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
Grainger and "Country Gardens"
"Country Gardens" is the best-known work of the Australian-born American composer, arranger, and pianist Percy Grainger. Its score bears this note: "Birthday-gift, Mother, July 3, 1918." Grainger's...
Lucky Gluck?
In the German, "Gluck" means luck, and today's date marks the birth anniversary of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with "reforming" the v...
Milhaud's "Scaramouche" Suite
On today's date in 1937, some jaunty music by the French composer Darius Milhaud premiered in Paris. It was a suite for two pianos entitled "Scaramouche," after a stock character in the Italian com...
Herrmann's "Wuthering Heights"
In 1971, American film composer Bernard Herrmann confessed, "the only thing I ever did that was foolhardy was to write an opera." The opera was based on the 19th century novel "Wuthering Heights" b...
Rafael Kubelik
Today's date marks anniversary of the birth of the famous Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík. He was born on June 29, 1914, in the Bohemian village of Býchory, as the son of a very musical father, name...
Antoine Forqueray
It was on today's date in 1745 that a 73-year-old French Baroque composer named Antoine Forqueray died in Mantes-la-Jolie outside Paris, where he had lived after his retirement as a court musician ...
George Templeton Strong, Jr.
The name "George Templeton Strong" crops up frequently in both the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Civil War and Ric Burn's history of New York. THAT George Templeton Strong was a lawyer and music...
Zwilich's Piano Concerto
It was Mozart who wrote the first great piano concertos, with Beethoven, Brahms and others following suit in the 19th century. Closer to our own time, the tradition continues, with new contribution...
Telemann makes the record
In the Guiness Book of Music Facts and Feats, the record for "Most Prolific Composer" goes to Georg Philip Telemann, who died on today's date in 1767 at the age of 86. And longevity gave an edge to...
Vaughan Williams's Fifth
In wartime London, on today's date in 1943, a Promenade Concert featured the first performance of the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer himself conducted the London Philharmoni...