Grofe in Hollywood

Synopsis

In the 1930s, American composer Ferde Grofé was on a roll. During the previous decade, as staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman orchestra, Grofé had orchestrated all the music that popular ensemble had premiered, including George Gershwin’s 1924 jazz classic Rhapsody in Blue. But by the late 1920s, Grofé was composing his own original scores, and in 1931 finished his Grand Canyon Suite.

Around that time, Grofé left the Whiteman band, and signed on as staff conductor of the NBC Radio Network, and soon became a familiar figure on the American music scene from coast to coast.

On today’s date in 1935, a new ballet score by Grofé premiered at the Hollywood Bowl. It took as its story line a familiar Hollywood theme: the exploited “double” who stands in for a starlet during the making of a film. The ballet music was later recast as Hollywood Suite, a concert work.

In the 1960s, looking back on his long career in music, Grofé said, “Many of my compositions, I believe, were born of sight, sound, and sensations common to all of us. I think I have spoken of America in this music simply because America spoke to me.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ferde Grofé (1892-1972): Hollywood Suite; Bournemouth Symphony; William Stromberg, conductor; Naxos 8.559017

On This Day

Births

• 1875 - English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, in London. His father was from Sierra Leone and his mother English. He composed a successful trilogy of oratorios based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Hiawatha”: The Song of Hiawatha (1898), The Death of Minnehaha (1899) and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900).

• 1890 - French composer Jacques Ibert, in Paris

• 1896 - Russian inventor Lev Sergeivitch Termen (anglicized to Leon Theremin) in St. Petersburg (Julian date: August 3). He invented the theremin, an electronic instrument whose sound was used or imitated in a number of film scores (Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc.) and in the Beach Boys’ song “Good Vibrations.”

• 1922 - German-born American composer and conductor Lukas Foss, in Berlin (presumed date; Foss says his birth year is not authenticated and he has no birth certificate)

Deaths

• 1728 - French composer and gamba virtuoso Marain Marais, 72, in Paris

• 1985 - American composer Richard Yardumian, 68, in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania

Premieres

• 1865 - Liszt: oratorio, St. Elizabeth, in Pest, Hungary

• 1935 - Grofé: Hollywood Suite, at the Hollywood Bowl

• 1986 - Penderecki: opera The Black Mask, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria

• 2000 - Saariaho: opera L’amour de Loin, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, with a cast including Dawn Upshaw, Dwayne Croft, and Dagmar Peckova; and Kent Nagano conducting the Southwest German Radio Orchestra of Baden-Baden

Others

• 1772 - Johannes Nepomuk Maelzel, German inventor credited with the creation of the metronome, is born in Regensburg. For a time he was the friend of Beethoven and collaborated with him on various projects.

• 1969 - The three-day Woodstock Music and Arts Fair begins in Bethel, fifty miles south of Woodstock, New York, attended by nearly half a million rock & roll enthusiasts