Composers Datebook

• A Mass for Machaut

  SynopsisIn the Catholic Liturgical calendar, today is celebrated as the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. In the Middle Ages, when the veneration of Mary as Notre Dame — French for “Our Lady” — was at its peak, a Lady Mass would be sung on a day like this.And it's quite likely that one of the earliest-known settings of the Latin mass, the Notre Dame Mass by Guillaume de Machaut, was performed as a Lady Mass at one particular chapel in the Cathedral of Reims for many years in the 14th century. de Machaut and his brother Jean were both canons at that Cathedral and had arranged an endowment for a mass in honor of Mary to be sung there every Saturday.In our day, de Machaut’s Notre Dame Mass is his most famous work, but in his own time, the age of Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he was far better known as a secular poet of Courtly Love. de Machaut had been a widely-travelled and extremely well-connected artist before returning to his native Reims at the end of his life. Before that, employment by various members of the royalty took him from Paris to Prague and on trips to Italy, Poland and Lithuania.It's ironic that Machaut is nowadays famous for his sacred music — this one Mass in particular — when the vast majority of his music was decidedly secular in tone.Music Played in Today's ProgramGuillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377): Messe de Nostre Dame

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• Bolcom's 'Five Fold Five'

  SynopsisYoung composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg’s followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, neo-Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?For American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the first option was not appealing. “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to,” he said, “but I said ‘to hell with it.’”According to Bolcom’s teacher and mentor, French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was “as gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in his compositions. Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow.Bolcom’s chamber work, Five Fold Five, for example, premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. The piece starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.Music Played in Today's ProgramWilliam Bolcom (b. 1938): Five Fold Five; Detroit Chamber Winds; William Bolcom, pianoKoch 7395

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• Martinu in California

  SynopsisOn today's date in 1950, the orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California gave the premiere performance of this music by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The Sinfonietta La Jolla was Martinu's response to the Society’s call for a tuneful and approachable piece of new music for their chamber orchestra.Martinu modeled his 20th century work on the 18th century symphonies of Haydn, a composer he very much admired. In fact, in 1890, when Martinu was born, his native Bohemia was still a part of the Austria-Hungarian empire in which Haydn had lived and worked a hundred years earlier.Martinu’s music blends the modernism of 20th century composers like Stravinsky with the rich 19th century tradition of Czech national composers like Dvořák — but Martinu’s relations with his native land were anything but smooth. He was twice kicked out of the Prague Conservatory for his supposed lack of academic discipline, and instead established himself as a freelance composer in France and Switzerland. Then, just as his music began to receive some recognition and performances back in Prague, the Nazi invasion of World War II led to his works being banned.In 1941, Martinu settled in the United States, where his music was very well received. In 1948, Martinu returned briefly to Prague, but found the new Communist government there as distasteful to him as the Nazis. Martinu’s Sinfonietta La Jolla was written shortly after he returned to the United States.Music Played in Today's ProgramBohuslav Martinu (1890-1959): Sinfonietta “La Jolla”; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Christopher Hogwood, conductor; London 433 660

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• 'Twilight Butterfly' by Thomas

  SynopsisEach summer, music lovers congregate about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago for the annual Ravinia Festival, the oldest outdoor music festival in America, and since 1936 the summer home of the Chicago Symphony.But on today’s date in 2013, Ravinia was the venue for world-premiere performances of several new art songs, including Twilight Butterfly, by American composer Augusta Read Thomas, a setting of a poetic text written by the composer herself.“The poetic is always in my music”, she explained. “In writing Twilight Butterfly … I began with a mental picture … [of] someone, viewing a butterfly fluttering on a deep summer evening beneath the twilight moon. This imagery became so specific that writing my own lyrics was almost inescapable.”Now even at their most poetic, composers must keep practical considerations in mind, as Thomas explained:“Beyond the evocative, impressionist nature of the piece … I sought to provide a comfortable performance environment for the singer. My lyrics integrate words whose open vowel sounds suit the voice ... The piano gives the singer pitches at every entrance … [and] rubato indications allow the singer delicate rhythmic and interpretive flexibility.”Music Played in Today's ProgramAugusta Read Thomas (b. 1964): Twilight Butterfly; Yvonne Redman, soprano; Julie Gunn, piano; Nimbus 6306

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• Bernstein in Hollywood

  SynopsisElia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront, a 1954 black and white classic starring Marlon Brando, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was also nominated for — but didn’t win — that year’s Oscar for best original score. It was Leonard Bernstein’s first film score, and his last. He didn’t enjoy the experience:“I had become so involved in each detail of the score, that it seemed to me the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the least important part,” Bernstein recalled. “Sometimes the music would be turned off completely to allow a line to stand forth stark and bare, and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, planned as a composition with a beginning, middle and end, would be silenced seven bars before the end … And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting with a heavy heart the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort you. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. It’s good for the picture, you repeat numbly to yourself … it’s good for the picture.”But Bernstein did fashion a concert suite from On the Waterfront and, not one to waste time, conducted the first performance with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood on today’s date in 1954, exactly two weeks after the film opened.Music Played in Today's ProgramLeonard Bernstein (1918-1990): On the Waterfront Suite; Israel Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 415 253

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