Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
"Peanuts Gallery"
Music—Beethoven’s music in particular—played an important role in the life of Schroeder, a piano-playing character in “Peanuts,” the comic strip created by Charles Schulz, who was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on today’s date in 1922. But new music snuck in the strip on occasion, too. In a 1990 installment, Peppermint Patty is at a young person’s concert and when informed that the American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich had won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, stands up and yells, ''Way to go, Ellen!'' Turns out Schulz had been impressed by a piece by Zwilich that he heard at a concert, and the cartoonist and composer struck up a friendship. So when Zwilich was asked to write a new work for a young people’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the result was a suite entitled “Peanuts Gallery.” Its 1997 premiere was acknowledged in a Sunday “Peanuts” strip that had Schroeder telling Lucy about the new work. ``We're all in it,'' he says, and goes on to list the movements: “Schroeder's Beethoven Fantasy,” “Lullaby for Linus,” “Lucy Freaks Out,” etc. Of course, Lucy's only comment is: “MY part should be longer.''