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.
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 3 days 20 hours 58 minutes
Paul Fetler's "Capriccio"
Synopsis
On today's date in 1985, a brand-new piece of music had its premiere in a brand-new concert hall in Minnesota. The American composer Paul Fetler wrote his jaunty "Capriccio" to celebrate both the first concert of the 7th season of conductor Jay Fishman's Minneapolis Chamber Symphony and the new Ordway Music Theater in St. Paul, which had just opened its doors to the public that year...
Bach is back
Synopsis
As Leipzig’s chief provider of both sacred and secular music Johann Sebastian Bach probably gave a huge sigh of relief on today’s date in 1733...
Francis Johnson
Synopsis
Today we celebrate Francis Johnson, born in Martinque in the West Indies on today’s date in 1792. He emigrated to Philadelphia in 1809 at the age of 17. Even as a teen, Johnson was a master of the violin and the keyed bugle, an early precursor of the trumpet. By his 20s, he was already a popular bandleader around Philadelphia...
David Ward-Steinman's Cinnabar
Synopsis
“Listening to inner voices” is a phrase that can mean a lot of things.
For musicians who play the viola, PROVIDING those inner voices, musically speaking, is their daily bread and butter. In the modern orchestra, the viola provides the alto voice in the string choir, filling in harmonies and musical lines between the violins on top, and the cellos and double basses on the bottom...
Bernstein, Blitzstein and Brecht
Synopsis
Bernstein, Blitzstein and Brecht . . . It sounds a little like a law firm, doesn’t it?
But today we celebrate the anniversary of an important MUSICAL partnership involving those three gentlemen.
Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein were two American composers who shared a passion for musical theater. Bertolt Brecht was a German poet and playwright perhaps best known here for his collaboration with the composer Kurt Weill on “The Three Penny Opera...
Thomas Greene Wiggins
Synopsis
On this date in 1908 Thomas Greene Wiggins died in Hoboken, New Jersey at the age of 59. Known as Blind Tom Wiggins he was one of the most celebrated – and cruelly exploited – black concert performers of the 19th century.
Born a slave in Georgia in 1849, Tom and his parents were offered for sale in an ad reading: “Price: $1,500 without Tom, $1,200 with him...
Music for the birds by Dvořák
Synopsis
There’s a long list of composers ranging from Vivaldi to Messiaen who have incorporated bird song into their musical works. Today we make note of one of them.
On this date in 1893 the great Czech composer Antonin Dvořák was vacationing with his family in Spillville, Iowa, spending the hot summer months with a small Czech community who had settled along the banks of the Turkey River...
Hovhaness and the world's biggest vocal soloist
Synopsis
On this date in 1970, the New York Philharmonic, led by Andre Kostelanetz, introduced the world’s largest vocal soloists in the premiere performance of “And God Created Great Whales,” by American composer Alan Hovhaness.
The New York Times review found the music accompanying the recorded songs of whales “fairly inconsequential,” but pleasant enough. “Faced with such an irresistible soloist,’ the review continued, “Mr...
Marsalis and Swing
Synopsis
Wynton Marsalis says it all began with a dare in the 1990s from the late German conductor Kurt Masur, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic. “He came to a concert of mine,” said Marsalis, “when I was like 28 or 29, and said he wanted me to write for the New York Philharmonic. I started laughing like, man, I have never even written for a big band...
Franklin's Falls Flyer
Synopsis
The name Charles A. Lindbergh will forever be associated with two dramatic events: the first, Lindbergh’s historic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic in the airplane named “The Spirit of St. Louis”; the second, the kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh’s infant son.
On today’s date in the year 2002, marking the centennial of Lindbergh’s birth and the 75th anniversary of Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, the Opera Theatre of St...