Today in musical history
Famous composers' birthdays and fantastic facts about them (molto emphasis on fantastic, non troppo emphasis on facts). If you want to know something worthwhile about your favorite composer, well then, you're on-line--go look them up. Otherwise, if you just want to kill time, click away here.
The opera Pelléas et Mélisande (french for Pelleas and Melisande, but now pronounce the 's' and the 'e') premiered this day 111 years ago. It was written by Claude (french for 'Cloud') Debussy. (In Chicago, we accent Debussy on the 2nd syllable. Try it! De-BUS-sy) Now, I don't know if you are an opera fan, but if you like exciting stories, you haven't lived til you live through a production of this opera. It is excitement personified.
April 3rd 1926 marks the first performance of Jean Sibelius' Seventh Symphony. Take the two digits of the date, 04-03, add them together and you get what? Just like the Seventh Symphony. Is that comic, er, cosmic or what? Of course, at the time, the USSR did not take this event lightly (Seven symphonies from, from, from that man!?) Plans for war and an eventual takeover of Sibelius' home country were underway.
April 4th is the birthday of composer Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004) whom I am always confusing with another composer, whose name escapes me. (Perhaps I'm thinking of
Super rock concert California Jam on this day in 1974. 200,000 in the audience, many of whom were people, most of whom were friends of the roadies, snuck in for free. Among the acts performing were Rare Earth; Earth, Wind and Fire; Eagles; Seals & Crofts; Mark Adamczyk; Black Oak Arkansas; Black Sabbath; Deep Purple; and Emerson, Lake and Adamczyk.
Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar virtuoso, born this day in 1920. He, of course, hired the Beatles to be his backup band (playing cymbals and waving incense mainly) in 1966. The rest, as they say, is history. Shankar has since fathered successful children, like Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar. And the Beatles? Well, whatever happened to those guys? Nobody plays their cymbal/incense music anymore.
Legendary lyricist-with-a-conscience Yip Harburg born on this day in 1898. (The "Yip" is short for "yipsel", squirrel in Yiddish, he was a sprightly lad.) Among many famous songs,
Tom Lehrer celebrates his birthday today. Gosh, he wrote and performed some funny songs. And in a style unto himself; he sounded just like, uh, Tom Lehrer. Carl Perkins, a giant in country music history born this day as well. He's famous for, uh, for being a giant in country music history.
Birthdate of Dorothy Fields, one smart songwriter. She started out as an infant in 1905 and went on to become a collaborative partner with some of the biggest names in Broadway. (We're talking big, big names, all CAPS!) And her sense of what made a song a hit was uncanny, whatever that means. Wait, no, here are some examples. Instead of writing "I'm in the mood for liver", she had the unerring instinct to write "I'm in the mood for Love." Or this: instead of writing "I can't give you anything but a twenty" she went with "I can't give you anything but Love." She didn't write "By the Beautiful Trashpit," but instead was inspired to write "By the Beautiful Sea." I could go on and on (and on (and on (and on))) but the point is, how did she do it? Come up with all those boffo ideas? Too late to ask, she is no longer answering her mail, if you get my drift. Although, I must admit I think that she'd have been better served if, instead of writing "A tree grows in Brooklyn", she had instead done something memorable like "A tree grows in the woods." Now, there's clever!