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
Cowell's "Seven Rituals"
Synopsis
In all, the American composer Henry Cowell composed 20 symphonies, and left sketches for a 21st. On today’s date in 1954, the Louisville Orchestra gave the premiere of Cowell’s 11th Symphony, subtitled “The Seven Rituals of Music.”
“There are seven rituals of music in the life of man from birth to death,” so Cowell explained in program notes...
Josiah Flagg, Music Man?
Synopsis
If you wanted to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name “Josiah Flagg.”
Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts...
New Looney Tunes
Synopsis
Many baby boomers confess their introduction to classical music was via classic Warner Brothers Loony Tunes cartoons featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny. OK, in those cartoons, classical music was parodied, but it was done with great wit and affection–and the tunes in those ‘toons stuck in your memory.
Well, on today’s date in 2020, a fresh, brand-new series of Looney Tunes cartoons began streaming online with the launch of HBO Max...
Lou Harrison's "Pacifika Rondo"
Synopsis
The British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’
But on today’s date in 1963, East DID meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, titled “Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments" at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii...
Delibes plays with dolls?
Synopsis
In 1967, the Beatles released a song about “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but on today’s date in 1870, it was “a girl with enamel eyes” that was the subject of a ballet that debuted on today’s date at the Paris Opéra.
The ballet’s full title was “Coppelia, or the Girl with Enamel Eyes,” and its story-line was based on a fantastic tale by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, dealing with the mad toymaker Dr...
Corigliano's "Fantasia on an Ostinato"
Synopsis
The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is held every four years in Fort Worth, Texas, and for each competition, a new test piece for solo piano is commissioned that each contestant is required to interpret.
The 1985 test piece, “Fantasia on an Ostinato” by American composer John Corigliano, was first performed on today’s date. It was inspired by a famous repetitive passage in the slow, second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No...
Da Ponte (and Mozart) in New York
Synopsis
In 1805, a 56-year-old Italian man of letters immigrated to America.
Now, there wasn’t much call for Italian men of letters in America in those days, so over the next twenty years, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, he was, by turns, a grocer, distiller, seller of patent medicines, and owner of a dry goods shop. Eventually he was offered an honorary–that is to say unsalaried–position as Professor of Italian at Columbia University...
Alvin Singleton's "PraiseMaker"
Synopsis
The Cincinnati May Festival one of America’s oldest music festivals, with roots going back to the 1840s, and a formal launch dating from the 1870s. Over the course of its history, the Festival has performed great choral works of both European and American composers and commissioned and premiered many brand-new works...
Adolphe's "Tyrannosaurus Sue"
Synopsis
Popular as the imaginary purple dinosaur named “Barney” was with American kids back in the 1990s, he got some competition from another T-Rex named “Sue.” Sue was the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a female T-Rex discovered in South Dakota, named after the woman who found her, a paleontologist, named Susan Hendrickson.
“Sue”–the dinosaur, that is–ended up as a major display at the Field Museum in Chicago...
Beethoven in New York
Synopsis
On today’s date in 1846, a Grand Festival Concert took place at New York’s Castle Garden, a popular spot for 19th century Manhattanites to enjoy fireworks, balloon rides, ice cream, and band concerts.
The band on this occasion consisted of some 400 instrumentalists and singers, including members of the four-year-old New York Philharmonic. They gave, for the first time in America, a complete performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the “Choral Symphony...