Composers Datebook

A surprise best-selling entry on the Billboard charts in 1968 was an LP titled Switched-On Bach. Of course, the 1960s were a kind of turned-on time in general, but the LP’s title didn’t refer to the sexual revolution or anything that Timothy Leary was advocating — no, this was just Johann Sebastian Bach performed on an electronic synthesizer, a Moog synthesizer to be precise, a maze of electronic circuits, wires, knobs and keyboards invited by Robert Arthur Moog, who enlisted several composers for help in its development as a musical instrument. One of them was Wendy Carlos, whose Switched-On Bach album helped put the Moog on the map.

On today’s date in 1971, it was a synthesized electronic theme that introduced a new program from NPR, All Things Considered. The original theme was created by Wisconsin composer Don Voegeli on a tiny Putney synthesizer, but in 1974, when Voegeli was asked to create a new, updated version of the ATC theme, he used the brand-new Moog synthesizer he had just purchased for his Madison studio, which was installed by Robert Moog — and took up an entire room.

For almost 10 years, Voegeli’s Moog version of the ATC theme was heard week-in, week out on public radio, until in 1983 the very familiar electronic theme was arranged for live studio musicians.

J.S. Bach (1685-1750) arr. Carlos: Fugue No. 7, from WTC Book 1; Wendy Carlos, Moog synthesizer; Sony 7194

Don Voegeli (1920-2009): All Things Considered theme (1974 version); Don Voegeli, Moog synthesizer NPR recording

The catalog of the Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American composer George Walker includes two major pieces for winds: Canvas, written in 2000, is a large-scale work for wind band, percussion, and double bass; and Wind Set, a smaller chamber piece, written the previous year and for just five instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.

In both works, Walker said he set out to do something had hadn’t done before, something new:

“I am trying to think that I am beginning fresh — that it's not something that I have done before … I try to find the kind of beginning, for me the beginning is so crucial, that is unlike something that I have done before … or like something that I might have heard. So the search process is really trying to find those initial notes that will convey the sense of freshness … Beyond that I think that I was able, from my point of view, to maximize the coloristic possibilities of the winds.”

Wind Set was commissioned by the New Jersey Chamber Music Society and received its premiere performance by them in Newark on today’s date in 1999.

George Walker (1922-2018): Wind Set; Peggy Schecter, flute; Richard Foley, oboe; William Shadel, clarinet; Leonard Hindell, bassoon; Jerome Ashby, french horn; Summit 274

Today in 1825, a benefit concert was arranged in Boston for one of that city’s favorite musicians: Johann Christian Graupner — not a household name for music lovers today, but in the early 19th century, Graupner was an important musical link between the Old World and the New.

Graupner was born near Hanover in 1767. The son of an oboist, young master Graupner mastered that instrument, too — and many others. After service in a German military band, he made his way to London, where in 1791 he was picked as the principal oboist for the first of Haydn’s symphonic concerts there.

In 1797, Graupner’s itchy feet took him to Charleston, South Carolina, where he met and married an English actress and opera singer. The couple moved to Boston and became active in the musical life there. Graupner opened a music store, importing from Europe both those newfangled fortepianos and the latest in sheet music. In 1810, he became the first president of Boston’s Philharmonic Society, and in 1815 helped organize that city’s Handel and Haydn Society — a performing organization that still exists today.

For Graupner’s benefit concert on May 1, 1825, Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was included on the program, marking that symphony’s first documented performance in America. It was presumably an authentic performance, too, since Graupner had most likely played it under the composer’s direction back in London some three decades earlier.

Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1808): Symphony No. 100 (Military); London Classical Players; Roger Norrington, conductor; EMI 55192

On today’s date in 2003, the Wind Ensemble of the University of Texas at Austin, led by Jerry Junkin, premiered a new work for wind band by American composer David Del Tredici.

Its title was In Wartime, as its composition and premiere coincided with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States alongside the United Kingdom and smaller contingents from Australia, Denmark and Poland.

“In Wartime, my first piece for wind symphony, was begun on November 16, 2002, and completed on March 16 (my birthday), in 2003 — as momentous a four-month period in U.S. history as I have experienced,” Del Tredici recalled.

“With my TV blaring, I composed throughout this period, feeling both irresistibly drawn to the developing news and more than a little guilty to be unable to turn the tube off. Composing music at such a time may have seemed an irrelevant pursuit, but it nevertheless served to keep me sane, stable and sanguine, despite the world's spiraling maelstrom.”

Del Tredici’s In Wartime has two sections: “Hymn” and “Battlemarch.” The first has the character of a choral prelude, with fragments of “Abide with Me” sounding through a welter of contrasting material. An ominous drum roll introduces the “Battlemarch” section, with the confrontation of East vs. West symbolized by musical quotes from “Salamti, Shah!” (the national song of Persia) and the opening of Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde.

David Del Tredici (1937-2023): In Wartime; University of Texas Wind Ensemble; Jerry Junkin, conductor; Reference Recording 104

April 29th fell on Sunday in 1906, and readers of The New York Times photogravure supplement were able to view scenes of the terrible destruction in San Francisco that followed the great earthquake that struck that city 11 days before. The paper was filled with accounts of the suffering caused by the quake, and undoubtedly, many New Yorkers asked themselves what they could do to help. The New York musical community provided one answer by quickly arranging a number of benefit concerts.

The largest of these occurred on today’s date that year at New York’s Hippodrome, and was organized by popular composer Victor Herbert, who conducted his orchestra with Metropolitan Opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink as a featured soloist. The vast Hippodrome was completely sold out, with standing-room-only tickets filling the aisles. Seven thousand dollars were raised, which by today’s standards seems a rather modest sum, but by 1906 standards was impressive enough to make newspaper headlines.

Perhaps New York musicians and their audiences felt a personal affinity with the quake victims, as their own Metropolitan Opera Company, including its star tenor Enrico Caruso, was on tour in San Francisco when the quake struck on April 18th, and, as the Times reported, the Met’s touring orchestral musicians, almost without exception, lost their instruments.

That bit of news must have struck a special chord with Herbert. In 1886, both he and his wife had come to America from Europe to join the Metropolitan Opera — he as an orchestral cellist, and she as a soprano soloist.

Victor Herbert (1859-1924): Cello Concerto No. 1; Lynn Harrell, cello; St. Martin’s Academy; Sir Neville Marriner, conductor; London 417 672

Despite its relation to both the physics of sound and pure mathematics, music, for most people — including composers — is essentially an emotional language.

Despite its abstract sound, that’s the case of this orchestral piece, which premiered in Rochester, New York, on today’s date in 1938. The music, Elegy in Memory of Ravel, was by 22-year-old American composer David Diamond.

Nine years earlier, as a precocious adolescent, he had met Ravel during the French composer’s American tour of 1928. Ravel was impressed with the lad’s talent, and encouraged him to pursue a career in music, as did George Gershwin, who served on a jury that awarded one of Diamond’s works first prize. He lost both these important mentors in 1937, with the sudden deaths of first Gershwin, then Ravel. The day after learning of Ravel’s death, he began work on his Elegy.

“It is an expression of terrible loss,” Diamond recalled in an interview decades later. “As the piece began to take shape, almost unconsciously, I heard it as a ritual — an elegy, but a ritualistic one. I asked that there be no applause at the end.”

The work’s 1938 premiere performance was conducted by Howard Hanson, then the head of the Eastman School of Music and the conductor of its famous orchestra. Diamond’s modern, frankly dissonant idiom didn’t sit well with Hanson’s more conservative tastes. He recalled Hanson asking “David, why do you have to write such modern music?” Even so, Hanson respected both Diamond and his music enough to conduct the new piece.

David Diamond (1915-2005): Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel; Orchestra of St. Luke’s; John Adams, conductor; Nonesuch 79249

We have a special Datebook birthday to note today, for on this date in 1894, one of music’s great “date-meisters,” Nicholas Slonimsky, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia.

A self-described “failed wunderkind,” Slonimsky became an accomplished conductor and relentless new music promoter, giving the first performances of avant-garde works by Charles Ives, Henry Cowell and Edgard Varese, to name just a few. A composer himself, Slonimsky’s own works include settings of actual advertisements he found in the Saturday Evening Post circa 1925, and a symphonic work that culminates in the triple-forte explosion of 100 colored balloons.

Slonimsky was an obsessive collector of the dates, venues, and premiere performers of concert music in the 20th century. Slonimsky’s chronicle, Music Since 1900, runs over 1000 pages and went through several editions during his long lifetime. Slonimsky also served as the editor for several editions of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, writing many of the wittiest contributions himself.

Slonimsky’s scholarly writings include a 1947 Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, an inventory of all conceivable and inconceivable tonal combinations, a work that became a cult classic among BeBop jazz musicians, including legendary saxophonist John Coltrane. In 1952, Slonimsky published his Lexicon of Musical Invective, a collection of some of the juiciest bits from the devastatingly bad reviews many musical masterpieces received at the hands of contemporary critics, and in 1968, for the Music Library Association of America, a painstakingly researched report, Sex and the Music Librarian.

Slonimsky died in Los Angeles in 1995, just four months shy of his 102nd birthday.

Charles Ives (1874-1954): Three Places in New England; San Francisco Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; BMG 63703

On today’s date in 1891, a small group of music patrons gathered at one of New York’s docks to greet Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who had been invited to America to take part in the grand opening of a new music hall. Back then, it was just called “The Music Hall,” but over time it took on the name of wealthy steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded its construction.

“Carnegie is an amazing eccentric,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his friends back in Russia. “He rose from being a telegraph boy, transformed with the passing of years into one of America’s richest men, but one who has remained a simple, modest man who does not at all turn up his nose at anyone.”

And, despite his legendary melancholic funks and chronic bouts of homesickness, the composer admitted he found the rest of New York rather impressive. “American customs, American hospitality, the very appearance of the town, the remarkable comfort of my accommodations — this is all very much to my taste and if I were younger I would probably be greatly enjoying my stay in an interesting new country,” he noted.

On the down side, Tchaikovsky reported you couldn’t buy cigarettes on a Sunday, and it was sometimes hard to find a public bathroom when you needed one — a common complaint of New York tourists even today!

“All told, I am a much bigger fish here than in Europe. Incidentally, Central Park is magnificent,” Tchaikovsky concluded.

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Orchestral Suite No. 3; Detroit Symphony; Neeme Järvi, conductor; Chandos 9419

Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performance of two 20th century chamber works.

On April 25, 1931, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 1 received its premiere performance by the Brosa Quartet at the Library of Congress. Accepting the commission from the Library’s Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, Prokofiev set about studying pocket scores of the string quartets of Beethoven, which he perused on trains while shuttling between concert engagements.

Prokofiev himself described the work’s opening as “rather classical,” but when the new quartet was premiered in Moscow, the verdict of the all-powerful Association of Proletarian Musicians was that it was too “cosmopolitan,” a pejorative adjective in Soviet arts criticism in the Stalinist Era that meant something like “unacceptably modern.”

Our second chamber music premiere occurred on April 25th in 1980, when the Octet for Winds and Strings by American composer George Rochberg was performed for the first time at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. The occasion was a concert by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, who had commissioned the new piece.

At the time, Rochberg was a rather controversial figure for shifting from his earlier, strictly atonal style into a more emotionally charged neo-Romantic approach to music making, often referencing earlier composers and musical styles of the past. The music critic of The New York Times thought he heard a touch of Rachmaninoff in Rochberg’s new piece — an observation that some at the time would translate as really meaning the work was “unacceptably old-fashioned.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): String Quartet No. 1; St. Petersburg String Quartet; Delos 3247

George Rochberg (1918-2005): Octet (A Grand Fantasia); New York Chamber Ensemble; Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, conductor; New World 80462

“In an ideal musical world, a composer should have a friendly, creative, and ongoing working relationship with performers for whom she writes,” composer Joan Tower said.

For Tower, who has emerged as one of the most successful American composers of her generation, a friendly, creative and ongoing relationship with chamber ensembles, symphony orchestras, and soloists has resulted in a number of musical works.

Her Violin Concerto, for example, was written for American violin virtuoso Elmar Oliveira, who gave its premiere performance on today’s date in 1992, at a Utah Symphony concert.

Tower wrote the piece with Oliveria in mind. “A lot of violinists are speed freaks, but Elmar can play both virtuosically and with an innate singing ability,” she wrote. The more lyrical and emotional heart of the work was written as memorial to Olivera’s older brother, also a violinist, who died of cancer during work on the new concerto. That’s not to say she didn’t supply some flashy, pyrotechnical passages for her star soloist, however.

As Oliviera put it, “It’s the kind of flashiness an audience can relate to. Joan doesn’t need avant-garde gimmicks, because now she’s completely comfortable speaking her own language, one that is expressive and natural to her.”

Or, as Tower put it, “Sometimes it’s a struggle to find out what you’re good at. It took me a number of years to decide how I wanted to write with my own voice.”

Joan Tower (b. 1938): Violin Concerto; Elmar Oliveira, violin; Louisville Orchestra; Joseph Silverstein, conductor; D’Note 1016