" And thus, one of Haydn's symphonies, his symphony No. 96 in D Major, came to be called "The Miracle" Symphony. It's a nice story, but it actually occurred just before the first performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 102 in B-flat. Somehow or another the nickname got stuck to one of Haydn's earlier London Symphonies, and simply refused to become "unstuck." In his book, "The Symphony: A Listener's Guide," musicologist Michael Steinberg suggests an elegant solution: He still lists Haydn's Symphony No. 96 as "The Miracle" but give the Symphony No. 102 a new nick-name: "The REAL Miracle."

On today's date in 1862, while President Lincoln was fretting over General McClellan's unwillingness to confront Secessionist rebels, New York concert-goers could find some relief from Civil War headlines by attending a New York Philharmonic concert at Irving Hall.

Conductor Carl Bergman had programmed some brand-new music by a Hamburg composer named Brahms, whose Serenade No. 2 in A Major received its American premiere at their February 1st concert—a concert that took place almost 2 years to the day after the Serenade's world premiere in Hamburg in 1860.

Give the New York Philharmonic some credit for daring programming. After all, it would be another year before the same Serenade would be performed in Vienna. Moreover, in 1863, during the Vienna Philharmonic's final rehearsal of this "difficult" new music by a composer nobody there had ever heard of, open mutiny broke out.

The first clarinetist stood up and declared that the music was too darn hard and the orchestra simply refused to play it. Conductor Otto Dessoff, who had programmed the Brahms, turned white with anger, laid down his baton, and resigned on the spot, joined by the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmaster and principal flutist.

Alarmed at the threatened disintegration of their orchestra, the Viennese rebels capitulated; and the performance of Brahms' Serenade No. 2 took place as scheduled and was, to the mutineers' chagrined astonishment, a tremendous success.

In the rarified world of contemporary music, composers are expected to “challenge” performers—to push the envelope of instrumental technique and difficulty. But in the fall of 1999, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Colgrass himself who was challenged: He was commissioned by the American Composers Forum to write a piece for their BandQuest series, intended to provide high-quality new music for young performers.

Specifically, Colgrass was asked to write for the Winona Drive Senior School Band of Toronto. Far from professional musicians, some of these were kids just learning to play their instruments. Their conductor—no jet-setting superstar—was the hard-working Louis Papachristos, who, in addition to leading 3 bands, also coached boy’s and girls’ basketball.

Colgrass rose to the challenge, and the resulting work, “Old Churches,” was premiered on this date in 2000. Colgrass employed elements of Gregorian chant to evoke an ancient monastery, and easy graphic notation to introduce students to improvisation and involve them in the compositional process itself.

“Keeping the music simple was a challenge,” says Colgrass, “but it struck me that Mozart and Beethoven wrote music for amateurs without ‘dumbing down’… am I a good enough composer to write a simple theme that can be genuinely exciting or moving, the way they did?”

As a result of the experience, Colgrass suggests that writing for middle school bands should be a required project in university composition programs—as training for composers. “Writing for eighth grade band is like walking in four-pound shoes, says Colgrass, “if you can move gracefully with that weight on your feet, you'll fly when you put on the four-ounce runners.”

Today a salute to a remarkable American composer and performer—the cornet virtuoso Herbert Lincoln Clarke.

Clarke was born in Wolburn, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1867, into a peripatetic musical family. He began to play his brother’s cornet and was soon earning fifty cents a night playing in a restaurant band. At age 19, Clarke won first prize at a cornet competition in Indiana, and, in 1893, after many years on the road, Clarke got the call from John Philip Sousa to join his illustrious organization as its star soloist, a position he held for over 20 years.

From 1900 on, Clarke began to compose and make recordings of his own music. In 1904, while on a return voyage from England with the Sousa Band, Clarke completed one of his best-known pieces, a work originally titled “Valse Brilliante”—but while waiting to dock in New York, at Sousa’s suggestion Clarke changed the title to “Sounds from the Hudson.”

In 1923, Clarke accepted an offer to direct the Municipal Band of Long Beach, California, performing a new work at his debut concert there, entitled—appropriately enough—“Long Beach is Calling!”

Herbert L. Clarke died in California on today’s date in 1945. But the much-traveled composer and performer was buried on the opposite coast—in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.—near the grave of his lifelong friend, John Philip Sousa.

The American composer John Williams has written dozens of classic film scores, providing the music you hear when ET calls home, or Indiana Jones runs for his life, inches ahead of that huge boulder that threatens to burst out of the movie screen and land right in our laps. Writing for the movies means working fast AND working hard. The music has to meet firm production deadlines and fit specific cinematic requests.

Despite the frantic pace, Williams somehow managed to find the time to lead the Boston Pops orchestra for many years, and even compose a substantial body of work for the concert hall as well as for the silver screen.

On today’s date in 1981, Leonard Slatkin conducted the St. Louis Symphony in the premiere performance of this Violin Concerto by John Williams. Williams began work on this concerto in 1974, and completed it in 1976, dedicating it to the memory of his late wife, an actress and singer.

Considering the quantity and quality of modern violin concertos by master composers like Walton, Bartok and Stravinsky, says Williams, it was a bit daunting to tackle one himself, but he couldn’t resist the challenge... and then he went on to write concertos for flute, tuba, clarinet, bassoon, cello, trumpet and horn!

When does this guy find time to sleep?

Late in 2013, the musical world was gearing up to celebrate the 70th birthday of British composer John Tavener, but sadly he died in November of that year, so his 70th birthday, which fell on today’s date in 2014, became a memorial tribute instead.

Tavener had suffered from ill health throughout his life, including a stroke in his thirties, heart surgery and the removal of a tumor in his forties, and two subsequent heart attacks.

In his early twenties, Tavener became famous in 1968 with his avant-garde cantata entitled "The Whale," based loosely on the Old Testament story of Jonah, a work that caught the attention of one of The Beatles, and so an LP recording of the work was made and released on The Beatles' own Apple label.

Tavener converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977, and his music became increasingly spiritual in nature. Millions who watched TV coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, were deeply moved by his "Song for Athene," which was performed to telling effect as Diana's casket left Westminster Abbey. Taverner was knighted in 2000, becoming Sir John Tavener.

This music, from his "Ikon of Eros" was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra and violinist Jorja Fleezanis on the occasion of the Orchestra's Centennial, and premiered in November of 2003 at St. Paul's Cathedral—the one in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is, not the one in London—and Tavener came to Minnesota for the event.

“English Horn” is an odd name for an instrument—for starters, it’s not English, and, it’s not a brass instrument, like the French horn.

The English horn is, in fact, a double reed instrument, a lower-voiced cousin of the oboe. The “English” part of its name is probably a corruption of “angle,” since it has a bend to its shape. Until late in the 20th century, its primary role was to add a darker tone color to the reed section of the orchestra, and performers who played the English horn had precious few solo concertos written to showcase their dusky-voiced instrument.

One performer, Thomas Stacy, decided to do something about that. He’s commissioned and premiered dozens of new works for his instrument. This is one of them —a concerto by the American composer Ned Rorem that Stacy premiered on today’s date in 1994 with the New York Philharmonic.

Ned Rorem is perhaps best-known as a composer of art songs, but has also composed successful orchestral and chamber works. “Why do I write music?” asks Rorem—“because I want to hear it. It’s as simple as that. My sole aim in writing the Concerto for English Horn was to exploit that instrument’s special luster and pliability… to make the sound gleam through a wash of brass and silver, catgut and steel.”