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 54 minutes
Diamond's Elegy
Despite its relation to both the physics of sound and pure mathematics, music, for most people—including composers—is essentially an emotional language. Despite its abstract sound, that’s the cas...
Nicholas Slonimsky, Date-Meister
We have a special DATEBOOK birthday to note today, for on this date in 1894, one of music’s great “date-meisters,” Nicholas Slonimsky, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. A self-described “failed ...
Tchaikovsky in New York
On today’s date in 1891, a small group of music patrons gathered at one of New York’s docks to greet the Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who had been invited to America to take part in t...
Prokofiev and Rochberg chamber premieres
Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performances of two 20th century chamber works. On April 25, 1931, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 1 received its premiere pe...
Tower's Violin Concerto
“In an ideal musical world,” says Joan Tower, “a composer should have a friendly, creative, and ongoing working relationship with performers for whom she writes.” For Tower, who has emerged as one...
Gabriela Lena Frank's "Three Latin American Dances"
On today’s date in 2004, the Utah Symphony and conductor Keith Lockhart premiered “Three Latin-American Dances” by the American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Just a few days later, the same forces ...
Husa's "Apotheosis of This Earth"
Today is Earth Day—an annual event started in 1970 by then-Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as an environmental teach-in. Senator Nelson wasn’t the only one concerned back then, either: the Cze...
Copland's Hurricane for kids
On today’s date in 1937, one of Aaron Copland’s least well-known works had its premiere performance. This was an opera written for high school students, New York’s Henry Street Settlement Music Sch...
Biblical Torke
Religious music, like the religious experience itself, comes in all shapes, forms, moods, and colors. On today’s date in the year 2002, for example, this setting of the Song of Isaiah had its prem...
Anthony Braxton's operas
In the 19th century, Richard Wagner composed a cycle of four operas collectively titled “The Ring of the Nibelungen,” lasting 16 hours in performance. In the 20th century, another German composer,...