Composers Datebook

SynopsisFor the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a major international arts festival was planned, and, as its centerpiece, a gigantic day-long music-theater work designed and coordinated by avant-garde American director Robert Wilson. Wilson titled the work the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, with a story line loosely inspired by Matthew Brady’s famous phot

SynopsisOn today’s date in 1965, Lizzie Borden premiered at the New York City Opera. The new opera by American composer Jack Beeson depicted a fictionalized version of a real-life event: a gruesome double axe-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden that occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Andrew Borden’s daughter, Lizzie, was accused of the murder of her father and stepmot

SynopsisCommedia dell’arte was a kind of theater popular throughout Italy during the 18th century. In this improvised, rough and tumble genre, a group of stock figures with names like Harlequin, Pierrot, and Punchinello would appear in awkward and farcical situations which modern audiences might recognize from the TV sitcoms — only the earthy 18th century version often more R-R

SynopsisWhen your instrument is nicknamed “the burping bedpost,” it’s hard to get respect in refined circles. So it’s understandable that the bassoon section of, say, a major London orchestra might indulge in a bit of day-dreaming in which a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists blow into town and take over a concert hall. And guess what? That is exactly the scenario

SynopsisOn this day in the year 1886, critic Gustav Dompke wrote these lines in the German Times of Vienna, after attending a performance of one of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies: “We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint…Bruckner composes like a drunkard!”Today, with Bruckner’s sympho

SynopsisOne of the most serious — and daunting — of musical forms is the passacaglia, in which an unchanging melodic pattern repeats itself while other lines of melody offer elaboration and counterpoint to the unwavering tread of the repeated motive. The result tends to be deliberate, somber and imposing. The most famous passacaglia in all of Western classical music is the Pass

SynopsisIn 2010, the American Composers Forum launched ChoralQuest, a specially-commissioned series of works written especially for middle and junior high school choirs. The idea was to expand the available repertoire for young choirs, introduce them to contemporary composers, and give composers the chance and challenge of writing for young voices.One of these new works received it

SynopsisThe opening of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, takes place at New York’s old Academy of Music in the early 1870s, during a performance of Gounod’s Faust, a French opera based on a German play by Goethe. At the time specified in Wharton’s novel, Gounod’s opera was still “new” music, having premiered about a dozen years earlier in Paris on today’s

SynopsisAll artists, including composers, are frequently urged to “write what they know.”Well, if that’s the case, then any new and sleep-deprived parent can relate to music which depicts a late-night session with a newborn baby. It’s the middle movement of a piano concerto that was given its premiere on today’s date in 1994 by the Kansas City Symphony, with Bill McGlaugh

SynopsisToday we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Boston (where else?), noting two musical premieres that occurred in that Celtic city.The first premiere was in March 1922, when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony in the premiere of three of the Five Irish Fantasies by German-born American composer Charles Martin Loeffler. These were settings for solo voice and orchestra o