Composers Datebook
च्यानल विवरणहरू
Composers Datebook
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 accessi...
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92 एपिसोडहरू
Villa-Lobos meets the harmonica
Traditionally, the harmonica is the instrument of the loner: the cowboy by the campfire, the hobo riding the rails, the bluesman pouring out his soul...
Claude Debussy out to sea?
On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded a...
Lully and Moliere send in the clowns
To most music lovers, the name Jean-Baptise Lully calls to mind pompous and courtly music for Louis XIV, the French “Sun King” who was his great patro...
Rebecca Clarke gets her due
Today’s date in 1979 marked the passing, at 93, of a remarkable composer and performer named Rebecca Clarke. Born in Harrow, England, in 1886, she bec...
Columbus Day music
Today’s date marks the original Columbus Day, honoring the Italian explorer who for decades was described as the man who “discovered America.” In rece...
Concertos by Nielsen and Adams
On today’s date in 1928, Danish composer Carl Nielsen conducted the first public performance of his new Clarinet Concerto in Copenhagen.
“The cl...
Berio's 'Sinfonia' in New York
In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, the thoughts of its major characters keep shifting from the sights and sounds they encounter in and around Dublin to t...
A birthday Beatle
John Lennon was born on today’s date in the year 1940, in Liverpool, England — during a German air raid on that city, as it happened. With three other...
Sharon Isbin and John Corigliano
1991 was a big year for American composer John Corigliano. The Metropolitan Opera premiered his opera The Ghosts of Versailles and the 53-year old com...
Music and politics with Rimsky-Korsakov and John Adams
On today’s date in 1909, The Golden Cockerel, the last opera of the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, had its premiere in Moscow. Rimsky-Korsa...
Brahms and Rzewski for amateurs
The first performance of the Liebeslieder — or the Love Song Waltzes — for piano four-hands by Johannes Brahms took place on today’s date in 1869. The...
Timely Argento and Takemitsu
It was on this day in 1972 that A Ring of Time by American composer Dominick Argento was premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis. The work...
How to win friends and influence Shostakovich
In 1939, Dale Carnegie published a self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, suggesting you could change people’s behavior to you by ch...
Ceremonial Beethoven and Schuman
If you had arrived early for the gala reopening celebration of Vienna’s Josephstadt Theater on today’s date in 1822, you might have heard the theater...
Joan Tower's 'Made in America'
These days, the cost of commissioning a major American composer to write a major orchestral work requires, well, a major amount of money.
Back i...
Flagg-waving in Colonial Boston?
On today’s date in 1768, two regiments of British redcoats marched into colonial Boston accompanied by martial music provided by their regimental wind...
The Twilight Zone
On today’s date in 1960, the second season of The Twilight Zone — the legendary TV series created by Rod Serling — began airing on CBS. For this, the...
Holst (and Colin Matthews) in outer space
One of the most popular works of 20th-century orchestral music, The Planets by Gustav Holst, had its first performance on today’s date in 1918. This w...
Bielawa's 'Chance Encounter'
It happens to all of us: you’re in some public space and overhear someone say something that strikes you as memorable, oddly poetical, or perhaps even...
In Memoriam: Schubert and Oldham
On this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers and played some of his new piano sonata in B-flat, whi...
Weill's 'September Song'
The haunting melody September Song by Kurt Weill was first heard by the public on today’s date in the year 1938, during a trial run of a new musical,...
Shostakovich's 60th
On today’s date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert o...
Pendercki's Symphony No. 6
In all, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki completed eight symphonies, and in 2013, to celebrate his 80th birthday, there appeared a box set of reco...
A Mass in time of terror?
If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your ar...
Higdon welcomes Autumn
As the season begins, we offer you this Autumn Music — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. She said she wanted to write a compani...
Of froth and Friml
Today’s date marks the 1925 premiere in New York City of a classic operetta The Vagabond King by Rudolf Friml, the source of many once-popular sentime...
Sibelius passes
Today’s date commemorates the death, in 1957, of the most famous Finnish composer of modern times, Jean Sibelius. Born in 1865, Sibelius studied at th...
'On the Transmigration of Souls'
On today’s date in 2002, a little over one year after two passenger jetliners had crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York C...
Prokofiev and Leifs agree: 'There's no place like home!'
On this day in 1918, Russian composer Serge Prokofiev arrived in America to give a recital of his piano works in New York. He told interviewers that d...
Ellington's 'Money Jungle'
In 1962, American jazz composer, performer and bandleader Duke Ellington was 63 — an acknowledged master, but trends in American jazz were changing, a...
A concerto by Sally Beamish
British composer Sally Beamish was born in London and studied music there and in Germany, but more recently has come to be associated with both Scotla...
Henry Brant's 'Northern Lights'
If you’ve ever witnessed a spectacular display of the Northern Lights, you’ll know the feeling: jaw-dropping wonder at the powerful forces unleashed i...
New 'Variations on a Theme by Purcell'
The year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of BBC Music Magazine and to celebrate the magazine’s editor asked British composer Colin Matthews to coordi...
Bernstein meets Wharton
On today's date in 1993, the first gala preview screening of a new film, The Age of Innocence, based on the novel by Edith Wharton, took place at the...
Reisenberg and Mozart
During her lifetime, pianist Nadia Reisenberg was regarded as one of this country’s finest concert artists. She performed at Carnegie Hall 22 times, o...
Leroy Anderson in the studio
On today’s date in 1950, Decca recording engineers committed to disc seven short works by American composer Leroy Anderson, with him conducting top-no...
Berlioz and the Parisian prudes
We tend to think of Paris as the most sophisticated and worldly of European capitals — a city whose residents are unlikely to be shocked by anything t...
Edward Burlingame Hill
Today is the birthday of American composer and teacher Edward Burlingame Hill, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872.
Hill studied at Harvar...
Bernstein's 'Mass'
On today’s date in 1971, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., was inaugurated with a gala performance of a new work...
Hymnus Paradisi by Herbert Howells
The Three Choirs Festival is one of England’s oldest musical traditions. Established around 1715, it showcases the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Wor...