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 52 minutes
Colorful music by Scriabin and Torke
A question: do you see colors when you hear music? No, we’re not going psychedelic on you and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today’s edition of COMPOSERS DATEBOOK. I...
Roger Sessions' "The Kennedy Sonata"
The American composer Roger Sessions is an acquired taste for most classical music fans, and, truth be told, his works don’t show up on concert recital programs all that often. He was born in the...
Rehearsing Monteverdi and Reich
Today, a letter: written on this date in 1615 by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi to a friend at the court of the Duke of Mantua. The letter accompanied a vocal score that Monteverdi hoped...
Mahler's First in Budapest and New York
Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 was first heard on this day in Budapest in 1889, with the 29-year-old composer conducting. Originally billed as a “symphonic poem,” a newspaper in Budapest even pri...
Buda and Pest feted in music by Bartok and Kodaly
The modern Hungarian city we know as Budapest is really three older settlements merged into one: Buda, on the west bank of the Danube, was the royal seat of the medieval Hungarian kings; Obuda, jus...
'Toon-ful music by Carl Stalling
Today’s date marks the official birthday of a quintessential American form of 20th century music—for cartoons. It was on November 18, 1928, that the first-ever animated cartoon with its own synch...
"To be Certain of the Dawn" by Stephen Paulus
On today’s date in 2005, the chancel of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis was transformed into a performance stage for vocal soloists, choirs, and the Minnesota Orchestra led by Osmo Vänksä. ...
Gluck sings the blues
On today’s date in 1777, the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck was baffled by Parisian audiences and wrote these lines to a friend: “I am so much disgusted with music that at present that ...
Kern's "Showboat" is launched in D.C.
Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performance of Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat,” produced in 1927 at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. by Florenz Ziegfeld. Show Boat’s book and ly...
An important date for Copland and Bernstein
If ever there was a red-letter day in American music, November 14th must surely be it. For starters, it’s the birthday of Aaron Copland, who was born in New York City on today’s date in 1900—and th...