Composers Datebook

Synopsis

The Nov. 7, 1950, issue of Look magazine included a record review of a new LP of music by avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse. “Varèse is unlike anything else in music, and well worth knowing,” the review suggested.

Frank Zappa, a young Californian just short of his 10th birthday, was fascinated by the Look magazine photo of Varèse accompanying the review, which made the composer look a little like a mad scientist in vintage horror films. The young Zappa felt compelled to hunt down the record and begin composing music himself. For his 15th birthday, he chose to spend a $5 gift from his parents on a long-distance phone call to Varèse, who he correctly guessed must live in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Today, Zappa is best remembered as the head of the iconoclastic rock band of the ‘60s and ‘70s the Mothers of Invention, but in 1983, he also conducted works of Varèse at a San Francisco concert honoring the composer’s centenary, and always acknowledged Varèse as a major influence. One of his final projects, recorded in 1993, the last year of his life, was an orchestral tribute to Varèse.

Music Played in Today's Program

Edgar Varèse (1883-1965): Ionisation; New York Philharmonic; Pierre Boulez, conductor; Sony 45844

Frank Zappa (1940-1993): Dog Breath Variations; Cincinnati Conservatory Wind Symphony; Eugene Corporon, conductor; Mark 1116

Synopsis

American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all. Her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra. The score for her second symphony is lost. Her Symphony No. 3, commissioned by the WPA Federal Music Project, was premiered on today’s date in 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra.

Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her mother was a music teacher who guided her early musical training. At 14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time.

After teaching in the south, she moved to Chicago in 1927, where she became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, who both helped promote her music.

Price died in 1953. After decades of neglect, early 21st-century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career.

Music Played in Today's Program

Florence Price (1887-1953): Symphony No. 3; Women’s Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor; Koch 7518-2

Synopsis

Into the Woods, a musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1987, and brought to the stage characters from the world of fairy tales: Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and not one, but two Prince Charmings.

But in Lapine and Sondheim’s fairy tale, bad things happen to good people who make morally questionable decisions in their quest to “live happily ever after.”

At the time, Sondheim said, “All fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity. The final step is when you become responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the world.”

The New York Times review noted that this fairy tale’s quest was “the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.” Granting the musical was “potent stuff,” some complained there was simply too much of it, with multiple plot lines resulting in a complicated story hampering Sondheim’s lyrical gifts from really taking off on their own.

Even so, since its 1987 premiere, Into the Woods has gone on to become one of the most performed and popular of all Sondheim’s musicals.

Music Played in Today's Program

Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021): Into the Woods; original Broadway cast members; RCA 60752

Synopsis

Today we honor one of America’s greatest patrons of chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who died on this date in 1953.

Born in 1864, Coolidge was the daughter of a wealthy wholesale grocer. She put her inheritance to good use. In 1924, she proposed to the Library of Congress that an auditorium be constructed in Washington, D.C., that would be dedicated to the performance of chamber music. A year later it was built, and Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress still stands today.

Not content with just a superb venue for chamber music, she diligently commissioned new works to be played there. The list of important chamber pieces her foundation commissioned is impressive, and includes Bartok and Schoenberg string quartets, the original chamber versions of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Stravinsky’s Apollo ballets, and modern works by American composers as diverse as Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb and John Corigliano.

Coolidge was an amateur composer and accomplished pianist. Her passion for music and enthusiasm for the creation of new works was all the more remarkable considering that tragically she battled deafness from her mid-30s.

Music Played in Today's Program

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Apollo ballet; Stockholm Chamber Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Sony Classical 46667

Synopsis

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 2002, the American Composers Orchestra presented new works inspired by the Hebrew Psalms. The program included the premiere of a new work by American composer David Lang, How to Pray.

In his program note, Lang wrote: “[The] Psalms are so central to religious experience [because] they are a comprehensive catalogue of how to talk to the Almighty. ... Of course, it's like reading one side of a correspondence. ... I am not a religious person. I don't know how to pray. I do, however, know some of the times and places and formulas that are supposed to help make prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending those messages out. And then I wait, secretly hoping that I will recognize the response.”

The minimalist-style, patterned repetition in Lang’s How to Pray, reminded some listeners of a “mandala” — those intricate graphic patterns intended to be an aid to meditation for Hindu or Buddhist believers.

Stravinsky fans with sharp ears might also recognize the running piano line from the beginning of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which Lang borrows and weaves into the pattern of How to Pray as both a tribute and inspiration.

Music Played in Today's Program

David Lang (b. 1957): How to Pray; Real Quiet ensemble; Gil Rose, conductor; Naxos 8.559615