Exploring Music History with Professor Robert Greenberg one Monday at a time. Every Monday Robert Greenberg explores some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things.
Music History Monday: An American in Paris
Aug 26, 2024
We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.
Here’s how we’re going to proceed. Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.
Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.
Statement
George Gershwin (1898-1937) on the cover of Time magazine, July 20, 1925
George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39).
He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898. He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized. It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)
Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner. Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime. By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano. But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone. …
This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post. I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them. It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music. From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic.
Music History Monday: Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev
Aug 19, 2024
Serge (or Sergei) Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1916
We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice. Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.
Movers and Shakers
Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time. In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:
“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts. All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts. I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”
Diaghilev at 17, circa 1889
Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war. Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend. Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!
Music History Monday: Giovanni Gabrieli and the Miracle That is Venice!
Aug 12, 2024
Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612)
We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli. Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.
Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music. The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!
To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.
It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…
Music History Monday: The First Professional Composer
Aug 05, 2024
Easy Times!
We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle. Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).
Today we get back to the historicalrepertoire. But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).
“Portrait of a Young Man” (1432) by Jan van Eyck; possibly Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)
Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!
We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay. He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.
Guillaume Du Fay as The FirstProfessional Composer
Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:
“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”
Early Life
He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels. He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…
Music History Monday: Cass Elliot and the Making of an Urban Legend
Jul 29, 2024
We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District. Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.
Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen); 1941-1974
Brief Biography
Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland. According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”
The Pale of Settlement
(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties. As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live. Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)
It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!
Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground. (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)
It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark. She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.” In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show. In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps. Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…
Music History Monday: Shake, Rattle, and Roll
Jul 22, 2024
Taylor Swift (born 1989)
Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)
Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!
A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.
No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.
Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again. My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.
“Earthquake Country”: San Francisco, April 1906
I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate. These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions. The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south. The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.
Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast. So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…
Music History Monday: An Indispensable Person
Jul 15, 2024
Indispensability
The title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.”
According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:
“There is no indispensable man.”
Said President John F. Kennedy:
“Nobody’s indispensable.”
Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970):
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.”
It’s a school of thought that I do not attend. That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical endscould not have been achieved. Here are four obvious examples.
James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books). Flexner was correct in so titling his book, because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person. Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost. And without Washington, the American presidency and with it, the nascent American democracy, would very likely have devolved into autocracy, perhaps even monarchy. (This book should be required reading for a certain six members of our current not-terribly-Supreme Court, who need – desperately – to be reminded of what the Founders intended and what moral greatness look like.)
We should all be loath to even consider what the United States would look like today if not for the indispensable moral guidance and eloquence of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). As for the twentieth century, the world as we know it would not exist, and the forces of darkness might very well have triumphed, without the indispensable Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).
(As for the overly politically and socially sensitive among us: yes, yes, I am aware that these are all white, Protestant men; one of them a slave owner [Washington]; one of them an imperialist [Churchill]; and three of them members of the wealthy, ruling class [Washington, Churchill, and Roosevelt]. So what? Does that information in any way reduce their contributions to humanity?)
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt together at the White House on May 24, 1943
The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pinpointed the traits that leaders require to make them “indispensable”:
“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”
Okay: some perspective as we observe the obvious: the indispensable people of, say, the world of potash-mining; of lip-gloss manufacturing; and of shipping palette design may not be as well-known and their impact on humanity not as universal as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt. But in terms of their fields, they are indispensable people as well. Yo: without Howard T. Hallowell (1877-1955), who patented the first shipping palette in 1924 (he called it a “Lift Truck Platform”), the American trucking industry might never have gotten off the ground in the manner it did. Long live Howard T. Hallowell, the indispensable person of the shipping palette!
Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833
Another Unsung Hero! Another Indispensable Person!
We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 167 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist, chronicler of Beethoven, and teacher Carl Czerny. For all his various and extraordinary contributions, Czerny must be considered an indispensable person to Western music during the first half of the nineteenth century!
I would hazard that some might think that I’m stretching the “indispensable-thing” just a tad by including Carl Czerny on a list that just featured George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Howard T. Hallowell. But no, I’m not.…
Music History Monday: What’s in a Name?
Jul 08, 2024
We mark the birth on July 8, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence, in Brooklyn, New York. He died just four months ago, on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles.
Steve Lawrence (1935-2024)
Steve Lawrence, one might ask? Have potential topics for Music History Monday become so depleted that after nearly eight years (my first such blog was posted on September 9, 2016) I’ve been reduced to profiling baritone-voiced male pop singers of the second half of the twentieth century? Who’s next: Dean Martin? Perry Como? Andy Williams? Tom Jones? Jack Jones? Vic Damone? Al Martino? Robert Goulet?
And what of it, I would rather AGGRESSIVELY ASK IN RESPONSE? Over the years, I’ve profiled the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Otis Redding, and Chubby Checker, among others. SO WHY NOT STEVE LAWRENCE?
Okay, I will admit that there is an ulterior motive here, and we’ll get to that ulterior motive behind this profile of Maestro Lawrence in due time. But first, permit me, please, to reminisce.
“Fitting In”
As I have mentioned more than once, I was born and spent my first years in that Olduvai Gorge of American ethnicity (pronounced “et-nicity”): the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Three of my four grandparents were born there as well (the fourth – my paternal grandfather – was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey but moved to Brooklyn as a toddler and grew up there). Both of my parents and my stepmother were born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brooklyn.
That’s a lot of freaking Brooklyn.
While I grew up in the New Jersey ‘burbs and was shaped by the lower middle-class suburban experience of the 1950s and 1960s, my grandparents and parents were all New Yorkers to the bone, and were shaped by the dual experience of growing up in Brooklyn and by being the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. That meant maintaining something of their ethnic and religious identity while, paradoxically, at the same time, trying to blend in – to assimilate – and be, as my paternal grandfather Sidney would say, “real Yankees!”
When my extended family got together, you could count on certain conversations to always take place. The alte kaker (meaning the old men; literally “old poopers”) would play pinochle and complain about politicians, taxes, the stock market, the weather, and the New York Mets. Boring and predictable. It was the women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations whose conversations I would eavesdrop on, because they were interesting and they were funny. (If they saw me listening, they’d start speaking in Yiddish, so I’d have to keep my distance and look as if I wasn’t listening to them at all.)
I recall their conversations as representing gossip and innuendo raised to high art, conversations more often than not fixated on other women: who was married to the worst/best husband (sometimes the same thing: “he slaps her around, but he makes a BUCK”); who had the best/worst clothes and jewelry, and what they paid for their best/worst clothing and jewelry; who was too fat or too thin (these were Jewish ladies, so it was indeed possible to be “too thin”); who wore too much makeup and who wore too little; whose teeth needed fixing and hair needed cutting and/or coloring; who was drinking too much and popping diet pills (meaning methamphetamines, which were legal at the time); who was sexless and who was shtupping the mailman; etc. The comments I enjoyed the most were about the people I knew: my girl cousins, some of whom were these ladies’ daughters. This one needs to go on a diet, that one needs a nose-job; this one needs to see a dermatologist, that one has to dress more appropriately; this one needs to do something with her hair, that one needs braces.
Genuine compliments for anyone were few and far between, though the greatest compliment that these women could bestow on any fellow female is burned into my memory:
“She could pass.”
“She could pass”: meaning, she could pass for a goy, for not being Jewish. The beneficiary of such a compliment would be slim (but not, God forbid, skinny); her hair and teeth would be straight; her skin would be clear, her accent undetectable, and her nose a button.
Sidney Liebowitz
Which – finally! – brings us back to Steve Lawrence. He was indeed born Sidney Liebowitz, in Brooklyn, on July 8, 1935. He came by his musical bona fides honestly: his father, Max Liebowitz was a cantor (a professional singer and prayer leader) at Temple Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav in Brooklyn; his mother Anna (born Gelb), was a homemaker.…
Music History Monday: The Sony Walkman: A Triumph and a Tragedy!
Jul 01, 2024
The original Sony Walkman, model TPS-L2
We mark the introduction on July 1, 1979 – 45 years ago today – of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman was the first entirely portable, high-fidelity (or at least fairly high-fidelity) audio cassette player, a revolutionary device that allowed a user to listen to entire albums anywhere, anytime. Introduced initially in Japan, the higher-ups at Sony expected to sell 5000 units a month for the first six months after its release. Instead, they sold 30,000 units in the first month alone and then – then – sales exploded. All told, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmen (“Walkmans”?) in cassette, CD, mini-disc, and digital file versions, and Sony remained the market leader among portable music players until the introduction of Apple’s iPod on October 23, 2001.
For Sony the Walkman was a commercial triumph. For consumers, it was a technological game-changer. But for humanity, taken as widely as we please, it can (and will!) be argued that the “portable music player” – or PMP – has been an unmitigated disaster, a tragedy that has served to increasingly isolate human beings from one another in a manner unique in our history.
A Walkman ad from 1979, inadvertently promoting individual isolation and the death of public interaction
Headphones and Earbuds
Growing up, my maternal grandparents lived in a pre-War apartment building at 82nd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (or just Lincoln Center) was just 16 blocks to the south, a 16.3-acre complex between 66th and 62nd Streets. Lincoln Center’s Library & Museum of the Performing Arts opened in 1965, and I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother Steve down to see it. Actually, I don’t just “remember” the visit; it is etched forever in my 11-year-old memory because of what happened there.
There was a large, open area filled with small, circular tables on which were built in record turntables. As I recall, each of these circular tables had four stereo headphones plugged in around the turntable. One would go up to a counter, request a particular record, and then sit down and listen to it through the headphones.
I had never listened to music through over-the-ear headphones (stereo or otherwise) before that visit, and I still remember the amazement I felt: I’d never, ever experienced such sonic fidelity; I’d never imagined that recorded music could sound so fantastic. And because I was listening through over-the-ear headphones, most of the ambient noise in the room was blocked out, effectively isolating me and allowing me to focus strictly on the music. I don’t remember what my grandmother did to drag me away from that turntable, whether she used a leather sap, a fire hose, the jaws-of-life or, more likely, the promise of ice cream on the way back to her apartment. Whatever; because of those stereo headphones, I had experienced musical high-fidelity for the first time in my life, and I was hooked.
To this day, I have a number of excellent over-the-ear headphones, and when I really must “listen” for recorded detail, I will listen through one of them. (FYI: I will not use earbuds, as I can’t tolerate the sensation of something shoved into my ear canal. Too bad for me.)
To the point. The immersive experience provided by headphones – by broadcasting directly into our ears while isolating us from ambient sound – is seductive. But at what point might the isolating aspect of the headphone/earbud experience become a less-than-positive thing? The advent of PMPs – be they Walkmen, iPods, or smartphones – has allowed two generations of listeners to isolate themselves from the world around them, often to the point of near total disengagement. …
One sort of Boogie Fever: Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) cuttin’ the rug at New York’s Studio 54, circa 1978
On June 24, 1374 – 650 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively, and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or, in some cases, just plain dropped dead. It was a real-life disco inferno, true boogie-fever stuff: the first (but not the last) major occurrence of what would come to be known as the “dancing plague (or mania)” or “choreomania,” which soon enough spread across Europe.
There had been small outbreaks of the “dancing plague” before, going back as far as the seventh century. An outbreak in the thirteenth century – in 1237 – saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that is believed to have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But the outbreak in Aachen 650 years ago today was big. Before it was over, thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from the western German cities of Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and Stuttgart; to the Belgian cities of Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren; then across France, the Netherlands, and finally, back into Germany!
Another sort of Boogie Fever. The authorities typically had music played during outbreaks of dancing plague, as it was believed to somehow “cure” the mania; painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), after drawings by his father.
This gigantic outbreak came to be referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance.” (These names were coined based on the assumption that the dancing plague was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, St. John having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and St. Vitus martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.)
Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way:
“They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.”…
We mark the death on June 17, 2014 – an even 10 years ago today – of the Grammy Award winning American record producer and Director of Columbia Masterworks Recordings John Taylor McClure. McClure was born in Rahway, New Jersey on June 28, 1929, and died in Belmont Vermont at the age of 84, 11 days short of his 85th birthday. Record Producers The title of this post says it all: “Unsung Heroes.” It is my experience that unless someone has personally been involved in creating a recording, it’s pretty much impossible to appreciate the amount of work a producer puts into the process and the degree to which the producers’ own musical taste, musical proclivities, and musicality influence the final product. The front of a record jacket or CD case might bear the image of a composer or performer, and the producer’s name might appear in the tiniest of print on the lower left-hand corner of the back of the jacket, but in fact – in terms of their singular impact on a recording – the producer should, by all rights, be pictured on the front of the album side-by-side with whomever else the producer deems worthy of joining […]
Music History Monday: Let Us Quaff from the Cup: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
Jun 10, 2024
On June 10, 1865 – 159 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent and groundbreaking music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (whose wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, Wagner was enthusiastically shtupping at the same time). Oh Goodness; Did I Just Write That? I did. I know, right? Here I am, introducing Tristan und Isolde – one of the most awesome, incredible works of art ever created – and I still couldn’t resist a cheap dig at Wagner the person. As we have discussed in the past and will do so again, the same personality flaws that made Richard Wagner an often despicable narcissist allowed him the conceit to reject the operatic clichés and conventions of his time and to create a body of dramatic musical art unfathomable in its originality, beauty, dramatic power, and imagination. Of course, had he not been the towering genius he was, and had he not risked everything – including his sanity, over and over again – to create his unparalleled body of work, well, he would just have been another loathsome crank, writing nasty letters to newspaper editors and shouting at people in the […]
Music History Monday: Ludwig von Köchel and the Seemingly Impossible Task
Jun 03, 2024
We mark the death on June 3, 1877 – 147 years ago today – of the Austrian lawyer, botanist, geologist, teacher, writer, publisher, composer, and “musicologist” Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel, of cancer, in Vienna. Born on January 14, 1800, he was 77 years old at the time of his death. Ludwig Köchel and the Archduke Herr Köchel wasn’t born a “Ritter” – a “knight” – a “von” – with all the privileges and perks that such a title brought. Rather, he was born to the middle class in the Lower Austrian town of Krems an der Donau (meaning “At the junction of the Kremas and Danube Rivers”) some 43 miles west of Vienna. Smart and ambitious, he studied law in Vienna and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1827, at the age of 27. Köchel was a polymath, someone who knew a lot about a lot of things. As such, despite having a law degree, he chose a career as a teacher. But he was not just any teacher, and he didn’t teach just any students. For 15 years, Köchel was the tutor to the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria. This requires […]
Music History Monday: “Inappropriate”
May 27, 2024
There Must Be Something in the Air Have any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate? If you do, know that you will be in good company. Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.” For example. On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school. The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended. According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph: “their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’ Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into […]
Music History Monday: A Difficult Life
May 20, 2024
Before we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage. Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909. On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779). We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured. The disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux. About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that: “When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, […]
Music History Monday: What Day is Today?
May 13, 2024
We recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day! National Days, Weeks, and Months! Who creates these damned things? We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month). In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President. There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off. However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month). The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning. Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals. According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day. May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of […]
Music History Monday: The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)
May 06, 2024
We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).” Scoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London. Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways. The study’s abstract is as follows. I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than […]
We mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C. By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States. Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer. In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!). Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House. His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people. Theirs was a musical household; both […]
Music History Monday Replay: “The Empress” – Bessie Smith
Apr 15, 2024
I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna. As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses). I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here. We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith. Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States. Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:
Music History Monday: The Guy Who Wrote the “Waltz”
Apr 08, 2024
We mark the death on April 8, 1858 – 166 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, editor, and music publisher Anton Diabelli in Vienna, at the age of 76. Born on September 5, 1781, his enduring fame is based on a waltz of his composition that became the basis for Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations for piano. Quick Work We are, fairly or unfairly, going to make rather quick work of Herr Diabelli. That’s because, with all due respect, what I really want to write about is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. There’s a powerful ulterior motive at work here as well. In a field of great recordings, my numero uno favorite Diabelli Variations is the recording made by the Milan-born Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in 1998 and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000. Pollini passed away at the age of 82, on March 23, 2024: 16 days ago. As such, we will honor Maestro Pollini in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes even as we celebrate his unequaled performance of Beethoven’s variations. Anton Diabelli (1781-1858) Despite his Italian surname, Anton Diabelli was Austrian born-and-bred. He was born in Mattsee, a market town just outside of Salzburg. He was a musical […]
Music History Monday: Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate
Apr 01, 2024
On April 1, 2017 – 7 years ago today – Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941) was awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in a private ceremony held at an undisclosed location in Stockholm, Sweden. At the ceremony, Dylan received his gold Nobel Prize medal and his Nobel diploma. The cash prize of eight million Swedish kronor (837,000 euros, or $891,000) was not handed over to Dylan at the time, as he was required to give a lecture before receiving the cash. That lecture was recorded and then released some 9 weeks later, on June 5, 2017. The private award ceremony was attended by twelve members of the Swedish Academy, that organization tasked with choosing the recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature. According to Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, a good time was had by all: “Spirits were high. Champagne was had.” Ms. Danius went on to describe the occasion in a bit more detail: “Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: ‘Inventas […]
Music History Monday: The Towering Inferno
Mar 25, 2024
We mark the birth on March 25, 1867 – 157 years ago today – of the cellist and conductor Arturo Toscanini, in the city of Parma, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. He died, at the age of 89, on January 16, 1957, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in New York City. (Properly embalmed and, we trust, adequately chilled, his no-doubt well-dressed corpse was shipped off to Milan, Italy, where he was entombed in the Cimitero Monumentale. His epitaph features his own words, words he spoke in 1926 after conducting the posthumous premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which had been left unfinished at Puccini’s death: “Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.” (“Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.”) What Made Toscanini So Special Arturo Toscanini lived a long life, and he lived it to the hilt. Firmly in the public eye from the age of 19 (in 1886) until his death in 1957, he travelled everywhere, seemed to have performed with everyone, and had more affairs than Hugh Heffner had bunnies. This is my subtle way of saying that even the most cursory […]
Music History Monday: Fake It ‘til You Make It
Mar 18, 2024
We mark the birth of the Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov on March 18, 1844: 180 years ago today. Born in the Russian town of Tikhvin – roughly 120 miles east of St. Petersburg – Rimsky-Korsakov died at the age of 64, on June 21, 1908, on his estate near the Russian town of Luga, about 85 miles south of St. Petersburg Fake It ‘til You Make It Like most kids growing up, I had various assumptions about grownups (i.e. “adults”). As someone who has now – presumably – been an adult for very nearly a half of a century, I have learned that my assumptions – a few of which I’ve listed below – were all crazy wrong. Assumption one: at around 21, we cross the line into adulthood. Wrong. There are no such “lines”; we’re all changing, all the time. Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature. Wrong. Physically, yes, I’m pushing seventy. Emotionally? I’m roughly fifteen. On a good day. Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing. Really? Adults only “know” what they’re doing (if they ever learn what their “doing” at all) after they’ve been doing it for decades. Until then, they are apprentices, “learning on […]
Music History Monday: An Opera Profane and Controversial: Verdi’s Rigoletto
Mar 11, 2024
We mark the first performance on March 11, 1851 – 173 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at Venice’s storied Teatro la Fenice: The Phoenix Theater. We set the scene. The year was 1849. Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was – at the age of 36 – the most famous and popular composer of opera living and working in Italy. Living in his hometown of Busseto, in the Parma region of northern Italy, Verdi spent the last days of 1849 and the first weeks of 1850 considering future opera projects. He sat down and drew up a list of stories that captured his interest, a list filled with literary masterworks old and new. At the top of the list were Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest. There was Kean, by Alexander Dumas pere and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, Ruy Blas, and Le Roi s’amuse (“The King’s Jester”). Among other works on the list were Lord George Gordon Byron’s Cain; Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre; Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s A Secret Grievance, a Secret Revenge; Vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Atala; and Count Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo (which would eventually become the opera Don Carlo). Stifellio […]
Music History Monday: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Some Myths Debunked
Mar 04, 2024
We mark the first performance of the ballet Swan Lake on March 4, 1877: 147 years ago today. Premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), choreography by the Czech-born dance master Julius Reisinger (1828-1892), and its music performed by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, the first performance of Swan Lake landed with an epic THUD, meaning not good. Pretty much every aspect of the ballet was critically blasted. The vast majority of the critics present found Tchaikovsky’s score to be far too “complex” for a ballet; one critic called it: “too noisy, too ‘Wagnerian,” and too symphonic.” A visiting correspondent by the name of Tyler Grant called the ballet: “utter hogwash, unimaginative and altogether unmemorable.” Now, admittedly, there were some problems with that premiere performance. For example. The famed Russian prima ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918) was originally cast in the role of Odette – the “white swan” – the star and heroine of the ballet. She may also have been slated to dance the role of the villainous Black Swan, Odile; today it is common practice for the same ballerina to perform the parts of both Odette and Odile. However, it is […]
Music History Monday: Too Late to Matter for Georges Bizet, though Better Late Than Never for the Rest of Us
Feb 26, 2024
We mark the premiere on February 26, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C. The premiere took place in Basel, Switzerland, in a performance conducted by Felix Weingartner (1863-1942). Bizet (1838-1875) never heard the symphony performed; he had died in the Paris suburbs in 1875 at the age of 36, a full 60 years before Weingartner’s premiere of his symphony. Bizet’s Symphony in C, considered today to be a masterwork, was only “discovered” in the archives of the Paris Conservatoire in 1933, 78 years after its composition in 1855! What If We contemplate a short list of those great (or potentially great) composers who died before their fortieth birthday. Henry Purcell (dead at 36), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (26), Wolfgang Mozart (35), Vincenzo Bellini (33), Frédéric Chopin (39), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Lili Boulanger (24), Juan Arriaga (19), and George Gershwin (who died at the age of 38). We should all deeply regret their early passing, not just because of the inherent tragedy of dying so young but because it is impossible not to think about what these composers might have accomplished had they at least lived Beethoven’s life span (56 years), or Sebastian Bach’s (65 […]
Music History Monday: Frankie and Johnny, and Helen and Lee
Feb 19, 2024
I am aware that Valentine’s Day is already 5 days past, but darned if the romantic warm ‘n’ fuzzies aren’t still lingering with me like a rash from poison oak. As such, I will be excused for offering up what I will admit is a belated, but nevertheless Valentine’s Day-related post. Gratitude We should all be grateful that the following Valentine’s Day-related post is not on the lines of those blogs I wrote in 2010 and 2011, blogs written for various websites in my attempt to drum up sales for my Great Courses/Teaching Company Courses. For example, I wrote a couple of Valentine’s Day-themed blogs in 2011, one for Huffpost and the other for J-Date, as in “Jewish-Dating.” For those posts – entitled “Romantic Music” – I was tasked with recommending appropriately “romantic” music for an intimate, tête-à-tête Valentine’s Day evening. This is how they began: “Fresh flowers, chilled champagne, and a candlelight dinner for two; the stereotypical trappings of a successful Valentine’s Day evening. But the sensual menu is still incomplete: smell, taste, touch, and sight are covered, but proper sound is still wanting. Yes indeed, music, the purported feast of the gods, the indispensable aural lubricant for romance, […]
Music History Monday: Unauthorized Use
Feb 12, 2024
February 12 is one of those remarkable days in music history, remarkable for all the notable events that took place on this day. So: before getting to our featured topic, let us acknowledge some of those events and share some links to previous Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts that dealt with those events. On this day in 1812, Beethoven’s student (and friend), the Austrian composer, pianist, and teacher Carl Czerny (1791-1857) performed as the soloist in the premiere of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor.” Czerny was the subject of Music History Monday on July 15, 2019. We wish a heartfelt farewell to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who died on this date in Cairo, Egypt in 1894, at the age of 64. Von Bülow was the subject of both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes just last month, on January 8 and 9,respectively. Birthday greetings to the American composer Roy Harris (1898-1979), who was born on this date in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma. Harris and his Symphony No. 3 were featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on April 9, 2019. On February 12, 1924 – exactly 100 […]
Music History Monday: Getting Back to Work!
Feb 05, 2024
On February 5, 1887 – 137 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25th and second-to-last opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career. But it was a premiere – and an opera – that was a long time coming. Background He was born on October 10, 1813, in the sticks: in the tiny village of Le Roncole, in the northern Italian province of Parma. Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in November 1839, when Verdi was 26 years old. Oberto was a modest success – it received 13 performances – and based on its success, the management at La Scala offered Verdi a contract to compose three more operas. Verdi had begun his second opera – a comedy called A King for a Day – when catastrophe struck: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a horrific, 20-month span between 1839 and 1840. Rendered nearly insane by the deaths, Verdi nevertheless battled through his grief and managed to complete A King for a Day. The opera received its premiere on September 5, […]
We mark the premiere on January 29, 1781 – 243 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, Re di Creta (“Idomeneo, King of Crete”). With a libretto by Giambattista Varesco (1735-1805), which was adapted from a French story by Antoine Danchet (1671-1748), itself based on a play written in 1705 by the French tragedian Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674 -1762; that’s a lot of writing credits!), Idomeneo received its premiere at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, Germany. Idomeneo was a hit, and it constitutes not just Mozart’s first operatic masterwork but, by consensus, the single greatest Italian-language opera seria ever composed! Setting the Biographical Scene On January 15th, 1779, the 23-year-old Wolfgang Mozart returned home to Salzburg after having been away for 15 months. His trip, which had taken him primarily to Mannheim and Paris, had been both a professional and personal disaster. He had left Salzburg with his mother, filled with high hopes, high spirits, and dreams of finding a permanent job and romance. He returned without his mother (who had died in Paris), without a job, without any money, and without the young woman he had met and fallen in love with during the trip (one Aloysia […]
Music History Monday: Johannes Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 1
Jan 22, 2024
We mark the premiere on January 22, 1859 – 165 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, in the German city of Hanover. No other work by Brahms caused him such effort; never before or after did he so agonize over a piece, working and reworking it over and over again. Background On October 1, 1853, the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms showed up at the door of Robert and Clara Schumann’s house in Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland. At the time, Brahms was pretty much a complete unknown outside of his hometown of Hamburg. He was visiting the Schumann’s at the behest of the violinist and conductor Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) who, although only two years older than Brahms, was already world famous. Physically, the young Brahms looked virtually nothing like the bearded, portly, cigar-smoking, bear-like dude of his later years; at twenty he was described as being: “a shy, awkward, nearsighted young man, blonde, delicate, almost wispy, boyish in appearance as well as in manner (the beard was still 22 years away) and with a voice whose high pitch was a constant embarrassment to him.” This 20-year-old kid might not have looked like our familiar image of […]
On January 15, 1972 – 52 years ago today – Don McLean’s folk-rock song American Pie began what would eventually be a four-week stay at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song made the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Don McLean (born 1945) very famous and very rich, and it is considered by many to be one of the greatest songs ever written. No One is Perfect Not a one of us is perfect, and that goes double/triple/quadruple for me. I eat ice cream right out of the carton before putting it back in the freezer, and will guzzle club soda and tonic water out of the bottle before putting it back in the fridge. I will lick a knife with cream cheese or peanut butter on it, lest any of it go to waste, and I will observe my personal ten-to-fifteen second rule when I drop food on the floor (providing one of the cats hasn’t gotten to it first). I don’t always turn my socks right-side-out before putting them in the washing machine, and I have been known to forget to water the plants even when I’ve been reminded to do so. (Regarding the freaking plants: […]
Music History Monday: Pianist, Conductor, Composer, and a Cuckold for the Ages
Jan 08, 2024
We mark the birth on January 8, 1830 – 196 years ago today – of the German pianist, conductor, composer, and cuckold, Hans Guido von Bülow. Born in the Saxon capital of Dresden, he died in a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, on February 12, 1894, at the age of 64. Poor Hans von Bülow. He was one of the top pianists and conductors of his time. His career was closely associated with some of the greatest composers of all time, including Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Famous for his devastating wit and ability to turn a phrase, it was Bülow who coined the alliterative trio of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Sadly, for all of his many accomplishments and deserved renown, he remains best known today (in no small measure because of scandal-mongering sensationalists like myself) as one of the great cuckolds of all time, right up there with myself (cuckolded by my college girlfriend Maureen Makler and an Israeli guy named Avi Luzon); Eddie Fisher (cuckolded by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and Henry VIII (cuckolded, or so we are told, by Ann Boleyn and a wide assortment of various courtiers and hangers-on). Bummer all the way around, […]
Music History Monday: Shostakovich Symphony No. 13
Dec 18, 2023
On December 18, 1962 – 61 years ago today – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow. The symphony stirred up a proverbial hornet’s nest of controversy, and we’re not talking here about your everyday hornet, but rather, those gnarly ‘n’ gnasty Asian Giant Hornets! It was a symphonic premiere that almost didn’t take place, though, in the end, the show did go on. Nevertheless, the authorities (the Soviet authorities, notable for their heavy blue serge suits, vodka breaths, and deficient senses of humor) did everything in their power to squash the symphony out of existence. In this they failed miserably, and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth is today acknowledged as not just one of Shostakovich’s supreme masterworks but as one of the most musically and politically important works composed during the twentieth century. A Good Communist During the late 1950s, Shostakovich was increasingly used by the Soviet authorities as a sort of artistic “figure head,” meant to represent the supposedly “free” Soviet intelligentsia. In 1960, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) – decided to make the 54-year-old Shostakovich the chairman of the newly founded RSFSR, the Russian Union of Composers. […]
On December 11, 1721 – 302 years ago today – Johann Sebastian Bach’s employer, the 27-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (1694-1728), married the 19-year-old Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg (1702-1723). She was the fourth daughter (and youngest child) of Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg (1668-1721) and his first wife, Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde (1672-1708). We can only hope that the kids enjoyed their wedding, because, sadly, their marriage was not fated to last for very long. (Allow me, please, a small bit of editorial bloviation. Speaking as a lower middle-class American kid born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in South Jersey – meaning someone with zero tolerance for all this royalty stuff – I find all of these puffed-up hereditary royals insufferable in both their titles and their actions. Among the actions of the literally hundreds of “princes” and “princesses” of the Holy Roman Empire was to intermarry, for generations, with other such “people of quality,” meaning their cousins. A brief look at their life spans – which are, indeed, representative of their “class” – reveals how well that turned out. Bach’s beloved boss, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, lived for all of 33 years. Leopold’s father, Emmanuel Lebrecht of […]
We mark the premiere on December 4, 1881 – 142 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s one-and-only violin concerto, his Violin Concerto in D major. It received its premiere in Vienna, where it was performed by the violinist Adolf Brodsky and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter. The concerto is, in my humble opinion, Tchaikovsky’s single greatest work and one of a handful of greatest concerti ever composed. Yet its premiere in Vienna elicited one of the most vicious reviews of all time. Unfortunately for him, Tchaikovsky was indeed one of the most over-criticized composers in the history of Western music. (Just asking: do any of us like being criticized? I think not, and please, let’s not dignify that oxymoronic phrase, “constructive criticism” by considering it seriously. I don’t mean to sound over-sensitive, but after a certain age – say, 25 – criticism of any sort, even if it is deserved [we’re talking to you, George Santos] is simply infuriating.) Tchaikovsky was also one of the most over-sensitive people ever to become a major composer, which meant that the sometimes brutal criticism he received drove him to near madness. (Regarding Tchaikovsky’s sensitivity, as a youngster, […]
Music History Monday: Richard Strauss, Stanley Kubrick, Friedrich Nietzsche, and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
Nov 27, 2023
On November 27, 1896 – 127 years ago today – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the German city of Frankfurt. Requests A momentary and applicable (if gratuitous) diversion. Over the course of the first half of my musical life I played a lot of gigs, both in bands and as a solo piano player. The bands ranged from fairly high end to not fairly high end. The best band I ever played with was led by the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; the worst was a disco band the name of which will remain my little secret. The first band in which I played was a rock ‘n’ roll garage band called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Berkeley, California-based Klezmer group called “Hot Borscht.” (“Cold Sun” and “Hot Borscht”: temperature challenged tags in both cases.) As a solo player I’ve played pretty much every sort of gig, from cocktail parties, weddings, sing-a-longs, awards shows, and receptions to a long-running gig at a long defunct restaurant in Oakland, California, called The Pewter House. I played at The Pewter House, in 1978 and 1979, on Friday and Saturday evenings. It […]
Music History Monday: The Great-Grandmother of All Concert Tours: Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour”
Nov 20, 2023
We mark the conclusion on November 20, 2022 – one year ago today – of the North American leg of Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour.” The concert took place at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles; it was the third of three “farewell” concerts held at Dodgers Stadium. The three concerts (on November 17, 19, and 20) saw a total attendance of 142,970 people and grossed $23,462,993. Since the first rock ‘n’ roll concert , which was held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952 (that would be the “Moondog Coronation Ball”), there have been rock ‘n’ roll concert tours and there have been rock ‘n’ roll farewell concert tours. But Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” was in a league of its own and will likely never, ever be matched. The numbers are mind-boggling and bladder-weakening. The tour, interrupted, as it was, by the COVID epidemic, ran for nearly five years, from September 8, 2018, to July 8, 2023. It began in Allentown, Pennsylvania and concluded in Stockholm, Sweden. It consisted of nine separate legs (or “tours within the tour”) and a total of 330 shows. All together, the tour was attended by 6.1 […]
Music History Monday: Gioachino Rossini and the Comedic Mind
Nov 13, 2023
We mark the death on November 13, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of the opera composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, in Paris, at the age of 76. He was one of the most famous and beloved artists of his time, and he remains no less so today. It is my humble opinion that anyone who does not like Rossini’s operas – and, believe it or not, I have met any number of such people in the “rarified” confines of academia – well, such a person is a crank and a humbug, someone averse to melodic brilliance, theatric sparkle, and wit. 10,000 Hours? In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), the English-born Canadian journalist (and staff writer at The New Yorker) Malcolm Gladwell posited his “10,000-hour rule.” Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule asserts that: “the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.” Of course this is complete nonsense. We must conclude that Mr. Gladwell has practiced making absurd statements for well over 10,000 hours, so completely daft is his “rule.” Listen: when I was twenty, I was 5’7” in […]
We mark the birth on November 6, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, and violinist John Philip Sousa. Born in Washington, D.C., Sousa died in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1932, at the age of 77. Timing, Location, Life Experience, and Talent We are told that talent – be it athletic, musical, artistic, culinary, whatever – will only take us so far; that without commitment, hard work, and perseverance “talent” is, in the end, nothing but potential. But success in any field in which innate, gene-given talent is an underlying necessity requires something more than just blood, sweat, and tears: it also requires timing, location, and life experience. We consider. How many potential William Shakespeares have been born in times and places in which vernacular, secular theater was not being cultivated to a revolutionary degree? How many latent Sebastian Bachs lived until one was born into the perfect family and at the perfect time and place to exploit his skill set? How many possible LeBron Jameses existed before the invention of basketball? I would suggest that what made Mozart “Mozart” was not just his talent and work ethic, but that his father was a […]
Music History Monday: Franz Schubert: An Unfinished Symphony; An Unfinished Life
Oct 30, 2023
We mark October 30, 1822 – 201 years ago today – as being the day on which Franz Schubert began what is now known as his Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the “Unfinished Symphony.” Lost just months after Schubert completed the two movements that make up the “Unfinished,” the symphony was heard for the first time in 1865, 43 years after its composition and 37 years after Schubert’s death. A Fable Agreed Upon One of the many clever statements (or in this case, a question) credited to Napoleon Bonaparte is: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” A good question for a despot who was intent on creating his own version of history. However, it is a question that applies as well to our contemporary view of Ludwig van Beethoven, and how we have come to believe his music was perceived in his own time. Today, Beethoven’s mature symphonies (nos. 3 through 9) are rightly perceived as representing his own, personal struggles and revolutionary times. Our mistake – the “fable agreed upon” – occurs when we assume that Beethoven’s contemporaries believed the same thing about his mature symphonies. They did not. For Beethoven’s symphonic contemporaries, […]
Music History Monday: Al Jolson and the Painful Legacy of Blackface
Oct 23, 2023
We mark the death on October 23, 1950 – 73 years ago today – of the Lithuanian-American singer and actor Al Jolson. Born “Asa Yoelson” on May 26, 1886, in the village of Srednik, in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Lithuania, he died of a massive heart attack in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco at the age of 64. He was playing cards with friends when he collapsed; his last words were “Oh … oh, I’m going.” Singing ran deep in the Yoelson clan; his father Moses Yoelson was a cantor. The family immigrated to the United States in 1894 when young Asa was eight years old. Jolson grew up in southwest Washington, D.C., where he began his “career” singing on street corners. From there, it was onto burlesque shows and performing on the vaudeville circuit. In those days, entertainment, local retail, and professional sports were among the few American “industries” open to immigrant Jews. If this sounds painfully familiar to Black Americans, well, so it should. Equally painful is that by 1905, the 19-year-old Jolson began appearing in “blackface”: a holdover from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. […]
Music History Monday: Mathilde Made Him Do It!
Oct 16, 2023
A few, necessary words before moving on to today’s post. Our hearts bleed for the events currently playing out in Israel and Gaza. Frankly, there are no words. Today is also the 14th anniversary of my wife Diane’s death; she died at the age of 35 on October 16, 2009. Again, there are no words. Our grief notwithstanding, we soldier on – as we must – doing what we can to make our individual “worlds” a better place. For me, here on Patreon, that means publishing my blogs and podcasts, and thus – hopefully – allowing us to observe the best of the human spirit through our music. That’s my gig, inadequate though it feels on days like today. We mark the premiere on Wednesday, October 16, 1912 – 111 years ago today – of Arnold Schoenberg’s dazzling, controversial, and in all ways extraordinary work Pierrot Lunaire, at Berlin’s Choralion–saal. The premiere was preceded by a mind-blowing forty rehearsals! (For our information: chamber music premieres typically receive 3 to 5 rehearsals, max. It’s never enough, but that’s just how it is. Forty rehearsals for Pierrot Lunaire? Unheard of!) Happy Coincidences! As those of you who follow me on Patreon are […]
We mark the birth on October 9, 1835 – 188 years ago today – of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, in Paris. He died in that magnificent city on Beethoven’s 151st birthday – on December 16, 1921 – at the age of 86. The Nose Physically, the adult Camille Saint-Saëns was – literally – an odd bird. The music critic Pierre Lalo has left us with this description: “He was short and strangely resembled a parrot: the same sharply curved profile; a beak-like, hooked nose; [with] lively, restless, piercing eyes. He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly, precipitously, with a curiously affected lisp.” In fact, Saint-Saens was as famous for his nose as Beethoven was for his hair. When he concertized in the United States during the 1906-1907 season, Philip Hale wrote in the Boston Symphony program book: “His eyes are almost level with his nose. His eagle-beak would have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed, ‘Give me a man with plenty of nose!’” Please: heaven forbid I should be accused of nasal-shaming here; we should just know about Saint-Saëns second most distinguishing feature before we move on. His principal distinguishing feature was his prodigious genius, a genius […]
Music History Monday: 710 Ashbury Street, San Francisco, California
Oct 02, 2023
Before we get to the central topic of today’s post – that being a particular address in San Francisco – we would wish a most happy birthday to someone we only know by his nickname. Please: no looking ahead and peeking! Today we wish a happy 71st birthday to the English singer, songwriter, bassist, and actor Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE (“Commander of the Order of the British Empire”). He was born at Sir G. B. Hunter Memorial Hospital in Wallsend, Northumberland, England. He grew up near the shipyards there in Wallsend, which itself is located just outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the east coast of northern England. The eldest of four kids, his mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest a milkman. Our birthday boy took up the guitar as a child, but as music didn’t pay the rent, he worked as a bus conductor, a construction worker, a tax officer and, after having attended the Northern County College of Education (today known as Northumbrian University) from 1971 to 1974, he received a teaching credential. He went on to teach for two years at St. Paul’s School in Cramlington, some 9 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His […]
Music History Monday: In a Class by Himself
Sep 25, 2023
We mark the birth on September 25, 1932 – 91 years ago today – of the pianist Glenn Herbert Gold, in Toronto, Canada. (Yes, the surname on “Glenn Gould’s” birth certificate is “Gold.” When the young guy was seven years old his family began informally using the surname “Gould,” though Glenn himself never formally changed his name from “Gold” to “Gould.”) He died there in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at the age of fifty. Superlatives Cut Two Ways! I would observe that ordinarily, when we refer to someone as being “in a class by themselves,” it is usually understood as a compliment: that someone is “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal”; sans pareil”; and so forth. But in fact, superlatives such as these can cut two ways, and are consequently not necessarily complimentary in their entirety. For example. Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961), the so-called “Georgia Peach” was – as I trust we all know – a baseball player during the Deadball Era (circa 1900-1920). He was a transcendent baseball genius (as you know, I do not use the “g-word” – genius – lightly); he was truly “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without […]
Music History Monday: Jimi Hendrix and the 27 Club
Sep 18, 2023
We mark the death on September 18, 1970 – 53 years ago today – of the American guitarist, singer, and songwriter James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He was born in Seattle, Washington on November 27, 1942, making him 27 years old at the time of his death, something we will discuss later in this post. Creating and Mastering a New Idiom “Top ten” lists are entirely subjective and thus often irrelevant. But they can be informative when they agree and as such, indicate a consensus. Here are a few such lists of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, in which I’ve cut to the chase and listed only the “top four.” Rolling Stone, “100 Greatest [Rock] Guitarists”: Writing in Rolling Stone, the American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist Tom Morello explains: “Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could [italics mine] be. His playing was effortless. There’s not one minute of his recorded career that feels like he’s working hard at it – it feels like it’s all flowing through him. He seamlessly weaves chords and single note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music book. His riffs […]
Music History Monday: They Did Not Go Gently…
Sep 11, 2023
9-11; a somber day for us all. A day for reflection, contemplation and perhaps, still, after 22 years, a day to grieve. Far more often than not, Music History Monday is about celebrating the life and accomplishments of a musician or identifying and exploring some great (or small) event in music history. If I chose to, today’s post could celebrate the lives and music of two wonderful composers. On September 11, 1733 – 290 years ago today – the French composer and harpsichordist François Couperin (1668-1733) died in Paris, at the age of 65. The Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt was born 88 years ago today, on September 11, 1935. If we chose to explore an event rather than celebrate the lives and music of François Couperin or Arvo Pärt, this post could mark the 173rd anniversary of the first American concert of “The Swedish Nightingale” – Ms. Jenny Lind (1820-1887) – at the Castle Garden Theater in New York City, in a performance promoted by none-other-than P. T. Barnum. (For our information: Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was one of the most highly regarded operatic sopranos of her time. After a sensational European career, she retired from the opera […]
Music History Monday: On the Spectrum
Sep 04, 2023
We mark the birth on September 4, 1824 – 199 years ago today – of the composer and organist Josef Anton Bruckner, in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, which today is a suburb of the city of Linz. He died in the Austrian capital of Vienna on October 11, 1896, at the age of 72. It was Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) who famously said that Bruckner was: “Half simpleton, half God.” Strangeness I would be so bold as to suggest that there is such a thing as a “strangeness spectrum,” a scale of personality oddness that stretches from the merely quirky to the genuinely weird. If we were to consider such a spectrum as a scale from one to ten, with one being “quirky” (or idiosyncratic); five being “eccentric” (or odd); and ten being really “weird” (or bizarre), then the personality of the composer and organist Anton Bruckner would lie at about an eleven: an off-the-charts “downright whacky” (and even, at times, unnervingly creepy). I know, I know: many of you are probably thinking something on the lines of “so what? He was a professional composer. Show me a major composer besides, perhaps, Joseph Haydn and Antonin Dvořák who wasn’t a […]
We mark the premiere performance on August 28, 1850 – 173 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in the central German city of Weimar. The premiere was conducted by none-other-than Wagner’s friend and supporter (and future father-in-law!) Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Liszt had chosen the premiere date of August 28 in honor of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on August 28, 1749, 101 years to the day before Lohengrin’s premiere. The “opera” – the last of Wagner’s stage works to be designated by him as being an “opera” – was brilliantly received and has been a mainstay of the international repertoire since that first performance. Alas, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not in attendance there at the premiere. With a price on his head, he had been de-facto exiled from Germany thanks to his activities in the Dresden Uprising of May of 1849. Wagner did not hear a full performance of Lohengrin until 1861, 11 years later, in Vienna. Be informed that both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will deal with Lohengrin. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will focus on three video performances, comparing video excerpts from each […]
Music History Monday: Where is the “Sin” in “Synthesizer?: Robert Moog and “Synthetic” Sound
Aug 21, 2023
We mark the death on August 21, 2005 – 18 years ago today – of the American engineer and electronic music pioneer Robert Moog. Born in New York City on May 23, 1934, he died of a brain tumor in Asheville, North Carolina, at the age of 71. First things first: let us pronounce this fine man’s surname properly. It is not pronounced as “moo-g.” “Moo-g” is a sound made by a cow after she painfully stubs her hoof. Despite its double-o, the name is pronounced “mogue,” as in “vogue.” Moog didn’t invent the sound synthesizer. Rather, he (and his inventing “partners,” the composer Herbert Arnold “Herb” Deutsch, 1932-2022 and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Wendy Carlos, born 1939) democratized the thing, making it affordable, portable, and playable enough to be bought and used by anyone who could get around a piano-like keyboard. Our Game Plan Today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single post, one that I’ve divided in half and will post on two successive days. As my Patreon subscribers know, I’ve done this before; it’s no big deal and I will certainly do it again. However, for those of you […]
Music History Monday: Worst. Timing. Ever
Aug 14, 2023
On August 14, 1962 – 61 years ago today – the manager of the Beatles Brian Epstein made a phone call to the drummer Ringo Starr, inviting him to join the band. As I suspect we are all aware, Starr said “yes.” Two days later, on August 16, Epstein had the unenviable task of firing the band’s present drummer, Randolph Peter “Pete” Best (born Randolph Peter Scanland, 1941), who had been the Beatles’ drummer for almost exactly two years, since August 1960. Best’s firing, effective on August 18, 1962, was, for Best, the worst timing ever. 17 days later, on September 4, 1962, a reconfigured Beatles with Ringo Starr as drummer recorded their first #1 hit and went from nobodies to superstars in the span of a few weeks. Pete Best (Born 1941) Peter Best was born on November 24, 1941, in Madras, which was then part of British India. His father, a marine engineer named Donald Peter Scanland, died during World War Two. Pete’s mother Mona went on to marry a British officer from Liverpool named Johnny Best, with whom she had a second son, this one named Rory. In 1945, the Best family returned to Britain on […]
Music History Monday: All Hail The King!
Aug 07, 2023
We mark an online auction that concluded on August 7, 2008 – 15 years ago today – at which Elvis Presley’s white, sweat-stained, high-collared, plunging V-necked jumpsuit, decorated with a dazzling, hand-embroidered blue and gold peacock – sold for $300,000. (Because I know you want to know, the jumpsuit is cinched at the waist by a wide belt decorated in gold medallions in a design meant to resemble the eye of a peacock feather, all of it an ongoing reflection of Elvis’ fascination with peacocks as being his personal good luck symbol.) The outfit cost Elvis a cool $10,000. It was designed by the Los Angeles couturier Bill Belew (1931-2008), who designed all of The King’s stage wardrobe between 1968 and 1977. Talk about provenance (something we’ll define and discuss in just a bit)! Aside from Elvis’ personal sweat stains (do they still . . . give off an odor?), he performed wearing the jumpsuit for the better part of a year. Elvis first wore the “peacock” at a concert at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 11, 1974. He then performed wearing it in Las Vegas and wore it as well on the cover of his album “Promised […]
Before we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story. It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me. The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time. And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro). So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it. Much of the casting was easy. Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, […]
We mark the birth on July 24, 1880 – 143 years ago today – of the Swiss-born American composer and educator Ernest Bloch, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He died in Portland, Oregon, on July 15, 1959, at the age of 78. Establishing a Genealogy People trace their family trees for all sorts of reasons: to establish family connections, to collect family medical information, to meet other people engaged in such research, and so forth. But at the root (pun intended) of these (and other) reasons to establish a family tree is the issue of self-identity: the desire to connect with oneself by connecting with one’s ancestors: learning what we can of who they were; where they came from; what sort of lives they led; and what they accomplished. With the advent of genetic testing sites like “23 and Me,” “AncestryDNA,” “LivingDNA,” and “HomeDNA,” the whole family tree trip has taken a crazy-giant step forward, in that our family trees have gone from saplings to 400-year-old oaks. A couple of years ago, bored to death during the pandemic and unable to resist any longer, my wife and I were so tested using the site “23 and Me.” Here are […]
Music History Monday: Elaine Stritch: An Appreciation
Jul 17, 2023
We mark the death on July 17, 2014 – 9 years ago today – of the Broadway and television actress Elaine Stritch, in Birmingham, Michigan, at the age of 89. I personally have a soft spot in my heart for Ms. Stritch the size of Manitoba. She was your quintessential brassy, tart-tongued (a euphemism for foul mouthed), cigarette smoking, alcohol-soaked blonde who took nothing from no one and could sell a song like nobody’s business. (Please note that I didn’t say “sing a song” but rather, “sell a song.” Her ability to do so will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.) It is my great hope that by the time you finish this Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, you will have come to love her almost as much as I do. My decision to profile Elaine Stritch is, in my estimation, a great sign of respect, given the other musical events of the day. Both the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and the singer Billie Holiday died on this date, in 1967 and 1959, respectively. (Be assured that both of these luminaries – Coltrane and Holiday – will receive their due on these pages sooner […]
Music History Monday: When You Dance with the Devil
Jul 10, 2023
We mark the birth on July 10, 1895 – 128 years ago today – of the German composer and educator Carl Heinrich Maria Orff. Born in Munich, he died in that city on March 29, 1982, at the age of 86. The Good News Orff lived a long and productive life. He was a composer of considerable talent whose works draw on influences as diverse as ancient Greek tragedy and medieval chant, Baroque theater, and Bavarian peasant life. His so-called “scenic cantata”, Carmina Burana (of 1936), remains an audience favorite today. Along with the German educator Gunild Keetman, Orff developed a musical education method in the 1920s called the Orff Schulwerk, or the “Orff Approach,” a methodology that integrates music, movement, speech, and drama in a manner based on what children do instinctively, and that is play. Today, the Orff Approach is employed around the world and is one of the four major developmental music educational methodologies. The other three are the Kodály Method (created by the Hungarian composer and educator Zoltán Kodály, 1882-1967); the Suzuki Method (created by the Japanese violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki, 1898-1998), and Dalcroze Eurhythmics (created by the Swiss composer and educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1865-1950). […]
Music History Monday: Leoš Janáček: Composer, Patriot, and Patriot Composer!
Jul 03, 2023
We mark the birth on July 3, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the Moravian (meaning Czech) composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher Leoš Janáček. Born in the village of Hukvaldy in what today is the Czech Republic, he died on August 12, 1928 in the city of Ostrava, today the capital of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It’s All in the Name! Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer known for his self-help guides to self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. If he were alive today, he’d be on the speaking circuit, doing Ted Talks and, perhaps, making a fortune through a video self-help network. But given the comparatively limited technology of his day, Carnegie made his living writing books, books with such titles as The Art of Public Speaking (first published in 1915); How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962). But Dale Carnegie’s most famous and influential tome – one that remains in print today after 87 years! – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936. Among the thousands of assuredly useful tidbits […]
Music History Monday: You’ve Got to be Kidding
Jun 26, 2023
‘Fessing Up Okay: you’re going to have to bear with me for one of my idiotic tangents, one that nevertheless explains precisely how I feel about Mozart and his music at a gut level. What follows is a deep confession, something I’ve never shared before. Be forewarned though, that once you’ve read and/or heard this confession (depending upon whether you’re reading Music History Monday as a blog or listening to it as a podcast), it cannot be unread or unheard. Here goes. Since childhood, I have had a deep and abiding affection for horror films, the gnarlier, the gnastier, the better. Yes, color me juvenile if you must, but there it is. Among the very greatest masters of the genre is the American filmmaker John Carpenter (born 1948), whose oeuvre includes such classics as the Halloween franchise, Escape From New York, Escape from L.A., Christine, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Prince of Darkness. But for my dinaro, Carpenter’s magnum opus is The Thing (which was released in 1982). Critically panned when it first opened, it is today considered (by those of us who consider it at all) to be a masterwork of graphic, on occasion inadvertently […]
Music History Monday: Our Kind of Musician
Jun 19, 2023
We mark the birth on June 19, 1810 – 213 years ago today – of the German virtuoso violinist and composer, Ferdinand David. Born in the exact same house in Hamburg that saw Felix Mendelssohn’s birth 16½ months before, David died while on vacation in Switzerland on July 18, 1873, at the age of 63. We will get to the specifics of Maestro David’s life and career and why, to my mind, he is “our kind of musician” in a moment. But first, with your indulgence, a brief bit of editorializing. When the Performer Becomes the Show Marlon Brando (1924-2004). Yes, Marlon Brando: actor, director, activist, and father of at least 16 children (at least 16 children). I would respectfully suggest that a movie with Marlon Brando is not so much a movie in which Marlon Brando plays a role as it is a movie in which Marlon Brando plays Marlon Brando playing a role. Accordingly, I would assert that in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando portraying Stanley Kowalski; in The Godfather, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone; in Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Colonel Walter Kurtz, and so forth. Brando […]
Music History Monday: Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea
Jun 12, 2023
We mark the birth on June 12, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He died of cancer after a brief illness on February 9, 2021, at his home just outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, at the age of 79. Chick Corea’s spectacularly varied, 50-plus year career as a professional musician offers an object lesson in both the necessity and futility of labels. “Spectacularly varied” is the operative phrase in the sentence above. In the mid-1960s Corea became deeply involved in Latin American music, having broken in with the Cuban bandleader and percussionist Mongo Santamaria (1917-2003) and the Puerto Rican-American bandleader and percussionist Willie Bobo (whose real name was Willie Correa, no relation, 1934-1983). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Corea played with the Miles Davis (1926-1991) band (he played piano on seven of Miles Davis’ albums, including Davis’ classic Bitches Brew album of 1969). As such, the Chick-Meister was a full-participant in Davis’ electrified experiment in fusion, in synthesizing jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. In 1970 and 1971 Corea led his own, avant-garde, free jazz band called Circle. In 1972, Corea formed his jazz/Latin […]
Music History Monday: Never Eat Anything That Can Bite You Back!
Jun 05, 2023
On June 5, 1977 – 46 years ago today – the shock-rock superstar Alice Cooper’s pet boa constrictor and concert co-star, a creature rather cleverly named “Julius Squeezer,” suffered what turned out to be a fatal bite from a live rat it was eating for breakfast. No doubt: Julius probably should have ordered the scrambled eggs and toast, and in doing so would have heeded the advice offered by the title of this post: “never eat anything that can bite you back.” This is a heartbreaking tale, a tragic love story between a boy and his reptile, a love story brought to an ignominious end by an alpha-rodent. But it is also a story of hope, renewal, and love rekindled, as the auditions Alice Cooper subsequently held for a replacement snake allowed him to discover his new boa, a precious girl-snake named “Angel.” Now of course we’re going to expand on this saga of reptilian eradication-by-rambunctious-rat and subsequent replacement in just a bit. But first, we’d observe two other, date-relevant items. First, we mark the birth on June 5, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist Martha Argerich, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. To my ear and mind, […]
On May 29, 1860 – 163 years ago today – the composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz was born in Camprodón, Spain. Albéniz was a brilliant pianist and, as evidenced by his 12-movement suite for piano entitled Iberia (written between 1905-1909), a composer of genius. However, before we can get to Maestro Albéniz, I would beg your indulgence while we celebrate this remarkable day in music history! Also born on this date was the Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who came into this world in 1893 in Brno, in what today is the Czech Republic; he died in Los Angeles in 1957. The Romanian-born Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was born on this day in 1922 in Brâila, Romania; he died in Paris in 2001. The American singer, songwriter, and composer Danny Elfman was born on this day in 1953; the singer LaToya Jackson in 1956; and the Academy Award and Grammy Award winning singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge in 1961. Sadly but not unexpectedly, notable people from the world of music passed away on this date as well. May 29,1910, saw the death of Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg;he was 73 years old. On this day in 1911, the […]
Music History Monday: Giuseppe Verdi and the Requiem for Alessandro Manzoni
May 22, 2023
We mark the first performance on May 22, 1874 – 149 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, written in memory of the Italian novelist, poet, and patriot Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1872).” Background In June of 1870, the 57-year-old Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) agreed to compose an opera for the brand-new Cairo Opera Theater. The Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt personally handled the negotiations, as the opera was to celebrate nothing less than the opening of the Suez Canal. No expense was spared, either on the opera or on Verdi, who received the unheard-of commissioning fee of 150,000 gold francs: roughly $1,935,000 today! The opera – Aida – received its premiere in Cairo on December 24, 1871. With no disrespect intended towards either the Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt or the Cairo Opera Theater, the opera’s real premiere – as far as Verdi and the larger opera world were concerned – took place six weeks later: at La Scala in Milan on February 8, 1872. That Italian premiere was a triumph, the greatest of Verdi’s career to date. He himself received 32 curtain calls! The only contemporary Italian artist who could possibly be considered as beloved as Giuseppe Verdi was the […]
Music History Monday: All the Music That’s Fit to Print
May 15, 2023
On May 15, 1501 – 522 years ago today – the first polyphonic (that is, multi-part) music printed using moveable type was released to the public by the Venice-based publisher Ottaviano dei Petrucci. (The publication features a dedication dated May 15, 1501, so we assume that this corresponds with its release date.) The publication was an anthology of works entitled Harmonice musices odhecaton A, meaning “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A”. (Volumes “B” and “C” followed in 1502 and 1503, respectively). In fact, “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” consists of 96 (not “100”, as the title claims) instrumental works and French-language songs by some of the most famous composers of the day, as well as some anonymous works as well. Those famous composers represented in the anthology – which include Josquin de Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel, and Alexander Agricole – were all originally from northern France and southern Belgium: the so-called “Franco-Flemish” composers from the “oltre montani” (“the other side of the Alps”) who were so popular in Italy at the time. I am aware that that previous, opening paragraph, filled with relatively obscure Italian and Franco-Flemish names, musicological rubric, and […]
Music History Monday: Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or What Happens in Oakland Does Not Stay in Oakland
May 08, 2023
We mark the birth on May 8, 1829 – 194 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans. He died, all-too-young, on December 18, 1869 at the age of forty, in exile in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Events that occurred in September of 1865 in San Francisco, California and across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland led directly to Gottschalk’s “exile” to South America. Those frankly tawdry events, most unfairly, have been recounted way too often and as a result, they have come to obscure Gottschalk’s memory as a composer, pianist, patriot, and philanthropist. That’s because people like me continue to write about them as if they, somehow, encapsulated the totality of who and what Louis Moreau Gottschalk was. I hate myself for having participated in this unholy example of scandal mongering – I do – and I stand before you filled with shame and remorse. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, I fully intend to rehash these salacious events here and now with the understanding that following that rehash, we will spend the remainder of this post and all of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post doing penance, by providing a proper account of the cultural […]
Music History Monday: The Enduring Miracle
May 01, 2023
On May 1, 1786 – on what was also a Monday, 237 years ago today – a miracle was heard for the first time: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Some 100 years later, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote this about The Marriage of Figaro: “Every number in Figaro is for me a marvel; I simply cannot fathom how anyone could create anything so perfect. Such a thing has never been done, not even by Beethoven.” Herr Brahms, when you’re right, you’re right, and this case you are so right! 237 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed. Composing an Italian Language Opera for the Viennese On May 7th, 1783 – some three years before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro – Mozart wrote the following in a letter to his father back in Salzburg: “The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti [meaning literally “little book,” the script of an opera] but I have […]
Music History Monday: A Voice Like Buttah!
Apr 24, 2023
We mark the birth on April 24, 1942 – 81 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker Barbara Joan “Barbra” Streisand, in Brooklyn, New York. But first, before we get to the magnificent Babs, a brief but spirited edition of “This Day In Music History . . .” okay, “stupid” is too strong a word, so let’s just call it, “This Day In Music History . . . Dumb.” On April 24, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the American musician, actress, singer, and songwriter Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) declared on her website that in order to help the environment, the use of toilet paper should be limited to: “only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.” We cannot help but wonder precisely what “pesky occasions” Crowe might be referring to. Additionally, we must assume that Ms. Crowe’s proscription again TP overuse was intended to be voluntary, as the issues surrounding enforcement are, indeed, troubling. Sheryl Crow’s environmental concerns extended, as well, to what she deemed to be the profligate use of napkins. She went so far as to design a […]
Music History Monday: I Left My Nerve in San Francisco
Apr 17, 2023
We mark the final San Francisco performance – on the evening of Tuesday, April 17, 1906, 117 years ago today – of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1874-1921). That performance at the no longer extant Grand Opera House at No. 2 Mission Street (between 2nd and 3rd Streets) was not intended to have been Caruso’s last local appearance, but circumstances beyond his control assured that it was! Enrico Caruso (1874-1921) Caruso was born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, on February 24th, 1874. He was the third of seven children (and not the nineteenth of twenty-one, as Caruso himself often claimed!). Following in the professional footsteps of his father, Marcellino Caruso, who was a mechanic, young Enrico was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer at the age of 11. He “discovered” his voice singing in a church choir, and as a teenager he made a few extra dinero singing on the streets and in the cafes of Naples. At the age of 18, Caruso had something of a revelation, when he used money he had earned as a singer to buy his first new pair of shoes. Realizing his real professional potential, he began taking voice lessons, and his […]
Music History Monday: A Mama’s Boy, and Proud of It!
Apr 10, 2023
We mark the premiere on April 10, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ magnificent A German Requiem, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra. Johannes Brahms, Again? I know I’ve been going heavy on Brahms (1833-1897) as of late. I would apologize if he wasn’t so fascinating a person and if his music wasn’t so darned good, but he was a fascinating person and his music is superb, so our continued attention is well deserved. It’s not as if we didn’t have other topical options for this date. For example, on this date in 1970 – 53 years ago today – Paul McCartney “officially” announced the split-up of The Beatles. Okay; whatever; if there’s one topic that’s gotten more play here in Music History Monday than Bach, Brahms and Beethoven combined, it’s the fourth “B”: The Beatles. The breakup of The Beatles? Sorry, but yawn. The “Wilhelm Scream” Then there’s this. April 10, 1921, marks the birth – 102 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actor, and comedian Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley, in Erick Oklahoma (he died in Nashville, Tennessee on September 16, 2003, at the age of 82). For the vast majority of […]
Music History Monday: The Death of Johannes Brahms
Apr 03, 2023
We mark the death on April 3, 1897 – 126 years ago today – of the German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms at the age of 63. One of the great ones and along with Sebastian Bach and Louis van Beethoven one of the three bees – the killer bees – Brahms was born in the Hanseatic port city of Hamburg on May 7, 1833. We will get to Maestro Brahms in just a moment but first – with appropriate fanfare – I offer up this edition of “This Day in Music History Stupid.” Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust; Be Kind to My Ashes, Though Snort if You Must On April 3, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the Reuters news agency reported that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (born December 18, 1943) admitted in a soon-to-be published interview with NME (New Musical Express) magazine that he had snorted his father’s ashes during a drug binge. I think we’ve all wondered the same thing at some point or another: given his personal habits and corpse-like appearance, how and why is Keith Richards still alive, yet still performing at nearly 80 years of age? Richards would seem to be […]
Music History Monday: Papa’s Last Appearance
Mar 27, 2023
A quick comment in reference to the title of today’s post, “Papa’s Last Appearance.” Not that you really need me to tell you, but by “Papa” we are not referring to Papa John Schnatter, who founded “Papa John’s Pizza” in 1984. Neither are we referring to the stand-up comedian Tom Papa, the sportscaster Greg Papa, the American rock band Papa Roach, nor the American Paul Karason (1950-2013), also-known-as “Papa Smurf,” whose skin turned to a purplish-blue color as a result of ingesting a home-made brew of silver chloride colloid. By “Papa,” we are referring to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) who was once-and-forever nicknamed “papa” while still in his thirties by the grateful musicians who worked for him! We mark what turned out to be the final public appearance of “Papa” Joseph Haydn on March 27, 1808 – 215 years ago today – at a concert held in honor of his upcoming 76th birthday. The gala concert, held at Vienna’s University Hall, featured a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, which had been completed ten years before, in 1798. The concert was what we would call today a “star-studded event”: everyone who was anyone in Vienna’s musical world was there, including […]
Music History Monday: The First Night: Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville
Feb 20, 2023
We mark the premiere performance, on February 20, 1816 – 207 years ago today – of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera masterwork, The Barber of Seville, at Rome’s famed Teatro Argentina. The Natural Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29 (bummer of a birthday!), 1792 in the Italian city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He died of colorectal cancer on November 13, 1868, in his villa in Passy, which today is located in Paris’ chic, 16th arrondisement. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839) and Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827). Rossini’s father Giuseppe was a professional trumpet and horn player, and as such was Gioachino’s first music teacher. (The adult Rossini liked to say that: “Sono figlio di corna,” “I am the son of a horn!”) “Son of a horn” he might have been, but when it came to his real musical education, it was as the son of an opera singer. Rossini’s mother Anna was, at the time of his birth in 1792, a seamstress by trade. But changes in Italian society allowed her to make a second career as a professional singer. According to Rossini’s biographer Richard Osborne (Rossini; Oxford University Press): “Italian Society began to […]
Music History Monday: A Man for All Symptoms: The Death of Wagner
Feb 13, 2023
We mark the death, on February 13, 1883 – 140 years ago today – of the German composer Richard Wagner, in Venice, at the age of 69. He had been born in the Saxon city of Leipzig on May 22, 1813. Wagner’s Health Writing in Hektoen International – A Journal of Medical Humanities, George Dunea, MD, states that: “[Richard] Wagner was an extraordinarily highly strung individual.” Do you think, Dr. Dunea? In fact, he was a pathologically overwrought individual, a certifiable narcissist who required maximum stimulation at all times whether he was awake or asleep. (Yes, even asleep. As a young child he kept his many siblings awake at night by shouting and talking while he slept.) Wagner was not born a particularly healthy person, and as an adult, his personal habits and constant excitability exacted a considerable toll on his already compromised constitution. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1903 (Gould, George M.; The Ill-health of Richard Wagner, JAMA 1903; 51: 293 and 368; as articles go, this is an oldie but a goodie!), Dr. George Gould described Wagner as having the collective symptoms of: “[Thomas] DeQuincy [best known for his Confessions of […]
Music History Monday: Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani
Feb 06, 2023
We mark the death on February 6, 1497 – 526 years ago today – of the composer and singer Johannes Ockeghem, in Tours, France, at the age of 87 (or so). He was born circa 1410 in the French-speaking city of Saint-Ghislain in what today is Belgium, about 5 miles from the border with France. The title of this post – “Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani” – employs a Italian word that may not be familiar to everybody: “Oltremontani.” It’s a word that means, literally, “those from the other side of the mountains.” The mountains in question are the alps, so in fact, generally, the word refers to people “from the other side of the alps”: from northern and northwestern Europe. But when used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it meant something quite more specific than that: it referred to musicians from what today are northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. Johannes Ockeghem was just such an oltremontano, having been born in Belgium close to the northern border of France. Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497) “Born circa 1410, died 1497.” Back in the fifteenth century, if someone became famous – and at the time of his death, Johannes Ockeghem […]
Music History Monday: Francis Poulenc: “a bit of monk and a bit of hooligan”
Jan 30, 2023
We mark the death on January 30, 1963 – exactly sixty years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc, in Paris. A Parisian from head to toe, he was born in the tres chic 8th arrondisement in that magnificent city on January 7, 1899. He died of a heart attack not far from where he’d been born, in his flat opposite the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’ 6th arrondisement. Before we can get down with the magnifique Monsieur Poulenc, we have an important event in rock ‘n’ roll history to mark. On January 30, 1969 – 54 years ago today – the Beatles, joined by the keyboard player Billy Preston, performed their final live concert. The venue was unusual: a hastily constructed stage on the rooftop of their five-story Apple Corps (their record company) headquarters, at 3 Savile Row: smack dab in the middle of the fashion district in London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood. (I cannot resist the joke: how do you get a rock band onto a roof? You tell them the beer is on the house.) Badaboom. A couple of weeks before the rooftop concert eventually took place, Paul McCartney had suggested that the […]
Music History Monday: Paul Robeson: Truly Larger Than Life
Jan 23, 2023
We mark the death on January 23, 1976 – 47 years ago today – of the American bass-baritone singer, stage and screen actor, civil rights activist, professional football player, and graduate of Columbia University Law School Paul Robeson at the age of 77, in Philadelphia. Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, the son of an escaped slave turned Presbyterian minister, Robeson had more intellectual, artistic, and athletic gifts and lived more lives than any 10 (20? 50? 100?) so-called “normal” people. And he had to fight for every one of those lives, growing up a black person in early twentieth century America. “Larger than Life” The English-language idiom “larger than life” describes people “who are better and stronger and smarter than the average Joe”: individuals imbued with characteristics and abilities far beyond those of “ordinary” human beings. Typically, the idiom is reserved for fictional characters, who are gifted with superhuman (or nearly so) qualities and abilities. The heroes, warriors, gods, and goddesses of myths and legends are, by definition, “larger than life.” Achilles, Hercules, Zeus, Odysseus, Thor, Brünnhilde (and many, many more) would all qualify. Comic book characters and superheroes are likewise, by their nature, “larger than […]
Music History Monday: The Blockhead – Anton Felix Schindler – and Beethoven’s Conversation Books
Jan 16, 2023
We mark the death on January 16, 1864 – 159 years ago today – of Anton Felix Schindler, in Frankfurt, at the age of 68. Born on June 13, 1795, in the town of Medlov in today’s Czech Republic, Schindler was, for a time, Beethoven’s “factotum”: his secretary and general assistant. He was also a scoundrel and a profiteer, who after Beethoven’s death lied about his relationship with Beethoven, stole irreplaceable objects and documents from Beethoven’s estate, and falsified and destroyed many of those documents (some of which he later sold off) in order to make himself look better in the eyes of history. Boo-hoo for Schindler: the “making-himself-look-better-in-the-eyes-of-history” thing didn’t work, and today he is regarded as the patron saint of lying and thieving employees. Among the Beethovenian documents Anton Schindler took upon himself to “remove for safekeeping” were Beethoven’s so-called “Conversation Books.” Beethoven’s Conversation Books It took an agonizingly long time for Beethoven to go completely deaf. His hearing loss began in 1796, in his 26th year: a buzzing in his ears and a slow but progressive loss of high frequency hearing. By the fall of 1802, Beethoven had cut himself off from much of his world out […]
Music History Monday: An Impresario for the Ages: Rudolf Bing
Jan 09, 2023
We mark the birth on January 9, 1902 – 121 years ago today – of the opera impresario Rudolf Bing, in Vienna Austria. The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1950 to 1972, Bing died in Yonkers, New York in September 1997 at the age of 95. His was a long life by any standard, but particularly by the standards of an opera impresario, whose professional livesare marked by a degree of life-threatening stress and anxiety that, perhaps, only has its equal in combat and divorce court. Impresario The term “impresario” originated in the world of Italian opera in the 1750s. Deriving from the Italian word “impresa,” which is “an enterprise or undertaking,” an impresario was that single individual who organized, financed, and produced operas (and later, concerts). It was a job similar to what a film producer does today; a high stress job not for the faint of heart or weak of bladder. Apropos of the impresarios of his day, the great Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote in reference to how he went about composing his opera overtures: “Wait until the evening before the opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it’s the […]
Music History Monday: Getting Personal: Édith Piaf
Dec 19, 2022
We mark the birth on December 19, 1915 – 107 years ago today – of the French singer and actress Édith Piaf in the Belleville district of Paris. Born Édith Giovanna Gassion, she came to be considered France’s national chanteuse, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century, a French combination of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Billie Holiday. She died in Plascassier, near the French Riviera city of Nice, on October 10, 1963, all-too young at the age of 47. Way Too Personal I will be forgiven for making today’s post personal. (It’s just going to happen sometimes.) I was first married in August of 1981. I was 27 and my betrothed was 23 at the time of our marriage. We were . . . young. Frankly, chronological years notwithstanding, I was far “younger” than my bride. Together, we made two wonderful babies: our daughter Rachel, now 36 years old, and our son Samuel, now 32. Our marriage lasted for seventeen years. Based on the frankly terrifying statistics out there, our marriage lasted considerably longer than the seven-to-eight-year average of the 50% of marriages that fail in the United States. Three years after our […]
Music History Monday: The Garden State Hall of Fame
Dec 12, 2022
December 12 is a crazy day in American jazz and popular music history, a day that saw the births of five – count ‘em, five – significant musicians, three of whom have something very special in common. Let us first recognize the birthdays of the two jazz/pop musicians who do not share this special commonality. We start with a big, happy birthday to the jazz singer Joe Williams, who was born on December 12, 1918, 104 years ago today. Born Joseph Goreed, he came into this world in Cordele, Georgia, and left it on March 29, 1999, in Las Vegas at the age of 80. Big Joe had a gorgeous, warm baritone voice that was as smooth as a peeled onion. Long associated with Count Basie (1904-1984) and his big band, Williams sings one of his trademark songs – Alright, Okay, You Win – with the Basie Band in the link below, recorded circa 1970. Another big, happy birthday to the singer, drummer, and percussionist Sheila E. (“E” for Escovedo), who was born right here in Oakland, California, on December 12, 1957, 65 years ago today. Sheila Escovedo came by her musical bona fides honestly. Her father is the Latin […]
Music History Monday: Myths of Mayhem and Murder!
Dec 05, 2022
Here We Go Again . . . It has come to pass. I have been writing these Music History Monday posts for long enough that Monday dates and events have begun to repeat. And as a result, December 5, which was a Monday in 2016, once again falls on a Monday today. Ordinarily there are enough events on any given Monday to keep me from having to deal with the same topic. But December 5 is a special date for one particularly terrible musical event, an event that demands to be revisited. Dates That Will Live in Infamy We consider: there are some dates that, for events that marked them, will live in infamy. I would suggest that what qualifies as an “infamous date” – that is, a date we will all remember to our dying day – is generally dependent upon when one was born. For example, for someone born in the United States in 1854 (that’s 100 years before I was born), those dates of infamy might include: March 6, 1857: the date of the Dred Scott decision, which saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule 7-2 that an enslaved human being (Dred Scott) who had resided in a […]
Music History Monday: Aaron Copland in New York
Nov 28, 2022
We mark the New York premiere on November 28, 1925 – 97 years ago today – of Aaron Copland’s Music for the Theater, at a League of Composer’s concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at New York’s Town Hall. The actual world premiere of the piece took place eight days before, when Koussevitzky conducted Music for the Theater in Boston. But Copland was a native New Yorker and Music from the Theater is about the New York theatrical and musical world. So – and for this you’ll have to excuse me, particularly the Bean Town babies among us – the so-called “Boston Premiere” was nothing but a warmup, a preview, a promo, an hors d’oeuvre akin to trying out a Broadway play in New Haven or Philadelphia before taking it to the house, to the big time, the Apple, to the city that never sleeps, to the burg so big they had to name it twice: New York, New York! Coming Clean We all have to make decisions, the vast majority of which are, gratefully, relatively insignificant. (I cannot imagine having to make decisions that would affect the health and welfare of entire communities. It’s difficult enough for me to figure […]
Music History Monday: Henry Purcell and British Music Restored!
Nov 21, 2022
We mark the death on November 21, 1695 – 327 years ago today – of the English composer and organist Henry Purcell, in London. He lies buried today in a place of singular honor, adjacent to the organ on which he performed in Westminster Abbey in London. He had been born there in London on (or about) September 10, 1659, making him only 36 years old when he died. But like both Mozart and Schubert after him, Purcell’s terribly premature death did not preclude him from writing a tremendous amount of music of the very highest quality. Purcell’s music – sacred and secular – utterly defined his time, a time known in British history as the Restoration. Timing I know that the realtors among us will tell us that in the end, everything is all about location, location, and location. Well, sorry to disagree but, in fact, in the end, nothing is more important than timing, timing, and timing. Hey: I love the city of Paris; it is my favorite urban location. But a successful visit to that magnificent location is dependent on timing. Had I chosen to visit in August 1348, I would have arrived simultaneously with the Black […]
Music History Monday: The Other Prodigious Mendelssohn: Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel
Nov 14, 2022
We mark the birth on November 14, 1805 – 217 years ago today – of the German composer, pianist, wife, mother, and hausfrau Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. She died on May 14, 1847, all-too-young at the age of 41, at her home in the Prussian capital of Berlin. Fanny Cäcille Mendelssohn was the first child (of an eventual four) of Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn. Lea Mendelssohn took one look at her infant daughter’s hands and famously exclaimed: “Look! She has Bach fugue hands.” And that she did. The next Mendelssohn child was born three years and three months later, Fanny’s baby brother – the “genius” – Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). “Genius” The word “genius” is so overused as to be almost useless. Nevertheless, it is necessary that we define it and then discuss an aspect its usage. Definition. Admittedly, while there is no precise, scientific way to measure and define genius, the following definition, by Walter Isaacson, will do. (Isaacson “knows” genius; his biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci are must reads.) “Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses […]
Music History Monday: Listening to the Thundah from Down Undah
Nov 07, 2022
We mark the birth on November 7, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of the dramatic coloratura soprano Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, in Sydney, Australia. She died on October 10, 2010, in Montreux, Switzerland at the age of 83. I want you all to know upfront that Joan Sutherland was the first singer on whom I had a major crush, both because of her stupendous voice (hey: she wasn’t called “La Stupenda!” for nothing) and for reasons to be described below. In this post I will be using the occasion of Ms. Sutherland’s birth to not just talk about her extraordinary talent, but to wax nostalgic, for which I trust you’ll indulge me. While that nostalgia might dominate this post, be assured that tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will be dedicated entirely to Joan Sutherland’s artistry and recordings. Records and Record Players I’m going to talk about “sound reproducing equipment” for a bit. Please: though it might, momentarily, appear that I am geeking out here, I am – in fact – not. Because for people of a certain age, our records and the gear on which we played our records were for our younger selves (and perhaps […]
Music History Monday: The Grandmother of All Drop Parties
Oct 31, 2022
Before moving forward, the title of this post – “The Grandmother of All Drop Parties!” – demands an explanation-slash-definition. A “grandmother” is the mother of a parent, though in this usage, thank you, it is meant to indicate the ultimate example of what follows, as in “the grandmother of all drop parties.” I know you knew that. On to the important definition. A “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a festive event sponsored by someone or some corporate entity to celebrate the release of a new product or service. In these here parts – meaning the San Francisco Bay Area – the most familiar sort of drop parties are those usually lavish affairs thrown by tech companies to launch new hardware or software (as opposed to underwear, overwear, everywhere, nowhere, or whatever-ware). Certainly, the pandemic put a major crimp on such parties, but I have little doubt they will be back, and that’s because they check off so many important boxes. They allow a company to celebrate itself and to entertain its employees and clients while also drawing in potential customers at the same time. They increase brand visibility and status, and presumably serve as venues […]
Before moving on to Carl Ruggles, the featured composer of today’s post, we would offer the warmest of happy birthdays to one of the most brilliant composers of the twentieth century, who also happened to be one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, George Crumb. He was born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929 – 93 years ago today – and died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pennsylvania, on February 6, 2022, at the age of 92. I offered up an appreciation of Crumb in my Music History Monday post on the occasion of his 87th birthday on October 24, 2016. We will revisit Crumb in my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for March 13 and 14, 2023 (yes, I plan ahead!) when we tackle his Black Angels for electric string quartet. On to the featured event for today’s post. We mark the death on October 24, 1971 – 51 years ago today – of the American composer, teacher, and painter Charles Sprague (“Carl”) Ruggles, in Bennington Vermont. Born in Marion, Massachusetts on March 11, 1876, Ruggles was 95 years old at the time of his death. C-level People […]
Music History Monday: Name the Composer/Pianist
Oct 17, 2022
Name the Composer/Pianist: he was a student of Wolfgang Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Muzio Clementi, and Joseph Haydn; friend to Franz Schubert and a friend (and rival!) of Ludwig van Beethoven; and teacher of – among many others – Carl Czerny, Ferdinand Hiller, Sigismond Thalberg, and Felix Mendelssohn; in his lifetime considered one of the greats and in ours almost entirely forgotten? With a title like that, the subject of this post better be good. And good he was! We mark the death on October 17, 1837 – 185 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the Thuringian city Weimar. Born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) on November 14, 1778, Hummel was 59 years old at the time of his death. A Preliminary: What’s in a Name? Listen, the last thing in the world I want to be accused of (okay, maybe not the last thing . . .) is name shaming: making fun of someone’s name. But let’s be serious: what sort of middle name is “Nepomuk”? And it’s not just Hummel: “Nepomuk”, a name that most certainly does not ring beatific for native English speakers, was a fairly common middle […]
Music History Monday: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, AKA “Vernon Duke”
Oct 10, 2022
We mark the birth on October 10, 1903 – 119 years ago today – of the Russian-American composer of concert music Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky. As a composer of popular music, and as a major contributor to the Great American Songbook, he is known as Vernon Duke. The Great American Songbook The Great American Songbook refers to neither a book nor a specific list of songs. Rather, the phrase encompasses the repertoire of American popular song, written between about 1915 and 1955 that are today collectively referred to as the “standards.” According to what should be the unimpeachable source, the “Great American Songbook Foundation”: The “Great American Songbook” is the canon of the most important and influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the early 20th century that have stood the test of time in their life and legacy. Often referred to as “American Standards”, the songs published during the Golden Age of this genre include those popular and enduring tunes from the 1920s to the 1950s that were created for Broadway Theater, musical theater, and Hollywood musical film.” Now, you didn’t have to be born in America to be a contributor to the Great American Songbook. In fact, some […]
We mark the death on October 3, 1931 – 91 years ago today – of the Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen in Copenhagen, at the age of 66. Nielsen had what we colloquially call “a bad ticker.” He suffered his first heart attack in 1925, when he was sixty years old. A nasty series of heart attacks put him in Copenhagen’s National Hospital (the Rigshospitalet) on October 1, 1931. He died there at 12:10 am on October 3. Surrounded by his family, his last words were: “You are standing here as if you were waiting for something.” (We could take those last words a variety of ways. For example, we might assume that Nielsen, suffering from delirium, was genuinely curious as to why his entire family was gathered around his bed. But knowing Nielsen as we do – he was a salty, funny, straight-shooting person and a proud family man, married to a famous sculptress and the father of five kids – we’d like to think that Nielsen went to his death cracking an ironic joke. Not quite as ironic as Chicago’s founding guitarist and vocalist Terry Kath’s last words, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded”, but ironic enough.) Despite […]
Music History Monday: Béla Bartók’s American Exile
Sep 26, 2022
We mark the death on September 26, 1945 – 77 years ago today – of the pianist, composer, and Hungarian patriot Béla Bartók. Born in what was then the Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós(now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) on March 25, 1881, Bartók died – during what he called his “comfortable exile” – in New York City. Before moving on to Bartók’s “American Exile”, let’s establish –as we can from our vantage point in 2022 – his creds as a great and influential twentieth century composer! In 1961, 16 years after Bartók’s death, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) – composer, conductor, and, in the words of his teacher Olivier Messiaen, the great insufferable one – wrote this about Bartók’s music: “The pieces most applauded are the least good; his best products are loved in their weaker aspects. His work triumphs now through its ambiguity. Ambiguity that will surely bring him insults during future evaluation. His work has not the profound unity and novelty of Webern’s or the vigorous controlled dynamism of Stravinsky’s. His language lacks interior coherence. His name will live on in the limited ensemble of his chamber music.” Boulez was not just wrong; he was snotty wrong. But the degree of […]
“Don’t give up your day gig.” Along with “don’t eat yellow snow” and “fake it ‘til you make it”, “don’t give up your day gig” remains one of the oldest, hoariest, clichéd pieces of advice anyone can give or receive. But unless you were lucky/wise enough to heed the other greatest piece of advice any musician can receive, that being “marry rich”, “don’t give up your day gig” is still among the very best pieces of advice a musician can receive. Very few of us get our dream job right out of school; hell, very few of us ever get our dream job. All too rapidly, reality intrudes on youthful artistic idealism and no matter how much one wants to compose, or play violin, or sing, unless we can find someone willing to pay us to do so, we must all do something to make money. And then, as we get older and develop a taste for the finer things in life – like feeding, clothing, and housing our children – our day gigs become not just a matter of survival for ourselves but for those around us. Now, here and there and every now and then, someone gets very […]
Music History Monday: Robert and Clara, Sittin’ in a Tree…
Sep 12, 2022
We mark the marriage on September 12, 1840 – 182 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck (1819-1896) to the composer and pianist Robert Schumann (1810-1856). The couple were married the day before Clara’s 21st birthday (September 13, 1840), for reasons that will be explained in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Not for the Timid I ask: what are the most difficult things any person can attempt? To summit K2 and return alive? To win Olympic gold? To overcome addiction? To row solo across the Pacific? All tough things to accomplish, no doubt. What are the scariest things anyone can do? Swim with piranhas? Eat at a barbecue restaurant next to a cat hospital? Urinate on Mike Tyson? Scary stuff, dangerous stuff, that. But to my mind, nothing is more soul-searingly difficult-slash terrifying than one, raising children and two, staying in a first marriage. (Okay; I’ve probably told you more about my life than I intended to, but there it is.) Children are to people what water is to a house: children will find and reveal every flaw in your “structure” – your personality – while simultaneously sucking dry your money, patience, […]
We mark the premiere on September 5, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed the piece while still a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; it was completed in April of 1913. (For our information, Prokofiev still had another year to go at the Conservatory; he didn’t graduate until May of 1914.) The concerto received its premiere – 109 years ago today – at the Vauxhall at Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk being a sprawling Imperial palace, park, garden, and summertime concert venue some 19 miles south of St. Petersburg. The orchestra was conducted by Alexander Aslanov, who for many years led the summer concert series there at Pavlovsk. The piano solo – with its spectacularly difficult piano part – was performed by the then 22-year-old Prokofiev himself. That premiere performance provoked quite an uproar from the audience. That uproar will be discussed at length in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, which will be built around Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2. For now, we are going to talk about what happened to the actual score of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. But first, some historical background without which there would be no […]
We mark the birth on August 29, 1920 – 102 years ago today – of the alto saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. The trumpet player (and one-time member of Charlie Parker’s quintet) Miles Davis (1926-1991) famously said: “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Miles Davis never minced words, and he does not mince them here. Along with Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker was (and remains) the most innovative, influential, and technically brilliant jazz musician to have yet lived. However, before moving on to Parker, we have one other piece of date-related musical business. I know, I know: I am most aware that having broached the subject of Charlie Parker, it behooves us – out of awe and respect – to get on with his story. But along with Parker’s birth, one other event occurred on this date that demands – demands! – our attention. So please, allow me this brief excursion. On this Day in Music History Stupid On August 29, 1977 – 45 years ago today – three people were arrested in Memphis after trying to steal Elvis Presley’s body. (The New York Post headline pictured above indicates that four people were […]
We celebrate the birth on August 22, 1862 – 160 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Claude Debussy. Born in the Paris suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye, he died in Paris on March 25, 1918, at the age of 55. Let’s tell it like it is: Monsieur Debussy was one of the great ones. For all of its sensual beauty – and Debussy did indeed compose some of the most gorgeous music ever written – his music is among the most original, revolutionary, and influential ever composed. At a time when young composers like Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945) were casting about for new musical models, it was Debussy’s music that became their essential inspiration. Along with Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) Debussy was the most influential composer of the twentieth century. Among the radical triumvirate of Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, it was Debussy who was the “breakout” composer, the first composer to cultivate a musical language that broke free of the melodic and harmonic traditions of tonality, traditions that had governed Western music since the fifteenth century. That the musical revolution started in France is most significant, for reasons to be discussed in a […]
Music History Monday: Woodstock: A Triumph of Locational Branding!
Aug 15, 2022
We mark the opening of the so-called “Woodstock Festival” on August 15, 1969 – 53 years ago today – “so-called” for the following reasons. “Woodstock.” Even without considering the original festival that bears its name, “Woodstock”, as a placename has a homey, countryside-like quality to it. And a beautiful, quaint town it is, with a population – in 1970 – of 5714 people (it’s just about the same today). Eighty-eight miles north of New York City, within the borders of the Catskill Mountains Park, Woodstock has been a hub for musicians, writers, artists, and actors going back to the 1940s. (Even a short list of just the musicians associated with Woodstock should make our saliva run down our chins. That short list includes The Band [the members of which shared a house and two of whom – Rick Danko and Levon Helm – are buried in Woodstock Cemetery], Carla Bley, David Bowie, Jimmy Cobb, Henry Cowell, Jack DeJohnette, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Pat Metheny, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Van Morrison, Pauline Oliveros, Graham Parker, Bonnie Raitt, Sonny Rollins, Todd Rundgren, David Sandborn, Carlos Santana, and Peter Schickele [“P.D.Q. Bach” his very self!]) The festival was created by an operation called […]
Music History Monday: Abbey Road, and This and That
Aug 08, 2022
August 8 is a great day, a signal day, an epic day for both good and bad reasons in the history of popular, rock, and jazz music. We’d observe a few of today’s date-related events before moving on to our featured story. First, with heads respectfully bowed, we would note some of those who have passed away on this date. On August 8, 1940 – 82 years ago today – the jazz clarinetist and alto saxophonist Johnny Dodds died of a heart attack in Chicago, all-too-young at the age of 48. I have known Dodds’ wonderful, blues-inspired playing since I was a teenager, because that’s when I fell under the spell of two of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time: Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, groups in which Dodds played and recorded. I wrote about Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven in Dr. Bob Prescribes on July 7, 2020. On this date in 1975 – 47 years ago today – the jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley also died all-too-young at the age of 46 in Gary Indiana, from a stroke. Talk about being a member of an all-time great band and making all-time […]
Music History Monday: The Wayward Bach, His Wayward Daughter, and the Bachs of Oklahoma
Aug 01, 2022
We mark the death on August 1, 1784 – 238 years ago today – of the German composer and organist Wilhelm Friedemann Bach in Berlin at the age of 73. Born in the central German city of Weimar on November 22, 1710, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who from here on we will refer to as Friedemann Bach, was the second child and first son of Johann Sebastian Bach (who from this point forward we will refer to as Sebastian Bach). Friedemann Bach was a gifted musician, the equal (in my opinion) to his more famous brothers Carl Philip Emanual and Johann Christian Bach. But unlike his brothers, Friedemann harbored personal demons that poisoned his relationships with others and led to his financial ruin later in his life. We’ll discuss these issues in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, as well as the singular disaster Friedemann’s poverty eventually wrought, when he chose to the sell off so many of his father’s precious musical manuscripts, which were then lost for all time. For the remainder of this post, we’re going to shift our focus to Friedemann Bach’s only surviving child, his daughter Friederica Sophia, who was born in the Saxon city of […]
Music History Monday: Under the Covers
Jul 25, 2022
We mark the death on July 25, 1984 – 38 years ago today – of the American Rhythm and Blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. Born on December 11, 1926, she died in Los Angeles of both heart and liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse. According to Gillian Gaar, writing in She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Seal Press, 1992), during the brief period of her final illness, Thornton went from 450 pounds (Big Momma!) to 95 pounds, a weight loss of some 355 pounds. Thornton scored her one-and-only hit when, on August 13, 1952, she recorded a brand-new, 12-bar blues song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller entitled Hound Dog. Released by Peacock Records in February 1953, Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog sold over 500,000 copies and spent fourteen weeks on the Rhythm and Blues charts, seven of those fourteen weeks at number one. Thornton’s recording is linked below: (By the way: please ignore the photo of Josephine Baker at the top of the link; Big Momma’s left leg was bigger than all of Madame Baker.) Thornton’s recording of Hound Dog was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013 […]
Music History Monday: A Debussy Discovery!
Jul 18, 2022
Before getting into the date specific event/discovery that drives today’s post, permit me, please, to tell the story of the greatest manuscript discovery of all time. The ancient city of Jerusalem sits at nearly 2,700 feet above sea level. Less than 15 miles south of Jerusalem sits the Dead Sea, which at 1,300 feet below sea level is the lowest point on earth. In November of 1946, three Bedouin shepherds – Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum’a Muhammed, and his friend Khalil Musa – were looking for a stray goat (or sheep; the story shifts) around the cliffs at the northern end of the Dead Sea. According to the story they told, Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a rock into a cave on the side of a cliff, thinking the stray animal was inside and that the rock would chase it out. Instead of a hearing a frightened bleat, he heard pottery breaking. Lowering himself into the cave, he found three ancient scrolls wrapped in linen. Having climbed out of the cave and shown them to his companions, the guys went back into the cave and found four more scrolls, seven in all. They put them in a bag and, on returning […]
Music History Monday: The Death of George Gershwin
Jul 11, 2022
We mark the death on July 11, 1937 – 85 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist George Gershwin, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Born in Brooklyn New York on September 26, 1898, Gershwin was only 38 years old at the time of his death. This is going to be an unavoidably depressing post. Dealing with anyone’s death is difficult. Dealing with the death of a young person (and damn, from where I stand, 38 is still a kid) is both difficult and tragic. When we add to that Gershwin’s dazzling talent and unlimited promise we are forced, as well, to ask “what if . . .?” George Gershwin (1898-1937) George Gershwin had it all. Tall, athletic, good-looking (in his own lantern-jawed sort of way), he was blessed with preternatural talent. As someone who had grown up poor on the streets of New York City, he was devoid of snobbery or pretense and could get along with just about anyone. He suffered no childhood trauma; he adored and was adored by his family and friends and was filled with vitality and an infectious joie de vivre. We are told that given his gifts and effusive […]
Music History Monday: As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property
Jul 04, 2022
We mark the completion on July 4, 1941 – 81 years ago today – of Igor Stravinsky’s reharmonization and orchestration of The Star-Spangled Banner. Stravinsky in America In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and his long-time mistress Vera de Bosset (1889-1982) arrived in the United States from their home in Paris. The couple were married in Bedford, Massachusetts six months later, on March 9, 1940. Stravinsky had come to the United States to spend the 1939-1940 academic year at Harvard University, where he was to occupy the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry and deliver six lectures on music that were that year’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. By the time the academic year ended in June of 1940, the Stravinskys, Igor and Vera, had no home to return to. Nazi Germany had occupied Paris on June 14, and France surrendered to Germany 8 days later, on June 22, 1940. The couple settled in Los Angeles in 1941 and bought a house at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, just above the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood. Stravinsky and Vera would live there for the next 29 years, until his final illness forced a move to New York City. (For […]
Music History Monday: The Fabulous Hill Sisters!
Jun 27, 2022
Humiliation Before getting to the anniversary we are honoring in today’s Music History Monday post, it is necessary for us to contemplate the painful issue of humiliation. “Humiliation” is a consequence of unjustified shaming, as a result of which one’s social status, public image, and self-esteem are decreased, often quite significantly. Humiliation hurts; humiliation sucks. We are not, for now, going to discuss the seemingly countless ways we can (and have! and will!) be humiliated. Let us instead – for now – observe the difference between spontaneous humiliation and ritual humiliation. “Spontaneous” humiliations would be those unexpected moments of shaming, bullying, rejection, or deep embarrassment that come out of nowhere and have the emotional and physical impact of a punch to the gut. “Ritual” humiliations are different, in that we know exactly what’s coming but are powerless to stop them. Ostracism and its attendant processes – excommunication, shunning, and blackballing, whereby someone is purposely excluded from a community – is a form of ritual humiliation. “Hazing rituals” are another: those activities that purposely humiliate, degrade, and even risk physical harm to someone wanting to join a group or maintain status within a group. Then, there is – for […]
Music History Monday: Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky
Jun 20, 2022
We mark the birth on June 20, 1843 – 179 years ago today – of the Russia bass opera singer Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, in the city of Minsk, which is today the capital of Belarus but was then part of the Russian Empire. Considered one of the greatest singers of his time, Fyodor Ignatyevich has largely been forgotten because, one, he never recorded and, two, he’s been eclipsed by the fame of his son, the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). He was born of Polish descent in the “Government (province) of Minsk”, in what had been part of Poland until 1793, when the Russian Empire sliced off and annexed a large chunk of Poland in what is euphemistically called the “second partition of Poland.” (Today, the “province of Minsk” is part of the “nation” of Belarus, which is advised to mind its P’s and Q’s, as Tsar Putin no more considers Belarus to be separate country than he does Ukraine. Not that you need me to point this out, but I’ll do it anyway: the “annexation” of Crimea in 2014 and the present attempts to destroy Ukraine and annex the Donbas demonstrate that Russian actions towards its neighbors have not changed […]
Music History Monday: The Ultimate Fanboy: The Mad King, Ludwig II
Jun 13, 2022
We mark the death (the most suspicious death) on June 13, 1886 – 136 years ago today – of the ultimate Richard Wagner fanboy King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The Running Man Richard Wagner was among the least-athletic looking people to ever grace a composing studio or a conductor’s podium. Depending upon the source, he was between 5’ 3” and 5’ 5” in heights. His legs were too short for his torso, and his oversized square head was perched on an otherwise frail body. In his lifetime, an unknown wag referred to him as “that shovel-faced dwarf”, an unkind if not inaccurate description of the man. But despite his physical shortcomings, Wagner – believe it or not – could run like the wind for remarkable distances. These miracles of sustained athleticism were inspired by Wagner’s creditors and/or the law, from which Wagner was forced to flee on a regular basis. For example, in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love”; for your information, my spell check just tried to change “liebesverbot” to “lobster pot”).Again: in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot in the central German city […]
Music History Monday: Siegfried Wagner
Jun 06, 2022
We mark the birth of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner on June 6, 1869 – 163 years ago today – in Lucerne, Switzerland. Like the sons of so many great men groomed to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, he could never hope to measure up to or escape from his father’s shadow. Cliché We contemplate, for a moment, this thing called a “cliché.” Strictly defined, a cliché is: “an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.” Granted. But clichés didn’t become the tiresome, oft-repeated, over-used devices that – by definition – they are without carrying within them a kernel of truth. Admittedly, some clichés express stereotypes that may (or may not) be true, but the vast majority of them are analogies that do indeed express truisms. In fact, when it comes to expressing a truism succinctly, nothing succeeds more quickly that a cliché. For example: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” (Parenthetically, some folks would tell us that “the apple doesn’t fall […]
Music History Monday: Benjamin Britten War Requiem
May 30, 2022
We mark the premiere performance on May 30, 1962 – 60 years ago today – of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Completed in early 1962, the War Requiem was commissioned to mark the consecration of the “new” Coventry Cathedral, which was built to replace the original fourteenth century cathedral that had been destroyed on the evening and night of November 14 and 15, 1940. Today’s post will deal entirely with the events that led up to the composition of Britten’s War Requiem: the destruction of Coventry’s Cathedral of St. Michael, the extraordinary spirit of forgiveness and redemption that came to be identified with its ruins, and the New Cathedral that was built between 1956 and 1962. We cannot appreciate the meaning and spirit of Britten’s War Requiem unless we first come to grips with the meaning and spirit of the destruction and rebirth of Coventry Cathedral. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will get into the specifics of the Requiem itself, along with a recommended recording of the piece. Coventry and its Cathedral Coventry is a city in the West Midlands of England, 95 miles north-west of London. Founded by the Romans, by the fourteenth century Coventry had become a major center […]
Music History Monday: Beethoven and the Human Voice
May 23, 2022
We mark the premiere on May 23, 1814 – 208 years ago today – of Ludwig van Beethoven’s one-and-only opera, Fidelio, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. While Beethoven (1770-1827) had composed two preliminary versions of the opera, which had been performed in 1805 and 1806, it is this third and substantially different version that we will hear in the opera house today. It’s an odd but, in this case, an applicable idiom, “red herring.” Literally, a “red herring” is, believe it or not, a red herring (see image above): a dried and smoked herring that’s turned red due to being smoked. However, for our purposes, a “red herring” is: “something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion.” The Beethovenian red herring to which we are referring started with the German author, legal scholar, composer, music critic, and artist Ernst Theodor Amadeus (or “E. T. A.”) Hoffman (1776-1822). Hoffman wrote a lengthy and frankly worshipful appreciation of Beethoven’s instrumental music entitled “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” in 1813, when Beethoven was in his 43rd year. In the course of […]
Music History Monday: The Phoenix Rises!
May 16, 2022
We mark the opening on May 16, 1792 – 230 years ago today – of Venice’s principal opera house, the Teatro la Fenice, meaning the “The Phoenix Theater.” Excepting, perhaps, the magnificent phallus that is the Washington Monument, dedicated as it is to “The Father of Our Country,” rarely – if ever – will a building be better named than La Fenice, which has risen from the ashes three times. Background The first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637. Public opera quickly proved to be tremendously popular and immensely profitable, and Venice – already the tourist capitol, the Las Vegas of the European world – had yet another recreational activity to offer its endless stream of visitors. By 1700, there were some twenty opera theaters operating in Venice, cranking out operas the way Hollywood cranked out movies in the pre-television glory days of the 1930s and 1940s. As the popularity of public opera spread first across Italy and then all of Europe, so opera theaters were built across Europe. No longer the singular purveyor of public opera, many of Venice’s opera houses closed, so that by 1770 only five remained. Of […]
Music History Monday: Little Richard: The King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll
May 09, 2022
We mark the death on May 9, 2020 – just two years ago today – of the American musician, singer, and songwriter Richard Wayne Penniman, known universally by his stage name of “Little Richard.” Born on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he died at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee two years ago today from bone cancer. He was 87 years old. As a founding inductee to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the following statement was read aloud: “He claims to be ‘the architect of rock and roll’, and history would seem to bear out Little Richard’s boast. More than any other performer—save, perhaps, Elvis Presley – Little Richard blew the lid off the Fifties, laying the foundation for rock and roll with his explosive music and charismatic persona. On record, he made spine-tingling rock and roll. His frantically charged piano playing and raspy, shouted vocals on such classics as Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, and Good Golly, Miss Molly defined the dynamic sound of rock and roll.” Along with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Ike Turner, and Bo Diddley, Little Richard was one of that handful of Black American musicians who synthesized blues, rhythm and blues […]
Music History Monday: Giacomo Meyerbeer and French PopOp
May 02, 2022
We mark the death on May 2, 1864 – 158 years ago today – of the German-born opera composer Jacob Liebmann Beer, also-known-as Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born in Berlin on September 5, 1791, he died in Paris during the rehearsals for the premiere of his opera L’Africaine – “The African” – which turned out to be, no surprise then, his final opera. Let us get to know Herr/Signore/Monsieur Meyerbeer a bit even as we explore the tremendous popularity of his operas, the reasons behind that popularity, and the reasons for their fall from popularity! No Exaggeration: As Popular as Elvis Incredible though it may seem to us, here today, Meyerbeer was the Elvis Presley of nineteenth century opera. Not that he was a pelvis gyrating, groupie groping “rock star” as we understand a rock star to be today, no; but in the world of nineteenth century opera, he was the most popular musician of not just his time but of his century: the single most frequently performed opera composer of the nineteenth century. In terms of his singular international fame and his income, Meyerbeer was – more than Gioachino Rossini, more than Giuseppe Verdi, more than Richard Wagner –the […]
Music History Monday: Puccini’s Turandot: An Opera That Almost Wasn’t
Apr 25, 2022
We mark the premiere performance on April 25, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of Giacomo Puccini’s twelfth and final opera, Turandot. The premiere took place at Milan’s storied La Scala opera house and was conducted by Puccini’s friend (and occasional nemesis!) Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957). At the time of the premiere, Puccini himself had been dead for 17 months. And therein lies our tale. Because given the delays in creating the libretto for Turandot, Puccini’s failing health, his leaving the opera incomplete at his death, and the controversy surrounding Turandot’s subsequent completion by the composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954), itwas indeed an opera that almost didn’t happen. Giacomo Puccini was born in the Tuscan city of Lucca on December 22, 1858, and died in Brussels, Belgium on November 29, 1924, three weeks shy of his 66th birthday. Puccini’s operas remain among the most popular in the repertoire, but among the most critically controversial as well. It is a controversary we will not discuss in this post; rather, I’d direct you to Music History Monday for January 14, 2019. That post – on Puccini’s opera Tosca – wades chin-deep into the critical issues that continue to dog his work. Sometime in […]
Music History Monday: Charity Begins at Home
Apr 18, 2022
On April 18th, 1954 – 68 freaking years ago today – the American composer, pianist, music historian, and bloviator-par-excellence Robert Michael Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. The Teaching Company-slash-The Great Courses and My Favorite Things Since 1993, I have recorded 32 courses for The Teaching Company, rebranded as The Great Courses in 2006, and further rebranded in 2021 as “Wondrium.” (The less said about that latest rebrand, the better. To me, “Wondrium” sounds like an acne control or irritable bowel medication.) I am frequently asked “which is my favorite course.” That’s always an easy question to answer because the answer is whichever course I most recently recorded. As of today, that would be The Great Music of the 20th Century. (Sadly, it would appear that I am the only person who bears much affection for this course, as The Great Music of the 20th Century has proven to be among the least popular course I’ve recorded. A principal issue is the musical examples. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses could not afford to license the music I needed to play during the course, much of which was still under original copyright. So we hit upon the idea of providing […]
Music History Monday: St. Matthew Passion
Apr 11, 2022
We mark the first performance on April 11, 1727 – on what was Good Friday 295 years ago today – of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the St. Thomas Church (or Thomaskirche) in the Saxon city of Leipzig. The Passion was performed three more times in Bach’s lifetime, all under his direction in Leipzig: on April 15, 1729; March 30, 1736; and on March 23, 1742. Bach revised his St Matthew Passion between 1743 and 1746, and it is this revised version that we will hear in performances and recordings today. Our game plan for this post will be, one, to discuss what a “Passion” is and what the “gospels” are; two, to observe the structure and scope and make some blanket observations about the artistic quality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion; three, to discuss “the masterpiece syndrome” and some of the good and bad things that phrase implies; four, to once again venture into the unmapped minefield that is contemporary identity politics and attempt to create a meaningful context for the St Matthew Passion; and finally, five, to speculate on how the parishioners and church officials who, having filed in and taken their seats at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche […]
Music History Monday: McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters
Apr 04, 2022
We mark the birth on April 4, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of the American blues singer, songwriter, and guitar and harmonica player McKinley Morganfield. He was born in either Rolling Fork or Jug’s Corner, Mississippi. Known professionally as “Muddy Waters” (as opposed to, say “Crystal Springs”, or “Briny Deep”, or “Silty Delta”, or “Occluded H20”), Maestro Morganfield-slash-Waters died in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983, at the age of 70. We will get to Muddy Waters (as we will now refer to him) in a bit. But April 4 is a busy day in music history and thus, I’d like to observe three other date-related events. We mark the birth – on April 4, 1922, exactly 100 years ago today – of the American composer Elmer Bernstein, in New York City. He died in Ojai, California, on August 18, 2004, at the age of 82. Elmer Bernstein is among my very favorite film and television composers, and he would have been the lead story today if not for the fact that my Music History Monday post for April 3, 2017, already celebrated his birthday. (I’ll own up to it: April 3 is a quiet day in music […]
Music History Monday: Sergei Rachmaninoff in California
Mar 28, 2022
We mark the death on March 28, 1943 – 79 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was born on April 1, 1873, and thus died just four days before his 70th birthday. This post, as well as tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, will focus on the last year of Rachmaninoff’s life, during which he lived in Beverly Hills, California. Rachmaninoff – all 6’6” of him! – was one of the great pianists of his (or any) time; an outstanding composer; and a more than able conductor (he was, for example, the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow from 1904-1906). Lucrative though performing as a pianist and conductor were, what Rachmaninoff really wanted to be was a composer (the composition bug is, as I will attest, something of a disease). As is the case with so many “working” composers – meaning composers who make the bulk of their income doing something other than composing – Rachmaninoff composed primarily during the summer months. Between 1890 and 1917 – from the ages of 17 to 44 – Rachmaninoff spent those summer months composing at his home in Ivanovka, a […]
Music History Monday: Ludwig van Beethoven and the Legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach
Mar 21, 2022
We mark the birth on March 21, 1685, of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, in what today is central Germany. He died 65 years later, on July 28, 1750, in the Saxon city of Leipzig. I can hear the howling now, “Dr. B, hello, Bach was born on March 31, 1685, not March 21; March 31: it says so on Wikipedia!” Chill out and unknot those jockeys; let’s talk. Wikipedia and various other sources do indeed indicate, not incorrectly, that Bach was born on March 31. But according to the irrefutable and unassailable Bach scholar Christoff Wolff writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sebastian Bach was born on March 21. And in fact Bach celebrated his birthday on March 21. So what gives? A Brief Contemplation of Dates (by which we do not refer to one’s social life but the calendar) Old style and new style; in style and out-of-style. It is a question of almost Talmudic complexity. We’re talking about calendars and the confusion wrought by changing calendars. In 46 BCE (two years before his conversion into a human pincushion), Julius Caesar proposed replacing what was the 10-month Roman […]
Music History Monday: Georg Philipp Telemann
Mar 14, 2022
We mark the birth of March 14, 1681 – 341 years ago today – of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, in the city Magdeburg, in what today is central Germany. A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) (both of whom Telemann numbered as good friends; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was both the godson and namesake of Georg Philipp Telemann), Telemann was considered in his lifetime the greatest composer living and working in Germany, with our friend Sebastian Bach well down that list. Telemann died in Hamburg on June 25, 1767, at the age of 86. Georg Philipp was the youngest of three surviving children (two boys and a girl) of Maria and Heinrich Telemann. Young Telemann came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. His mother Maria’s father was a deacon, and his father Heinrich Telemann was a Lutheran pastor (as was Heinrich’s father before him). Sadly, Heinrich Telemann died his late 30’s in 1685 when Georg Philipp was just 4 years old, and the task of raising and providing for the family fell squarely on Maria Telemann’s shoulders. Single mothers are usually, by necessity, a tough bunch, and in this Maria Telemann […]
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