Composers Datebook

Today’s date marks an important anniversary in the history of the American symphony. On January 26, 1876, the Symphony No. 1 in c minor of John Knowles Paine was premiered in Boston. This was the first American symphony to be generally acknowledged by the musical community here and abroad as being on a par with the symphonies of the great European composers.

American musical life in the 19th century was heavily influenced by German models—and Paine’s Symphony No. 1 takes its key and much of its musical style from Beethoven’s Fifth. The contemporary American composer and conductor Gunther Schuller once quipped that Paine’s First was “the best Beethoven symphony that Beethoven didn’t write himself.”

Even so, Paine’s 1876 Symphony is a landmark in American musical history, as was one of Paine’s earlier works—a grandiose Mass in D Major for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, which was premiered in Berlin in 1867, and successfully revived by Gunther Schuller in Boston in 1972.

Paine is remembered for other reasons as well: He founded the music department at Harvard and became the mentor for a new generation of native composers. He was also one of the founders of the American Guild of Organists, and wrote an influential textbook titled, “The History of Music to the Death of Schubert,” which was published one year after Paine’s death in 1906.

Many a political work of art has had its origin in a smoke-filled room, but not all that many piano trios can claim such a venue for their inspiration. On today’s date in 1987, composer and pianist Paul Schoenfield joined a violinist and cellist from Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for the premiere performance of a new piano trio the orchestra had commissioned, a work Schoenfield eventually titled “Café Music.”

Here’s how Schoenfield explains it: “The idea came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist at Murray’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge in Minneapolis. Murray’s employed a house trio which played entertaining dinner music in a wide variety of styles. My intention was to write a kind of high-class dinner music—music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall. The work draws on the types of music played at Murray’s: early 20th century American, Viennese, light classical, gypsy, and Broadway style are all represented.”

Much to Schoenfield’s surprise, “Cafe Music” became a concert hall hit, performed and recorded by many classical chamber groups. For his part, Schoenfield confesses two lasting memories of that night he filled in at Murray’s: first, a realization of what hard work it was to play dinner music for hours on end, and, second—in the days before smoke-free restaurants—how his clothes smelled of cigars and cigarettes for days afterwards!

On this day in 1946, Igor Stravinsky conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the first performance of his “Symphony in Three Movements,” a work inspired in part by World War II newsreels.

“Each episode in the Symphony,” Stravinsky wrote, “is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of the war. But the Symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes—that is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say.”

What Stravinsky did say was that images of goose-stepping soldiers influenced its first movement, and its third movement was inspired in part by newsreels of the victorious march of the Allies into Germany. The themes of middle movement, however, had nothing to do with the war, but consisted of bits and pieces Stravinsky salvaged from his unused and unfinished score for the 1943 movie “The Song of Bernadette.” The producers decided instead to go with a score by a lesser genius, but more experienced film composer, Alfred Newman.

To Stravinsky’s embarrassment, Alfred Newman’s filmscore for “The Song of Bernadette” won an Oscar for the Best Film Score of 1943.

But Igor needn’t have felt too chagrined—his Symphony in Three Movements may have failed in Hollywood, but it triumphed at Carnegie Hall.

On today’s date in 1894, during the New York Herald’s clothing fund drive, readers of that newspaper would have seen this announcement of a concert that evening at Madison Square Garden: “Hear Stephen Foster’s ‘Old Folks at Home’—rendered tonight for charity as it has never been before—In Dvorak’s own arrangement—sung entirely by Negroes—in aid of the Clothing Fund.”

Dvorak was in New York, teaching at Mrs. Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory of Music. The Herald’s review of the January 23rd concert credited Mrs. Thurber with the idea of showcasing the talented black students of her Conservatory, writing, “She threw open the doors of her establishment to pupils of ability, no matter what their race, color, or creed. Her efforts were ably seconded by Dr. Dvorak. The famous Bohemian has studied the Negro race, their songs, their folk lore, and saw that in their intellectual make-up there lay, ignored or unknown, the germs of an original musical organization, the foundation of a truly national school of music.”

49 years later to the day—on January 23, 1943—many would have agreed with Dvorak’s prediction as Duke Ellington and his orchestra presented their first concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, offering the premiere performance of Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige” Suite—with all proceeds again going to benefit a charity: the Russian war relief fund.

As kids, many of us received home-made presents: a sweater or pair of socks, perhaps, or—if you were unlucky—a home-made crocheted bow tie you were forced to wear when Auntie came to visit.

On today's date in 1720, Johann Sebastian Bach started a home-made present for his 9-year old son, Wilhelm Friedemann. It was a collection of little keyboard pieces designed to help him learn to play the harpsichord.

These days, just about everyone who studies the piano at one time or another finds the music for the Two- and Three-Part Inventions of J.S. Bach propped up in front of them.

Here's how J.S. Bach himself described these pieces: "Straightforward Instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three… all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition."

In the case of little Wilhelm Friedemann, it did the trick. Not only did he master the keyboard, he became a composer himself.

Even just attentively listening to Papa Bach's inventions can have its rewards, according to the late music critic Michael Steinberg, who wrote, "Bach has done such a good job at inculcating 'a strong foretaste of composition' that… they will make the hearer a better, that is, a more aware and thus a more enjoying, listener as well."

One of the most famous British composers from the Age of Shakespeare was the lutenist and songwriter John Dowland. His life is better documented than many of his contemporaries, but much about him remains puzzling. Dowland wrote that he was born in 1563, but doesn’t tell us where—some speculate Dublin, others Westminister.

Early biographies said he died in London on today’s date in 1626, but more recent research suggests mid-February as more likely. Even so, Dowland was around 63 when he died—a ripe, old age in that time of the Plague.

One early biography described Dowland as: “A cheerful person, passing his days in lawful merriment.” Others suggest he suffered from depression, and many of his most famous works are deeply introspective in tone, in keeping with the then-fashionable cult of melancholy and its preoccupation with tears, darkness, and death.

Dowland lived in a dangerous age of bitter religious conflict. He once wrote a frantic letter from Germany warning the British authorities of a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. But in that same letter Dowland confessed his own Catholic sympathies, and, rather surprisingly, both at home and abroad worked for eminent Protestant families and royalty.

The last record we have of him as a performer dates from May of 1625, when he played at the funeral of King James the First—a fitting finale to the quintessential composer of that remarkable age.

On today's date in 1961, the French composer Francis Poulenc was in the United States for the Boston premiere of his major new choral work, scored for soprano solo, large orchestra, and chorus. It was a setting a Latin text from the Roman Catholic Mass—"Gloria in excelsis Deo" or "Glory to God in the Highest."

These days Poulenc's "Gloria" is regarded as one of his finest works, but back in 1961, a few critics shook their heads and tut-tutted about the seemingly irreverence of sections of the new work which seemed too light-hearted and rather out of place in a presumably "serious" religious work. Poulenc's setting of the Latin text "Laudamus te, Benedicimus te, Adoramus te, Glorificamus te" (We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you), seemed downright giddy to those critics.

In his defense, Poulenc said: "I was thinking when I composed it of these frescoes by Gozzoli with angels sticking out their tongues, and of those grave Benedictines I saw once playing soccer."

In retrospect, it seems odd that anyone should have been surprised by the coexistence of the serious and the silly in the music of Poulenc, since both moods had been evident in his music for decades. In 1950, the critic Claude Rostand described the composer as "A lover of life, mischievous and good-hearted, tender and impertinent, melancholy and serenely mystical, half monk—and half delinquent."

Each January, Martin Luther King Day is observed on the third Monday of the month, and in 2009, MLK day fell on January 19th.

To celebrate MLK Day 2009, the director of the Boston Children’s Chorus commissioned and premiered a new work from the American composer Trevor Weston. Rather than set words spoken by King, Weston took a different course:

“[Dr. King’s] speeches speak to … the beauty of living in a society where the truth of equality is actually realized and often demonstrate a broad historical perspective,” says Weston, “so I celebrated King by using texts from the African Saint Augustine and the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.”

From Saint Augustine’s “Confessions,” Weston includes the line, “O Truth, you give hearing to all who consult you … you answer clearly, but all men do not hear you,” and from a Dunbar work entitled “The Poet,” this line: “He sang of life, serenely sweet/With now and then a deeper note.”

Musically, Weston echoes and references music both medieval and modern, specifically the 12th century composer Hildegard von Bingen and the 20th century composer Morton Feldman, with a variation on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” tossed in for good measure.

The result is a haunting, inward-looking choral work that Weston entitled “Truth Tones.”

Composers—like anybody else—can be quite superstitious about numbers. Gustav Mahler, for example, was reluctant to assign the number “9” to his song cycle symphony, “Das Lied von der Erde,” fearing that work would turn out to be his last: after all, Beethoven and Bruckner had only completed nine symphonies. Ironically, Mahler did go on to complete a Ninth Symphony, but died before he could finish work on a Symphony No. 10.

For the most part, American composers have avoided this problem by rarely if ever producing more than one or two symphonies of their own. Naturally there have been exceptions.

On today’s date in 1963, the Ninth Symphony of the American composer Roy Harris had its premiere performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy, who had commissioned the work.

Like many of his other symphonies composed during and after the Second World War, Harris’s Ninth has a patriotic program, and each of its sections bears a subtitle from either the American Constitution or Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” This music, from the symphony’s opening movement, is titled “We the People.”

Harris went on to write 13 Symphonies in all—although, perhaps submitting to a bit of numerological superstition himself—when his symphony No. 13, a Bicentennial Commission, was first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1976, it was billed as his Symphony Number Fourteen!

On today's date in 1773, Wolfgang Mozart was a few days shy of his seventeenth birthday and found himself in Italy, in the company of his father, Leopold. This was their third trip to Italy, in fact, and this time around young Wolfgang was under contract to produce a new opera, "Lucio Silla," for the city of Milan. The lead singer scheduled for Mozart's new opera was the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, a male soprano, who, Leopold Mozart said 'sang like an angel." For Rauzzini, the teenage Mozart also composed a sacred work, tailor-made to show off his remarkable voice and vocal dexterity: this was a solo motet entitled "Exsultate, jubilate," which had its premiere performance in Milan's Church of San Antonio on today's date in 1773. The church is still standing, but these days the authentic performance practice movement hasn't gone quite so far as to surgically create new male sopranos, so more often than not, Mozart's "Esultate jubilate" is sung by sopranos or mezzos, who adjust portions of the vocal line up or down to make the best effect in the work's more brilliant passages. And so, although originally written for a divo, "Esultate, jubiliate" is one of the earliest of Mozart's major works to find a lasting place in the repertory of many grateful divas.