Composers Datebook

Synopsis

In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, the thoughts of its major characters keep shifting from the sights and sounds they encounter in and around Dublin to their private, non-stop interior monologues. This narrative technique came to be called “stream of consciousness” writing.

In music, something similar occurred on today’s date in 1968, when the Italian composer Luciano Berio conducted...

Synopsis

John Lennon was born on today’s date in the year 1940, in Liverpool, England — during a German air raid on that city, as it happened. With three other young lads from Liverpool, Lennon would eventually become world-famous, courtesy of the band he helped formed in 1959 called the Beatles.

The Beatles started out in a Liverpool nightclub called the Cavern, playing pop tunes of the d...

Synopsis

1991 was a big year for American composer John Corigliano. The Metropolitan Opera premiered his opera The Ghosts of Versailles and the 53-year old composer won two Grammys and the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No. 1. Corigliano was increasingly recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation, and was deluged with commissions for new works.

But about 10 ye...

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1909, The Golden Cockerel, the last opera of the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, had its premiere in Moscow. Rimsky-Korsakov had died the previous year, after a bitter battle with government censors who objected to the opera’s thinly disguised satire against the bumbling administration of Czarist Russia. For the premiere, the censors won — the opera was pe...

Synopsis

The first performance of the Liebeslieder — or the Love Song Waltzes — for piano four-hands by Johannes Brahms took place on today’s date in 1869. The performers were two distinguished soloists: Clara Schumann, widow of composer Robert Schumann, and Hermann Levi, a famous conductor of his day. But in fact, the Liebeslieder Waltzes were intended for amateur musicians to play. These pop...

Synopsis

It was on this day in 1972 that A Ring of Time by American composer Dominick Argento was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis. The work was commissioned to celebrate that orchestra’s 70th anniversary. A Ring of Time is subtitled “Preludes and Pageants for Orchestra and Bells,” and evokes the hours of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the seasons of the year.

Thoug...

Synopsis

In 1939, Dale Carnegie published a self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, suggesting you could change people’s behavior to you by changing your behavior toward them. We’re not sure if Carnegie’s book was ever translated into Russian, but we’d like to cite the case of famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich as an example of one way to influence a particular compo...

Synopsis

If you had arrived early for the gala reopening celebration of Vienna’s Josephstadt Theater on today’s date in 1822, you might have heard the theater orchestra frantically rehearing a new overture by Beethoven. They had just received the score, and so at the last minute were getting their first look at the new piece they would perform that evening.

Beethoven’s Consecration of the ...

Synopsis

These days, the cost of commissioning a major American composer to write a major orchestral work requires, well, a major amount of money.

Back in 2001, a group of smaller-budget symphonies around the country decided to pool their resources and commission American composer Joan Tower to write a new orchestral piece for them. What would have been cost-prohibitive individually proved...

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1768, two regiments of British redcoats marched into colonial Boston accompanied by martial music provided by their regimental wind band. It was that city’s introduction to the exotic sound of massed oboes, bassoons and French horns.

One Bostonian who was very impressed by these new sounds was Josiah Flagg, an engraver by trade and a boyhood friend of famous Bos...

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1960, the second season of The Twilight Zone — the legendary TV series created by Rod Serling — began airing on CBS. For this, the producers added a new signature theme written by Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French composer. Constant had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger and had a respectable career as a composer and...

Synopsis

One of the most popular works of 20th-century orchestral music, The Planets by Gustav Holst, had its first performance on today’s date in 1918. This was at a private concert at Queen’s Hall, London, under the baton of Adrian Boult, who later became one of the most famous interpreters of this work. The first public performance of excerpts from The Planets took place in February 1919, ...

Synopsis

It happens to all of us: you’re in some public space and overhear someone say something that strikes you as memorable, oddly poetical, or perhaps even moving. American composer Lisa Bielawa and soprano Susan Narucki started collecting such overheard phrases, and created a musical work incorporating them.

Commenting on the phrases, Bielawa said, “I noticed … people often say things...

Synopsis

On this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers and played some of his new piano sonata in B-flat, which he had completed only the previous day. That same month, Schubert composed one of his greatest works, the String Quintet in C Major.

Tragically, in less than two months, Schubert would be dead, an apparent victim of tertiary syphi...

Synopsis

The haunting melody September Song by Kurt Weill was first heard by the public on today’s date in the year 1938, during a trial run of a new musical, Knickerbocker Holiday in Hartford, Connecticut.

Weill was 38 at the time and had been in America just three years. In Europe, he had been a successful composer of both concert and stage works, most notably the enormously popular Thr...

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert of his music. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s new Cello Concerto No. 2, and the composer’s son, Maxim, conducted his father’s youthful Symphony No. 1 from 1926.

On the morning of the conce...

Synopsis

In all, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki completed eight symphonies, and in 2013, to celebrate his 80th birthday, there appeared a box set of recordings billed as his “complete symphonies,” all conducted by their composer. But while that “complete” set included Symphonies Nos. 1-5 and 7&8, it was missing No. 6. The reason? Although Penderecki had begun work on his sixth sympho...

Synopsis

If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck terror in many a nobleman’s breast.

During this anxious time Prince Nicholas Esterhazy th...

Synopsis

As the season begins, we offer you this Autumn Music — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. She said she wanted to write a companion piece to another famous woodwind quintet, Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Higdon’s Autumn Music was commissioned by Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honorary society, and premiered at their 1994 national convention in Pittsburgh.