Happy Leap Year!

Once every four years we have the opportunity to wish the great Italian opera composer Giacomo Rossini a happy birthday—he was born on February 29th in 1792—and to note some other musical events that occurred on this unusual but recurring calendar date.

The American Bicentennial Year of 1976, for example, was also a Leap Year, and 12 months were cram-packed with specially commissioned works written on a grand scale to celebrate that major anniversary of our nation. But at Alice Tully Hall on the afternoon of February 29, 1976, a more modest celebration was in progress: an afternoon of new chamber works for flute and harp, including the premiere performance of piece by the American composer Ned Rorem.

This piece was entitled “Book of Hours,” referring to the prayers that the clergy read at various times of the day. In 1976, when the avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez was the music director of the New York Philharmonic and dense, complicated music was considered fashionable by the critics, and the reviewer for the New York Times was struck by Rorem’s deceptive simplicity:

“Many contemporary composers flaunt their abilities to make music complex,” he wrote, “but Rorem waves an altogether different flag. His ‘Book of Hours’ seemed determined to be uneventful. Its calculated simplicities and unassertive manner recalled the bare-walls asceticism of Erik Satie, though Mr. Rorem’s phrases and colors are more sensuous and do not quite evoke Satie’s mood of monastic rigor.”