Composers Datebook

"Also sprach Zarathustra," the tone poem by Richard Strauss, was first performed in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on this day in 1896, with the composer conducting.

For decades after Strauss wrote it, it was considered one of his lesser works and only occasionally performed in concert. Then, in 1968, Stanley Kubrick chose its opening fanfare as the main theme of his enormously popular movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." Suddenly "Also Sprach" jumped to the top of the classical charts and became a concert hall favorite as well—despite the fact that many in the audience are surprised when the piece actually goes on for another half hour after its spectacular opening sequence.

A contemporary composer who benefited from Kubrick's movie was the Hungarian György Ligeti. Until "2001" Ligeti's fame was limited to avant-garde circles, but his 1961 composition "Atmosphères" also became part of the "2001" soundtrack and catapulted Ligeti to much wider fame. Ligeti's eerily floating sound-clusters seemed to Kubrick perfect "outer space" music.

Ligeti himself was not terribly impressed with how his music was used in the film, but, grudgingly, did finally express admiration for the film's surreal final sequence. Richard Strauss died in 1949—some 20 years before Kubrick's film debuted—but we suspect THAT hard-headed businessman would have been pleased with the success of his "Zarathustra" music in "2001"… but would have promptly demanded a hefty cut of Kubrick's royalties.

On today's date in 1997, violinist Joshua Bell and the San Francisco Symphony gave the premiere performance of an 18-minute "Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra" by the American composer John Corigliano.

This music was a concert offshoot of Corigliano's filmscore for Francois Gerard's film "The Red Violin," but debuted months before the film itself was completed.

"I was delighted when asked to compose the score for Francois Girard's new film," said Coriglino. "How could I turn down so interesting and fatalistic a journey through almost three centuries, beginning as it did in Cremona, home of history's greatest violin builders? I also welcomed the producer's offer to separately create a violin and orchestra concert piece, to be freely based on motives from the film. I'd assumed that, as usual in film, I wouldn't be required to score it until it was completed, except for a number of on-camera "cues"… Then plans changed. Filming was pushed back. So the present Chaconne was built just on the materials I had; a good thing, as it turns out, because I now had the freedom, as well as the need, to explore these materials to a greater extent than I might have had I been expected to condense an hour's worth of music into a coherent single movement."

On today's date in 1955, the Boston Symphony was celebrating its 75th anniversary season with the premiere performance of a brand new symphony—the sixth—by the American composer Walter Piston. At the time, Piston was teaching at Harvard, and his association with the Boston Symphony went back decades. Even so, Piston paid the orchestra an extraordinary compliment, crediting its musicians as virtual partners in its composition:

"While writing my Sixth Symphony," Piston wrote, "I came to realize that this was a rather special situation. I was writing for one designated orchestra, one that I had grown up with, and that I knew intimately. Each note set down sounded in the mind with extraordinary clarity, as though played immediately by those who were to perform the work. On several occasions it seemed as though the melodies were being written by the instruments themselves as I followed along. I refrained from playing even a single note of this symphony on the piano."

This symphony may have been tailor-made for the Boston players, but Piston was practical enough to know other orchestras would be interested, and so added this important footnote: "The composer's mental image of the sound of his written notes has to admit a certain flexibility."

It's said that ragtime composer Scott Joplin was born on today's date in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas.* His family played the banjo, violin, and guitar, but little Scott was fascinated by the piano in a neighbor's house.

Joplin's father bought an upright for his son, and some German musicians in Texas taught him the European classics. By age 17, Joplin was proficient enough to play piano on the road and ended up performing in the honky-tonks of St. Louis. In 1894, Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where he began to write original music while performing at a place called the Maple Leaf Club, which was to lend its name to his most famous piece, the "Maple Leaf Rag."

Scott Kirby, a contemporary composer of ragtime music, shares Joplin's first name. Born in Urbana, Ohio, Scott Kirby lived and worked for a time in New Orleans. In addition to performing the classic rags of Joplin and the New Orleans romantic composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Kirby composes brand-new rags in a style he calls "Terra Verde."

"Terre Verde," says Kirby, "is a contemporary cousin of New Ragtime with roots in a wide variety of American ethnic music, as well as strong ties to European Romantics of the 19th century, such as Chopin and Schumann."

* Although for many years Joplin's birth date was accepted as November 24, 1868, more recent research has revealed that this is almost certainly inaccurate – the most likely approximate date being the second half of 1867. And it's also uncertain exactly where he was born!

Do you see colors when you hear music? No, we're not going psychedelic on you and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today's edition of COMPOSERS DATEBOOK.

It's just that many composers do—see colors, that is.

For example, the late Romantic Russian composer Alexander Scriabin would describe the key of F-sharp Major as very definitely being "bright blue." His colleague Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, however, thought F-sharp Major more a greyish-green hue. While many composers confess to seeing certain musical keys as certain colors, the fact is they don't always agree on WHICH color matches which key.

Which brings us to the American composer Michael Torke, who gave the title "Bright Blue Music" to an orchestral piece that premiered on today's date at Carnegie Hall. This was at a concert of the New York Youth Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller.

In 1985, when this music premiered, Torke was just 24 years old, but had already been composing music for most of his young life. In addition to a string of other "colorful" scores, with titles like "The Yellow Pages" and "Ecstatic Orange," Torke has gone on to also write a number of ballet scores and vocal works, including a TV opera and, in 1999, a big choral symphony for the Disney Corporation to celebrate the Millennium.

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. The British composer was born in Suffolk in 1913, the son of a dentist. In the Anglican Church, November 22nd is celebrated as St. Cecilia's Day, in honor of the patron saint of music, and young Edward Benjamin Britten showed a very early and very deep talent for music. He studied at the Royal College in London, and privately with the British composer Frank Bridge, and by the time of Britten's death in 1976, was rated as arguably the finest British composer of the 20th century.

Regarding his craft, Britten remarked, "Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house—the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house." And, on still another occasion, "The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping."

In a feature celebrating Britten's 50th birthday that appeared in a 1963 issue of TIME magazine, the composer's lifetime partner, the tenor Peter Pears, said, "Britten has never claimed to be an innovator. There blows though his vocal music, at least, a strong, revitalizing southeast wind which has rid English song of much accumulated dust and cobwebs. If Britten is no innovator, he is most certainly a renovator."

Today we have a letter penned on this day in 1615 by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi to a friend at the court of the Duke of Mantua.

The letter accompanied a vocal score that Monteverdi hoped would induce the Duke to commission a much larger work. After detailed instructions regarding the positioning of the singers and the instruments Monteverdi adds—almost as an afterthought—this line: "If you could let the singers and players see it for an hour before His Highness hears it, it would be a very good thing indeed." Hmmm... Talk about "authentic performance practice!"

More than an hour's rehearsal was probably necessary for the U.S. premiere of American composer Steve Reich's intricate setting of four Hebrew psalm fragments—titled "Tehillim"—which took place in Houston, Texas, on today's date in 1981. Back then, Reich was already famous as one of America's leading "minimalist" composers, but a search for fresh directions coincided with Reich's rediscovery of his Jewish heritage, and "Tehillim" was the result.

"For me," says Reich, "the most important aspect of a piece of music, mine or someone else's, is its emotional and intellectual effect on performers and audiences—I find it basically impossible to separate the emotional and intellectual aspects of a piece of music."

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1 was first heard on this day in Budapest in 1889, with the 29-year-old composer conducting.

Originally billed as a "symphonic poem," a newspaper in Budapest even printed a detailed program, obviously supplied by Mahler himself. For subsequent performance in Europe, Mahler quickly withdrew these "Cliff's Notes" to his First Symphony.

Twenty years later, in December of 1909, Mahler conducted its American premiere at Carnegie Hall, during his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic. The symphony drew mixed reviews.

Some New York critics said it was impossible to fathom without knowing the original program: "There are matters in it, that as absolute music, have no evident significance, and that serve merely to puzzle and perplex," wrote the Times. The critic for the Sun took a dislike to the symphony's finale, suggesting "when the weather is bad in Tyrol, it is beyond the power of language to characterize."

Mahler's own reactions are recorded in a letter he sent to Bruno Walter: "The day before yesterday I did my First here, apparently without getting much reaction. However, I myself was pretty pleased with that youthful effort… The audiences here are very lovable and relatively better mannered than in Vienna. They listen attentively and very sympathetically. The critics are the same as anywhere else. I don't read any of them."

The modern Hungarian city we know as Budapest is really three older settlements merged into one: Buda, on the right bank of the Danube, was the royal seat of the medieval Hungarian kings; Obuda, just to the north, was an ancient Roman provincial capital; and Pest, is a newer city situated on the left bank of the Danube. These three became the modern-day city Budapest in 1873. In 1923, to celebrate modern Budapest's 50th anniversary, the Hungarian government commissioned two of its greatest composers, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, to compose orchestral pieces which both premiered on today's date that year. Bartok's contribution was a lively orchestra "Dance Suite," with themes reminiscent of Hungarian folk melodies, although no actual folksongs are quoted. It's one of his most genial and upbeat orchestral scores. Kodaly's contribution was his "Psalmus Hungaricus" for tenor, chorus and orchestra, a free setting a 16th century Hungarian translation of Psalm 55, in which the Psalmist pleads for deliverance from his persecutors. In the 16th century, Hungary was under Turkish rule, and the Psalm had a special political resonance for Kodaly, who had fallen out of favor with the right-wing Hungarian regime then in power. Despite its melancholy tone, "Psalmus Hungaricus" was an instant hit in Hungary and elsewhere, and helped established Kodaly's international reputation as one of his country's greatest composers.

Today's date marks the official birthday of a quintessential American form of 20th century music—cartoons.

It was on November 18, 1928, that the first-ever animated cartoon with its own synchronized soundtrack debuted at the Colony Theater in New York City. This was Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" starring Mickey Mouse, who amazed audiences when he spoke up in a squeaky, falsetto voice provided by none other than Disney himself. Mickey pulled the whistle on his steamboat—a startling sonic effect in those days—and, oblivious of the impending animal rights movement, coaxed music from various squeezed and plucked barnyard colleagues.

That music was actually provided by a quiet, unassuming theater organist out of Kansas City named Carl Stalling, who was soon lured to Hollywood by Disney to work on subsequent Mickey Mouse and "Silly Symphony" cartoons. In 1936, Stalling joined the Warner Brothers studios, and for the next 22 years was the music director for virtually all the classic Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Stalling's wonderfully wacky and endlessly inventive music was usually ignored by "serious" music critics as beneath notice. Ironically, his scores feature the same dizzying shifts of mood, tempo and instrumentation as the most complex avant-garde scores of the post-war period: Stockhausen and Boulez meet Tweety and Sylvester?

Now THERE'S a thought…