Composers Datebook

In 1952, the West Point Military Band celebrated that famous military academy’s Sesquicentennial by asking prominent composers to write celebratory works to mark the occasion. Among those who responded was American composer Morton Gould, whose West Point Symphony received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1952, at a gala concert featuring the West Point Academy.

There are two movements in Gould’s West Point Symphony: “Epitaphs” and “Marches,” and the composer provided these descriptive comments:

“The first movement is lyrical and dramatic … The general character is elegiac. The second and final movement is lusty … the texture a stylization of marching tunes and parades cast in an array of embellishments and rhythmic variations,” Gould said. “At one point, there is a simulation of a Fife and Drum Corp, which, incidentally, was the instrumentation of the original West Point Band.”

Of all the pieces written in honor of West Point’s Sesquicentennial in 1952, Gould’s Symphony is probably the best known.

The score of the West Point Symphony calls for a “marching machine,” but on this classic 1959 recording under the late Frederick Fennell, the required sound was provided by the very real marching feet of 120 Eastman School of Music students.

Morton Gould (1913-1996): West Point Symphony (Symphony for Band); Eastman Wind Ensemble; Frederick Fennell, conductor; Mercury 434 320

Today’s date marks the birthday of a significant American composer with an intriguing name, sounding at once both French and Slavic. Henri Lazarof was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, on April 12, 1932, and began his musical studies at 6. He graduated from the Sofia Academy at 16, studied composition in Rome with Italian modernist Goffredo Petrassi, came to the United States in 1957 for further study, and eventually settled in California, securing a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught not only composition, but French language and literature as well.

Lazarof organized L.A.’s first festival of contemporary music in 1963 and has continued enthusiastically promoting new music. In a Festival brochure, Lazarof once wrote that his music series was “dedicated to the presentation of the entire broad range of this historically evolving art without adopting a single ideology but the one of continuity — accepting tradition and altering it in terms of contemporary experimentation, which in turn is to become the legacy for the next generation to alter."

Henri Lazarof (1932-2013): Violin Concerto; Yukiko Kamei, violin; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Naxos 8.559159

On today’s date in 1689, London celebrated the coronation of William and Mary of Orange as the new Protestant monarchs of Britain. Thirty-nine musicians participated in the ceremony at Westminster Abbey, all wearing specially-tailored scarlet robes. One of them was Henry Purcell, today regarded as the greatest British composer of his time.

That same date is sometimes offered as marking the premiere performance of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas a few miles away in Chelsea at Josias Priest’s School for Young Ladies. This exact date and circumstance of this work, widely regarded as the first great British opera and one of Purcell’s masterworks, remains very uncertain. April 30 is also cited as a possibility for its premiere, being Queen Mary’s birthday. In any case, the premiere occurred sometime that year, as the libretto by Nahum Tate was published in London that December.

Three years earlier, Tate had written a poem that compared the deposed Catholic King James II to Aeneas, and constructed an allegory implying James had been led astray by witches, the result being that he abandoned the British people, just as the legendary Trojan Prince Aeneas had abandoned Queen Dido of Carthage in order to found a new empire in Rome. Since the Catholic King James II had also fled to Rome, some have speculated Purcell’s opera was a political allegory, commissioned by Mr. Priest’s School for Young Ladies to celebrate either the coronation or birthday of the new Protestant Queen.

Henry Purcell (1659-1695): Dido and Aeneas Suite; Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; Thomas Hengelbrock, conductor; Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 77231

In 1960, composer and conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski emigrated from Poland to become the music director of the Minneapolis Symphony, as the Minnesota Orchestra was called in those days.

In the decades that followed, Skrowaczewski, or “Stan” as his friends and admirers affectionately called him, became one of the most respected conductors of our time, famous for his interpretations of a wide range of repertory from Bruckner, Bartok and Stravinsky to the works of his Polish contemporaries, Lutoslawski and Pendereceki.

Skrowaczewski was born in Lwow in 1923. He composed an orchestral overture at 8, played a piano recital at 11, and performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at 13, conducting from the keyboard. His career as a budding piano virtuoso ended when his hands were injured by a collapsing brick wall during a World War II bombing near his home. After the war he won a French scholarship that enabled him to study composition with Nadia Boulanger and conducting with Paul Kletzki. His American debut occurred with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1958.

Skrowaczewski’s busy career as a conductor left little time to nuture his own talents as a composer, but even so he wrote a respectable number of chamber and orchestra works, including Passacaglia Immaginaria, which received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1996, at a Minnesota Orchestra concert. A few of his works have made their way onto recordings, including this recording of Passacaglia Immaginaria by the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony, conducted by Skrowaczewski.

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (1923-2017): Passacaglia Immaginaria; Saarbrucken Radio Symphony; Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, conductor; Albany 481

In 1943, before Allied bombing made it unsafe, Vienna was the primary residence of German composer Richard Strauss. Now, in a city mad about music and opera, the presence of a composer of Strauss’ stature was not something that went unnoticed or unappreciated. The previous year, the Vienna City Council awarded Strauss its Beethoven Prize, and the composer, for his part, felt obliged to write a little something as a thank-you gesture.

The resulting piece was Festival Music for the City of Vienna, and was scored for a brass ensemble sufficiently large to provide pomp and pageantry — and written in a style guaranteed to swell the breasts of the City Council with civic pride. Strauss conducted the Vienna Trumpet Corps in the premiere at the city’s Town Hall on April 9, 1943.

It’s a stirring piece, and went over so well that Strauss quickly made an arrangement for a smaller ensemble than the original, rather lavish, version for ten trumpets, seven trombones, two tubas, and timpani. It’s also quite possible that working on this piece reminded Strauss of some of his earliest compositions, which were also written for wind ensembles.

In any case, to keep himself busy while the disastrous course of the war meant the closure of theaters and fewer commissions for new music, Strauss began work on a piece for a small ensemble of wind and brass instruments, which would become his Sonatina No. 1.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Festmusik der Stadt Wien; Locke Brass Consort; James Stobart, conductor; Chandos 8419

Songs form a significant part of the output of American composer Libby Larsen. Like many other composers, she’s set poems of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke — but she has also penned her song-cycle Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII. Another, for mezzo-soprano and handbell choir Hell’s Belles, is set to words of formidable women such as Talulah Bankhead, Billie Jean King, and Gertrude Stein.

On today’s date in 1989, Larsen’s Songs from Letters: Calamity Jane to her Daughter, Jenny had its premiere performance in New York City. As the title indicates, the texts are drawn from the correspondence of Martha Jane Canary, popularly known as Calamity Jane, a hard-drinking, gun-toting woman of the Wild West, who lived from 1848 to 1903. Calamity Jane had a daughter, possibly by Wild Bill Hickok. She sent the child to live with a man she called a “normal daddy,” her friend Jim O’Neil, paying child support by both legal and not-so legal means. As Jane put it: “I ain’t no lady.”

Larsen says she was fascinated by “the struggle of an individual soul, a woman and pioneer on many frontiers.” As Larsen put it: “Calamity Jane was a working woman, good in her profession, doing what she loved and making choices because of her will to work. In her time she was odd and lonely. She chose rough-tough words to describe her life to her daughter. I'm interested in that rough-toughness and in Calamity Jane’s struggle to explain herself honestly.”

Libby Larsen (b. 1950): Songs from Letters; Benita Valente, soprano; Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Joel Revzen, conductor; Koch 7481

In 1723, the Leipzig Town Council appointed Johann Sebastian Bach as the new Kantor of St. Thomas Church. Despite what Bach might have felt about the workload, he apparently did like the Church: it was there that his family worshipped and 12 of his 20 children were baptized.

But Bach was responsible for music at TWO Leipzig churches: St. Thomas and St. Nikolaus Church.

In Bach’s day, St. Thomas was regarded as the lesser of the two, with St. Nikolaus Church the official venue for most important occasions, including the premiere performances of many of Bach’s sacred works. For example, it was at St. Nikolaus Church on today’s date in 1724 that Bach’s “Passion According to Saint John” was premiered.

Bach apparently intended his new Passion to be performed at St. Thomas Church, ignoring the Council’s specific request for the other venue, and changed his plans ONLY after the Council authorized more space for performers in the choir loft at St. Nikolaus—and after they repaired that church’s harpsichord.

Chalk up one victory for the cagey cantor!

Alas, Bach’s tussles with the Council didn’t end there. While posterity regards Bach’s years in Leipzig as one of the most glorious epochs in music history, it’s quite likely that both Bach AND his employers might have recalled it as one long battle of wills over matters large and small.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) — St. John Passion (Collegium Vocale; Philippe Herreweghe, cond.) Harmonia Mundi 90.1748/49

Carlos Salzedo, the most influential harpist of the 20th century, was born in Arcachon, France, on today’s date in 1885. Salzedo transformed the harp into a virtuoso instrument, developing new techniques showcased in his own compositions and that others like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Britten adopted in theirs.

In 1921, Salzedo and Edgard Varese co-founded the International Composers Guild, promoting works by progressive composers like Bartok and Honegger. Salzedo’s compositions for harp include both transcriptions as well as original works like Scintillation, probably his most famous piece, and Four Preludes to the Afternoon of a Telephone, based on the phone numbers of four of his students.

He taught at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, and offered summer courses in Camden, Maine. Hundreds of Salzedo pupils filled harp positions with major orchestras around the world. Salzedo himself entered the Paris Conservatory at 9 and won the premiere prize in harp and piano when he was 16. He came to America in 1909 at the invitation of Arturo Toscanini, who wanted him as harpist at the Metropolitan Opera, and — curious to note — Salzedo died in the summer of 1961, at 76, while adjudicating Metropolitan Opera regional auditions in Maine.

Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961): Scintillation; Carlos Sazledo, harp; Mercury LP MG-80003

In a 1964 essay, American composer Samuel Barber wrote, “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to enhance their lives … I do not write for posterity.” And in a 1979 interview, he said, “I write for the present, and I write for myself … I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience — ultimately.”

Barber was 35 when he composed his Cello Concerto in 1945, finishing the work around the same time he was discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps. The concerto was written for cellist Raya Garbousova, who gave the premiere performance of the work with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky on today’s date in 1946.

The new concerto was warmly received in Boston, and even won an award from New York music critics. Oddly enough, soon after its premiere, Barber’s Cello Concerto was pretty much ignored for several decades, and to date has yet to catch on with performers or audiences to the same degree as his earlier Violin Concerto — another work that took quite a while to become popular.

Still, in recent years both performers and audiences seem more than willing to revisit all of Barber’s scores, including his Cello Concerto, and a major reappraisal of Barber seems well underway, and, to paraphrase the composer himself, we think most of Barber’s music that is really good will be appreciated by audiences — ultimately.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Cello Concerto; Yo Yo Ma, cello; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor; CBS/Sony 44900

On today’s date in 1964, the musical Anyone Can Whistle opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. The book was by Arthur Laurents, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The show told the story of a town that's gone bankrupt because its only industry manufactured something that never wears out. To spark tourism, the town’s mayor fakes a miracle — water flowing from a rock — and when patients from a local mental hospital called the Cookie Jar escape and mix in with townspeople and tourists, chaos ensues. The only conventional thing about the new Sondheim-Laurent musical was the inclusion of a love story.

The New York Daily News called the first act “joyously daffy,” and the Journal-American reported that the opening night audience cheered several numbers. The New York Times, unfortunately, panned the new show, opening its review with this statement: “There is no law against saying something in a musical, but it’s unconstitutional to omit imagination and wit.”

Ouch!

It didn’t help that the new Laurent-Sondheim musical’s competition on Broadway that year included crowd pleasers like Hello, Dolly!, Funny Girl and Fiddler on the Roof. The show ran for just one week.

But one person who liked the show happened to be a Columbia Record executive named Goddard Lieberson, who assembled the original cast the day after it closed to make an original cast recording that became something of a cult classic.

Steven Sondheim (1930-2022): Me and My Town, from Anyone can Whistle; Angela Lansbury; orchestra; Paul Gemignani, conductor; RCA Victor 60515