Synopsis
On today’s date in 1996, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first performance of Lost and Found, a five-minute toccata for orchestra. Its composer was Steve Mackey, an American whose music Tilson Thomas championed and recorded.
Mackey wrote: “On more than one occasion Michael has used the word ‘wacky’ to describe my music. Composers usually blanch at such attributions — nobody wants to be captured in a single word — but I can live with ‘wacky’. It is not a common adjective, does not end with ‘ism,’ and clearly the rhyme with my last name personalizes it. My music tends to explore fringe modes of consciousness rather than brand name emotion or logical thought.”
He also avoids conventional titles. His Concerto for Electric Guitar is titled Tuck and Roll, and among his other works can be found Banana/Dump Truck and Eating Greens.
Mackey said, “I think a lot about momentum, inertia, and even gravity, allowing the music to get stuck and tip over, lurch headlong, tumble with limbs akimbo as well as to move fluidly gives it a ‘road runner’ cartoon kind of physicality, a fantasy, but not completely unhinged from the physical world.”
Music Played in Today's Program
Steven Mackey (b. 1956): Lost and Found; New World Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; BMG 63826
On This Day
Births
1824 - Austrian organist and composer Anton Bruckner, in Ansfelden
1892 - French composer and conductor Darius Milhaud, in Aix-en-Provence
Deaths
1907 - Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, 64, in Bergen
Premieres
1996 - Steven Mackey: Lost and Found for orchestra, by the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting
1999 - Philip Glass: new filmscore to accompany the classic 1931 Tod Browning horror film Dracula (starring Bela Lugosi), by the Kronos Quartet at Telluride, Colorado
Others
1965 - Organist, Bach authority, medical doctor and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer dies, 90, at his African mission hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon
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About Composers Datebook®
Host John Birge presents a daily snapshot of composers past and present, with timely information, intriguing musical events and appropriate, accessible music related to each.
He has been hosting, producing and performing classical music for more than 25 years. Since 1997, he has been hosting on Minnesota Public Radio's Classical Music Service. He played French horn for the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra and performed with them on their centennial tour of Europe in 1995. He was trained at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music and Interlochen Arts Academy.