On today’s date in 2013, the Jamaican-American pianist and composer Donald Shirley died at age 86 in New York City.
His death set into motion a plan that had been long in the works: a movie based on Shirley’s concert tour to the deep South in 1962, accompanied by Tony “the Lip” Vallelonga, a...Episode details...
In a 1964 essay, the American composer Samuel Barber wrote: “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to enhance their lives... I do not write for posterity.” And in a 1979 interview, he said: “I write for the present, and I write for myself... I think that most music that is...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1964, a new musical called “Anyone Can Whistle” opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. The book was by Arthur Laurents, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
The show told the story of a town that's gone bankrupt because its only industry manufactured something that never...Episode details...
On today’s date in 2003, a new orchestral work by the American composer Elliott Carter had its premiere in Boston. Carter was then 94 years old—he would live to be a month shy of 104, and, even more remarkable, he was composing new works almost to the end of his days.
Now, when you live that...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1800, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 had its first performance in Vienna, at a benefit concert for the 29-year-old composer.
It would be several years before any of Beethoven’s orchestral music reached American shores, but it did occur during Beethoven’s lifetime. In 1819, for...Episode details...
For many years, the BBC celebrated April Fools’ Day by trying to pull radio listeners’ legs with outrageously fabricated news stories. One year, for example, BBC TV aired footage of an Italian spaghetti farm where happy peasants harvested that year’s crop from bushes that the BBC production crew...Episode details...
We tend to think of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak as a 19th century composer—but he lived a few years into the 20th and one of his major works, his opera “Rusalka,” had its premiere in Prague on today’s date in 1901.
We mostly think of Dvorak as primarily a composer of symphonies and chamber...Episode details...
By the time of his death in 1949, the German composer Richard Strauss was famous worldwide as the composer of operas like “Der Rosenkavalier” and tone-poems like Don Juan and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” These operas and tone-poems are so famous, we tend to forget that Strauss also...Episode details...
On today’s date in the year 2000, the Shanghai Quartet premiered a new chamber work at the University of Richmond in Virginia. This was the String Quartet No.4 by the Chinese composer Bright Sheng.
Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955, but since the 80s he’s made the United States his home, and...Episode details...
On today’s date in the year 1801, the world, or at least that portion of it seated in the Imperial Court Theater in Vienna, heard for the very first time the music for a new ballet. The real draw that evening was the prima ballerina of the company, a certain Fraulein Cassentini, because the...Episode details...
