Composers Datebook American Public Media

Synopsis
In all, American composer Henry Cowell composed 20 symphonies, and left sketches for a 21st. On today’s date in 1954, the Louisville Orchestra gave the premiere of Cowell’s Symphony No. 11 (The Seven Rituals of Music).

“There are seven rituals of music in the life of man from birth to death,” so Cowell explained in program notes. He said that these musical rituals included work, play, dance, love, and war, bracketed by the mysteries of birth and death.

Although interest in Cowell’s music has risen steadily since his death in 1965, performances of his symphonies are still rare events. Part of the problem lies in the eclectic range of styles to be found in his music. There is, for example, a Cowell Gaelic Symphony, another Icelandic Symphony, and yet another, influenced by Indian ragas and talas, the Madras Symphony.

This didn’t bother Cowell at all. As he once explained, “I have never deliberately concerned myself with developing a distinctive personal style, but only with the excitement and pleasure of writing music as beautifully, as warmly, and as interestingly as I can.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Henry Cowell (1897-1965): Symphony No. 11 (Seven Rituals of Music); The Louisville Orchestra; Robert S. Whitney, conductor; First Editions 0003

Synopsis
If you wanted to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name Josiah Flagg.

Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

He was a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes, published in 1764. Although the music was all by a British composer, it was — symbolically — the first to be printed on American-made paper.

Acting as an impresario, Flagg also organized concerts in Boston for about a decade and gave some of the first Boston performances of music by George Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which proved to be his last. He included excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, but closed with his band’s rendition of the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of the Boston patriots.

Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early music history.

Music Played in Today's Program
John Greenwood The Hessian Camp First Michigan Colonial Fife and Drum Corps Private release

G.F. Handel (1685 – 1757) Water Music English Concert; Trevor Pinnock, cond. DG 439 147

Synopsis
Many baby boomers confess their introduction to classical music was via classic Warner Brothers Loony Tunes cartoons featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny. Okay, in those cartoons, classical music was parodied, but it was done with great wit and affection — and the tunes in those ‘toons stuck in your memory.

Well, on today’s date in 2020, a new series of Looney Tunes cartoons began streaming online with the launch of HBO Max. Bugs was back, and so were the parodies of classical music.

Joshua Moshier was one of the composers charged with scoring those new Looney Tunes.

“It was certainly intimidating,” he said in an NPR interview.

“There are cartoons like the Road Runner and the Coyote where there’s no dialogue except for a few ‘meep meeps’. But then you realize, ‘Oh — the dialogue is the music.’ The Coyote’s dialogue is the low meandering bassoon. For the Road Runner we referenced ‘The Dance of the Comedians’.”

“Looney Tunes … are caricatures,” Moshier said, “and that allows the music itself to be a caricature. It’s a joy [for a composer] to participate in the comedy in such an overt way and be part of what’s making people laugh.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Joshua Moshier (b. 1986): Excerpts from ‘Buzzard School,’ and ‘TNT Trouble’; Studio orchestra; Joshua Moshier, conductor; From ‘Looney Tunes Cartoons Original Soundtrack: Music by Joshua Moshier and Carl Johnson’ digital album

Carl Stalling (1891-1972): ‘The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down’ (arr. Carl Johnson); Studio orchestra; Carl Johnson, conductor; From ‘Looney Tunes Cartoons Original Soundtrack: Music by Joshua Moshier and Carl Johnson’ digital album

Synopsis
British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.

In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.

The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.

“In composing Pacifika Rondo,” wrote Harrison, “I have thought, with love, around the circle of the Pacific.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Lou Harrison (1917-2003): Pacifica Rondo; Oakland Youth Orchestra; Robert Hughes, conductor; Phoenix 118

Synopsis
In 1967, the Beatles released a song about “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but on today’s date in 1870, it was “a girl with enamel eyes” that was the subject of a ballet that debuted on today’s date at the Paris Opéra.

The ballet’s full title was Coppelia, or the Girl with Enamel Eyes, and its story-line was based on a fantastic tale by German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, dealing with the mad toymaker Dr. Coppelius, his uncannily lifelike doll Coppélia and the complications she causes in the love life of a small Polish village.

The music was provided by a 30-something French composer named Leo Delibes. Coppelia was a great success, much to Delibes’ relief. He had been juggling several jobs in Paris, but the new ballet’s financial success allowed him to concentrate on composing as his main career from then on.

Delibes followed up on the success of Coppelia with another ballet, Sylvia, in 1876, and, in 1883, his opera Lakmé premiered at the Opéra-Comique.

Along with the famous ballets of Tchaikovsky, Delibes’ Coppelia is now regarded as the culmination of the 19th century Romantic ballet.

Music Played in Today's Program
Leo Delibes (1836-1891): Coppelia; Lyons Opera Orchestra; Kent Nagano, conductor; Erato 91730

Synopsis
In 1895, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine, a sci-fi classic that fired the imagination of Victorian readers. How fantastic it would be to be able to experience past, present, and future at will!Well, on today’s date in 2019, Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir invited the audience at that year’s Point Music Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, to experience past, present and future all at once via the premiere of an orchestral work she titled Aiōn, after the ancient Greek god of time.The title is a metaphor, as Thorvaldsdottir put it, “connected to a number of broader ideas: How we relate to our lives, to the ecosystem, and to our place in the broader scheme of things, and how at any given moment we are connected both to the past and to the future, not just of our own lives but across — and beyond — generations.”At the 2019 premiere, dancers from the Iceland Dance Company moved in and around the players of the Gothenburg Symphony, creating striking visuals to accompany music one reviewer described as “weirdly unearthly, or awesome with oceanic majesty,” and another suggested that “[Aiōn] has the same archaic brutality as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977): Aiōn; Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Eva Ollikainen, conductor; innova 810 (original release) and Sono Luminus 92268