Composers Datebook

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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 instrume...

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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 ...

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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....

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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.

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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 Vare...

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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.

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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 ...

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“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 ...

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On today’s date in 2004, the Utah Symphony and conductor Keith Lockhart premiered Three Latin-American Dances by American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Just a few days later, the same forces recorded Frank’s music for a release, to be sandwiched between Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.

Frank’s first dance, Jungle Jaunt opens wi...

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Today is Earth Day — an annual event started in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as an environmental teach-in.

Senator Nelson wasn’t the only one concerned back then, either: Czech-born composer Karel Husa had noticed dead fish floating on a lake located near a power plant. “The plant was producing hot thermal pollution which in turn killed all those fish,” he recalled....

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On today’s date in 1937, one of Aaron Copland’s least known work had its premiere performance. The Second Hurricane was an opera written for high school students, New York’s Henry Street Settlement Music School, to be exact.

In his memoirs, Copland recalled that at the time he wrote it, he was living at the Empire Hotel in Midtown Manhattan for $8.50 a week, and that he wrote the...

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Religious music, like the religious experience itself, comes in all shapes, forms, moods, and colors.

On today’s date in 2002, for example, this setting of the Song of Isaiah had its premiere performance at the Milwaukee Art Museum during a concert by the Present Music ensemble. The composer of the new setting was Milwaukee native Michael Torke, who wrote:

“I have always consi...

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In the 19th century, Richard Wagner composed The Ring of the Nibelungen, a cycle of four operas lasting 16 hours in performance. In the 20th century, another German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, wrote a cycle of seven, collectively titled Light, which runs about 29 hours. Not to be outdone, for several decades a 21st-century American composer has been working on Trillium, a cycle o...

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On today’s date in 1942, Warner Brothers released the film King’s Row, which included in its cast a 31-year-old actor named Ronald Reagan, who claimed the film “made me a star.” The film’s musical score was by someone already a star — Austrian-born composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, famous for his earlier work for Hollywood swashbucklers like Captain Blood and Robin Hood starring Errol...

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British composer Gustav Holst lived and worked in a West London neighborhood called Hammersmith for many years — and in 1930, Holst gave that name to a work for wind band he wrote on commission from the BBC.

Hammersmith opens with a prelude representing the river Thames, which, Holst said, “goes on its way unnoticed and unconcerned.” A scherzo section represents the hustle and bus...

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In the years following the end of World War II, the “baby boom” led to a dramatic rise in the number of high school and college music programs across the country. By the mid-1950s, a number of well-known American composers started receiving commissions from these schools for new works for wind band.

In the past half-century, the Symphony for Band, by American composer Vincent Pers...

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A few years back, when RCA records issued a boxed set of 100 favorite Boston Pops recordings made by Arthur Fiedler, they included Handel’s celebrated Largo.

Over a hundred years earlier, the Theodore Thomas Orchestra had established this melody as a favorite with 19th century American audiences. Back then, Handel was best known for his sacred oratorios, and his Largo acquired a k...

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A number of the quintessentially French operas are set in other lands. Bizet’s Carmen is set in Spain and Gounod’s Faust is in Germany, to cite just two examples. But Spain and Germany were familiar next-door neighbors for 19th century Frenchmen, and in that colonizing age, Parisian audiences also enjoyed traveling to much more exotic corners, all the while safely ensconced in their p...

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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 ar...