Hector Campos Parsi

Synopsis

Today’s date in 1922 marks the birthday of Héctor Campos Parsi, one of Puerto Rico’s finest composers.

Campos Parsi originally planned to become a doctor, but after a meeting with the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, ended up studying music at the New England Conservatory in 1949 and 1950 with the likes of Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen and Serge Koussevitzky, and between 1950 and 1954 with Paul Hindemith at Yale and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Returning to Puerto Rico, Campos Parsi pursued a dual career: as a writer, he contributed short stories, essays, poems to Puerto Rican magazines, and wrote music reviews and articles for island newspapers. As a composer, he wrote instrumental and vocal works for chamber, orchestral, and choral ensemble. Two of his best-known works are Divertimento del Sur, written for string orchestra with solo flute and clarinet, and a piano sonata dedicated to Puerto Rican pianist Jesús María Sanromá.

As a musicologist, Campos Parsi wrote entries for music encyclopedias and served as the director of the IberoAmerican Center of Musical Documentation and as composer-in-residence at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, where died in 1998 at 75.

Music Played in Today's Program

Héctor Campos Parsi (1922-1998): Divertimento del Sur; Members of the Casals Festival Orchestra; Milton Katims, conductor; Smithsonian Folkways COOK-01061

On This Day

Births

• 1832 - American composer Henry Clay Work, in Middletown, Connecticut. A printer by trade, he wrote some famous popular songs, including Grandfather’s Clock, Father, Come Home, and Marching Through Georgia.

• 1865 - French composer Paul Dukas, in Paris

• 1931 - Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti, in Florence

Deaths

• 1708 - British composer John Blow, 59, in London

• 1964 - Austrian-born American composer Ernst Toch, 76, in Santa Monica, California. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for his Symphony No. 3.

• 1979 - American composer Roy Harris, 81, in Santa Monica, California

Premieres

• 1733 - Rameau: opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in Paris at the Palais Royal Opéra

• 1913 - Elgar: symphonic poem, Falstaff, at the Leeds Festival, with the composer conducting

• 1937 - Miaskovsky: Symphony No. 18, in Moscow, Alexander Gauk conducting

• 1961 - Shostakovich: Symphony No. 12 (The Year 1917), by the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting

• 1967 - Sessions: Symphony No. 7, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by the Chicago Symphony, Jean Martinon conducting

• 1975 - Shostakovich: Viola Sonata, in Leningrad, by Fyodor Druzhinin (viola) and Mikhail Muntyan (piano)

• 1992 - Michael Torke: Chalk for string quartet, at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (U.K.), by the Balanescu Quartet

• 1998 - Ives (arr. David G. Porter): Emerson Overture, for piano and orchestra, with soloist Alan Feinberg and the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi conducting

• 2005 - John Adams: opera Dr. Atomic, in San Francisco by the San Francisco Opera, Donald Runnicles, conductor

Others

• 1880 - John Philip Sousa, 25, is appointed 17th Leader of the U.S. Marine Band, a post he would hold for 12 years. During this time, the band made its first concert tour, premiered many of Sousa’s most famous marches, and produced some of the first phonograph recordings ever made.

• 1924 - Opening of The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, funded by a gift of $12.5 million from the American patroness Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who had inherited her fortune from the Curtis Publishing Company. The faculty, providing instruction for 203 students, includes Leopold Stokowski and Josef Hofmann heading conducting and piano departments, respectively: Polish-born coloratura Marcella Sembrich, Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch, French-born harpist/composer Carlos Salzedo, and Italian composer Rosario Scalero.