Composers Datebook

If you wanted to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name Josiah Flagg.

Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

He was a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes, published in 1764. Although the music was all by a British composer, it was — symbolically — the first to be printed on American-made paper.

Acting as an impresario, Flagg also organized concerts in Boston for about a decade and gave some of the first Boston performances of music by George Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which proved to be his last. He included excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, but closed with his band’s rendition of the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of the Boston patriots.

Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early music history.

John Greenwood The Hessian Camp First Michigan Colonial Fife and Drum Corps Private release

G.F. Handel (1685 – 1757) Water Music English Concert; Trevor Pinnock, cond. DG 439 147

Many baby boomers confess their introduction to classical music was via classic Warner Brothers Loony Tunes cartoons featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny. Okay, in those cartoons, classical music was parodied, but it was done with great wit and affection — and the tunes in those ‘toons stuck in your memory.

Well, on today’s date in 2020, a new series of Looney Tunes cartoons began streaming online with the launch of HBO Max. Bugs was back, and so were the parodies of classical music.

Joshua Moshier was one of the composers charged with scoring those new Looney Tunes.

“It was certainly intimidating,” he said in an NPR interview.

“There are cartoons like the Road Runner and the Coyote where there’s no dialogue except for a few ‘meep meeps’. But then you realize, ‘Oh — the dialogue is the music.’ The Coyote’s dialogue is the low meandering bassoon. For the Road Runner we referenced ‘The Dance of the Comedians’.”

“Looney Tunes … are caricatures,” Moshier said, “and that allows the music itself to be a caricature. It’s a joy [for a composer] to participate in the comedy in such an overt way and be part of what’s making people laugh.”

Joshua Moshier (b. 1986): Excerpts from ‘Buzzard School,’ and ‘TNT Trouble’; Studio orchestra; Joshua Moshier, conductor; From ‘Looney Tunes Cartoons Original Soundtrack: Music by Joshua Moshier and Carl Johnson’ digital album

Carl Stalling (1891-1972): ‘The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down’ (arr. Carl Johnson); Studio orchestra; Carl Johnson, conductor; From ‘Looney Tunes Cartoons Original Soundtrack: Music by Joshua Moshier and Carl Johnson’ digital album

British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.

In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.

The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.

“In composing Pacifika Rondo,” wrote Harrison, “I have thought, with love, around the circle of the Pacific.”

Lou Harrison (1917-2003): Pacifica Rondo; Oakland Youth Orchestra; Robert Hughes, conductor; Phoenix 118

In 1967, the Beatles released a song about “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but on today’s date in 1870, it was “a girl with enamel eyes” that was the subject of a ballet that debuted on today’s date at the Paris Opéra.

The ballet’s full title was Coppelia, or the Girl with Enamel Eyes, and its story-line was based on a fantastic tale by German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, dealing with the mad toymaker Dr. Coppelius, his uncannily lifelike doll Coppélia and the complications she causes in the love life of a small Polish village.

The music was provided by a 30-something French composer named Leo Delibes. Coppelia was a great success, much to Delibes’ relief. He had been juggling several jobs in Paris, but the new ballet’s financial success allowed him to concentrate on composing as his main career from then on.

Delibes followed up on the success of Coppelia with another ballet, Sylvia, in 1876, and, in 1883, his opera Lakmé premiered at the Opéra-Comique.

Along with the famous ballets of Tchaikovsky, Delibes’ Coppelia is now regarded as the culmination of the 19th century Romantic ballet.

Leo Delibes (1836-1891): Coppelia; Lyons Opera Orchestra; Kent Nagano, conductor; Erato 91730

In 1895, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine, a sci-fi classic that fired the imagination of Victorian readers. How fantastic it would be to be able to experience past, present, and future at will!

Well, on today’s date in 2019, Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir invited the audience at that year’s Point Music Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, to experience past, present and future all at once via the premiere of an orchestral work she titled Aiōn, after the ancient Greek god of time.

The title is a metaphor, as Thorvaldsdottir put it, “connected to a number of broader ideas: How we relate to our lives, to the ecosystem, and to our place in the broader scheme of things, and how at any given moment we are connected both to the past and to the future, not just of our own lives but across — and beyond — generations.”

At the 2019 premiere, dancers from the Iceland Dance Company moved in and around the players of the Gothenburg Symphony, creating striking visuals to accompany music one reviewer described as “weirdly unearthly, or awesome with oceanic majesty,” and another suggested that “[Aiōn] has the same archaic brutality as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.”

Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977): Aiōn; Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Eva Ollikainen, conductor; innova 810 (original release) and Sono Luminus 92268

In 1805, a 56-year-old Italian man of letters immigrated to America.

Now, there wasn’t much call for Italian men of letters in America in those days, so over the next twenty years, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, he was, by turns, a grocer, distiller, seller of patent medicines and owner of a dry goods shop. Eventually he was offered an honorary — that is to say unsalaried — position as Professor of Italian at Columbia University.

In 1825, a troupe of Italian opera singers visited New York, and our Italian professor friend attended their performances. He introduced himself to the head of the troupe, famous singer Manuel García, who was astonished to learn the elderly Italian gentleman was none other than Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni.

And so it came about, that on today’s date in 1826, the American premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was given in New York City, with García in the title role, in the presence of the man who had penned the opera’s libretto almost forty years earlier, a 77-year-old American citizen named Lorenzo da Ponte.

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) arr. Triebensee: Don Giovanni Suite; Amadeus Ensemble; Julius Rudel, conductor; MusicMasters 67118

The Cincinnati May Festival one of America’s oldest music festivals, with roots going back to the 1840s, and a formal launch dating from the 1870s. Over the course of its history, the Festival has performed great choral works of both European and American composers and commissioned and premiered many new works.

On today’s date in 1998, for example, James Conlon conducted the premiere performance of PraiseMaker, a new work for chorus and orchestra setting texts by poet and screenwriter Susan Kougell to music by American composer Alvin Singleton.

The title was inspired by the “praise singers” of Africa, who serve as the oral historians and celebrants of their community’s history and traditions. Susan Kougell’s text is a celebration of memory, expressed in simple, almost minimalist poetry.

“Her poetry is so straightforward; you don’t have to work to figure it out,” said Singleton. For his part, Singleton scored PraiseMaker for chorus and orchestra, with a percussion section that includes temple bells, tubular bells and vibraphone.

Reviewing a recording of PraiseMaker made by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, one critic wrote, “The score surprises you with its range of mood and even, in places, with its tenderness.”

Alvin Singleton (b. 1940): PraiseMaker; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; Robert Spano; Telarc 32630

Popular as the imaginary purple dinosaur Barney was with American kids in the 1990s, he got some competition from another dinosaur: a T. Rex named Sue. Sue was the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a female T. Rex discovered in South Dakota, named after paleontologist Susan Hendrickson, the woman who found her.

Sue — the dinosaur, that is — ended up as a major display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

As part of the festivities surrounding the opening of the exhibit, on today’s date in 2000, the Chicago Chamber Musicians premiered Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto, a work by American composer Bruce Adolphe that told Sue’s story. It was designed for children, in the style of Peter and the Wolf, or, in this case, “Sue eats Peter, the wolf, and anything else she can catch.”

Adolphe was a good choice for the project for, in addition to being a composer, author, educator and performer, he admits to being a big kid at heart, eager to share his enthusiasm for music with audiences of all ages.

Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955): Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto; Chicago Chamber Musicians; Pollyrhythm Productions 30001

On today’s date in 1846, a Grand Festival Concert took place at New York’s Castle Garden, a popular spot for 19th century Manhattanites to enjoy fireworks, balloon rides, ice cream, and band concerts.

The band on this occasion consisted of some 400 instrumentalists and singers, including members of the four-year-old New York Philharmonic. They gave, for the first time in America, a complete performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the Choral Symphony.

In attendance was a 26-year-old lawyer named George Templeton Strong, whose diary recorded his impressions:

“A splendid failure, I’m sorry to say,” he wrote. “The first movement was utterly barren … the minuet was well enough, quite brilliant in parts [and] the only point I found worth remembering in the whole piece … then came an andante (very tedious) ... then the fourth movement with its chorus, which was a bore …”

“[But] after all,” Strong concluded, “‘tisn’t fair to judge, hearing it under so many disadvantages.”

Fourteen years later, after a more advantageous Philharmonic performance in 1860, Strong changed his mind about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and wrote, “Strange I should have missed its real character and overlooked so many great points when I heard it last. It is an immense, wonderful work.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 9 (Choral); Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG 471 491

It’s ironic that Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns was more appreciated in England and the United States than in his native France.

And so, it’s perhaps not surprising that his Symphony No. 3 (Organ), premiered not in Paris, but at St. James’ Church in London on today’s date in 1886, with the composer conducting as well as performing as the organ soloist.

In addition to being a famous composer and brilliant pianist, Saint-Saëns was also an accomplished organist. In 1857, he became an organist at the famous Church of the Madeleine in Paris, and held that post for 20 years. Romantic composer Franz Liszt once hailed Saint-Saëns as the finest organist in the world. And so, again not surprisingly, Saint-Saëns dedicated the published score of the Organ Symphony to Liszt, who had died in Germany shortly after the London premiere.

What we do find surprising is that, for quite a few modern American audiences, this great and noble symphonic work calls to mind a clever little sheep-herding piglet named Babe, since one of the uplifting themes from the Organ Symphony was used, to great effect, in a popular 1995 film about talking barnyard animals.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Symphony No. 3 (Organ); Peter Hurford, organ; Montreal Symphony Orchestra; Charles Dutoit, conductor; London/Decca 410201