'The Composer is Dead!'

Synopsis

It’s a book! It’s a YouTube video! It’s a concert hall work! It’s by Stookey and Snicket!

Now, “Stookey and Snicket” is not the name of a law firm in some obscure novel by Charles Dickens, but is in fact the collaborative team of American composer Nathaniel Stookey and American novelist Daniel Handler, who writes popular children’s books under the pen name of Lemony Snicket.

Stookey was the youngest composer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music Series when he collaborated with Handler on a piece for narrator and orchestra. Their collaboration, The Composer is Dead, premiered on this date in 2006.

This “new and unusual” work with a macabre title is similar to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in that it intends to introduce young audiences to the instruments of the orchestra. But anyone familiar with Lemony Snicket books can expect something a little quirky, and, in fact, The Composer is Dead is a murder mystery, complete with a police inspector rounding up the usual suspects, and eventually pointing the finger…

And if you want to find out “whodunit” — well, you’ll have to buy the book!

Music Played in Today's Program

Lemony Snicket and Nathaniel Stookey: The Composer is Dead; Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler), narrator; San Francisco Symphony; Edwin Outwater, conductor; Book Audio CD

On This Day

Births

• 1882 - Australian-born American composer and pianist Percy Aldrich Grainger, in Melbourne; He became a USA citizen in 1919

• 1900 - American composer George Antheil, in Trenton, New Jersey

Deaths

• 1839 - Spanish composer Fernando Sor, 61, in Paris

Premieres

• 1940 - Randall Thompson: Allelujah at the opening of the Berkshire Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts

• 1942 - Sir Lenox Berkeley: Symphony No. 1 in London, conducted by the composer

• 1987 - Judith Weir: opera A Night at the Chinese Opera in Cheltenham, England

• 1988 - Philip Glass: opera The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (after a sci-fi novel by Doris Lessing), by Houston Grand Opera

• 2000 - John Williams: TreeSong for Violin and Orchestra, at Tanglewood with Gil Shaham and the Boston Symphony, composer conducting

Others

• 1588 - English composer and lutenist John Dowland receives B. Mus. Degree from Christ Church, Oxford