On today’s date in 2001, the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas gave the first performance of a new work by the American composer Henry Brant. The new piece was entitled “Ice Field,” and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002, the year Brant turned 89.
The Pulitzer...Episode details...
The Great Depression put many Americans out of work, and in 1935 the Roosevelt administration created the Works Progress Administration, putting some of the unemployed to work on various public projects. A Federal Music Project was also created for unemployed musicians, and thirty-four new...Episode details...
The great American poet Emily Dickinson was born on today’s date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death in 1886. The seemingly confined and rather mundane chronicle of her life stands in stark contrast to the breathtaking scope of her imagination, as expressed in the...Episode details...
The 19th century Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka ranks as the founder of a distinctive national style of Russian classical music, and as the composer of the first great Russian opera, which premiered in St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1836.
That opera tells the story of Ivan...Episode details...
The great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on this date in 1865.
In 1990, when the world was observing Sibelius’s 125th birthday, conductor Osmo Vänskä led the Lahti Symphony in the belated world-premiere performance of a previously unknown work by the composer. This was a Suite for...Episode details...
It’s perhaps not surprising that a solitary, iconoclastic 20th century composer should identify with a solitary, iconoclastic 18th century poet. The ultra-modernist American composer Carl Ruggles took as the title for one of his most famous orchestral pieces a phrase from a motto by the early...Episode details...
Two famous pieces of chamber music had their premieres on today’s date, both at private readings prior to their first public performances.
On today’s date in 1842, the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann arranged for a trial reading of his new Piano Quintet in E-flat at the Leipzig home of...Episode details...
“Snuff” is a finely pulverized tobacco that can be, well, “snuffed” through the nose (and Kids—don’t try this at home!)
In the 19th century, taking snuff was a common practice, and on today’s date in 1837, the most notorious example of snuff-taking in musical history occurred—or didn’t occur,...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1885, at an open public rehearsal at the Old Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Symphony gave the first performance in America of any symphony by the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. It was a fresh-faced 23-year-old conductor named Walter Damrosch who programmed the...Episode details...
