Sir Benjamin BrittenBorn: Lowestoft, Suffolk, England. November 22, 1913Died: Aldeburgh, England. December 4, 1976

Benjamin Britten grew up in the coast town of Lowestoft in Suffolk, England, in a home facing the North Sea. The fierce storms that drove ships onto the coast and ate away at the cliffs etched themselves into his memory. Two of his operas, Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, are stories of seamen and the sea that he loved.

Britten’s father was a dental surgeon and his mother a good amateur pianist. When Benjamin was a tiny boy, he became so insistent on learning to play the piano that his mother started giving him lessons. At the age of five he was composing little pieces. By the time he was seven, he had become so fascinated with music that he would take the scores of symphonies and operas to bed with him to read as some children read adventure stories. By the age of 16, Britten had written a symphony, 10 piano sonatas, a number of quartets, and other works.

In 1930, Britten enrolled in the Royal College of Music in London. For three years he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. He was an alert student whose rapid progress amazed his instructors.

At 21, Britten was earning a living with his compositions. For a good fee he wrote music for a government propaganda film. In 1934 a performance of his Fantasy Quartet for oboe and strings, presented in Italy by the Florence International Society for Contemporary Music, was well received. A further success was his Suite for violin and piano, played in Barcelona in 1935 and his Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, presented in London two years later. Britten was becoming well-established in the music world.

War came to Europe, and Britten, a pacifist, decided to leave for the United States. For a time, he shared an apartment with the poet W. H. Auden. From his friendship and collaboration with Auden, Britten came to a deeper awareness of the alliance between poetry and music.

While in the United States, Britten received a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation to write an opera. But, after three years in America, he was homesick. With the commission in his pocket, he returned to England. Still a pacifist, he worked in hospitals and bombed-out areas. He finished his new opera, Peter Grimes, for the Koussevitsky Foundation. It premiered at the Sadler’s Wells Theater in London on June 7, 1945. This opera brought Britten international fame.

In the next few years, Britten produced many fine works, among them three operas: The rape of Lucretia, Albert Herring, and Billy Budd. Commissioned once again by the Koussevitsky Foundation, he wrote the Spring Symphony. It received a tremendous ovation when it was played at the Berkshire Music Festival on August 13, 1949.

Most of Britten’s operas were scored for only 12 performers in the orchestra, making it possible for small opera groups and university workshops to perform his works.

Benjamin Britten is most famous for his operas but he also composed symphonies, chamber music, choral and vocal pieces, and film scores. In June, 1976, Benjamin Britten became the first composer in England to be honored by and elevation to the peerage. Sir Benjamin Britten died in Aldenburgh, England on December 4, 1976.

Gian Carlo MenottiBorn: Cadegliano, Italy. July 7, 1911Died: February, 2007

Gian Carlo Menotti had the good fortune to be born into a wealthy family. He was always able to indulge in his interests in music and the theatre. A happy childhood in the Italian town of Cadegliano and the blessings of his family fostered the imagination and sensitivity which is evident in his music.

Gian Carlo’s piano lessons began when he was four. At six years of age, he was writing music and participating in chamber music sessions with the family. On his ninth birthday, his mother gave him a puppet theater, and he immediately started writing little plays for the puppets. He composed the music, wrote the lyrics, designed the costumes and staging, and directed these early productions. His first attempt at an opera, the Death of Pierrot, was made at the age of 10.

When his family moved to Milan, Gian Carlo was enrolled in the Milan Conservatory. Musically gifted and handsome, he became the darling of Milan society. His mother soon realized that his musical education was not growing in this atmosphere. When he was 17, she sent him to the United States, where he studied composition with Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Menotti knew little English but solved this problem by going to the movies several times a week.

Inspired by memories of his boyhood associations and the social life of Milan, Menotti wrote the witty opera Amelia Goes to the Ball. Under the baton of Fritz Reiner, the opera premiered at the Curtis Institute on April 1, 1937 and was then presented in New York on April 7 of that year. Following the success of Amelia, Menotti was commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company to write an opera exclusively for radio. He composed the one-act comic opera The Old Maid and the Thief.

Menotti was visiting his home town of Cadegliano in the summer of 1937 when the postmistress came pedaling furiously on her bicycle. She shouted excitedly that she had a telegram for him from the Metropolitan Opera in New York – they were planning to present Amelia the following season!

But in Italy, his opera met a different fate. Menotti was promised that his opera would be heard in all the big opera houses of Italy, but only if he would join the Fascist Party. He declined the invitation, and as a consequence, Amelia played only in an obscure opera house in San Remo, Italy.

Menotti’s first serious opera came out of the experience of attending a séance with friends. There he witnessed the tragedy of his hosts’ pathetic attempts to see and hear their dead daughter. The séance left a lasting impression on Menotti. Nine years later, he told the touching story in his opera The Medium. A great success, this opera was presented more than a thousand times in the United States, London, and Paris. Under Menotti’s direction, it was made into a motion picture.

Menotti’s first full-length opera was The Consul. In it he tells the bitter story of Magda, who is caught in a police state in present-day Europe. Her husband has escaped to freedom. While she waits for the red tape of the bureaucracy to untangle so that she may leave, her child dies. Her husband returns to join her, only to be arrested. The title character, a shadowy presence, never appears and is not in the cast. Notwithstanding the somberness of the opera, critics acclaimed it as the best musical and dramatic play of the year.

Amahl and the Night Visitors is a one-act opera for television that was commissioned by the National Broadcasting Company. First given on Christmas Eve in 1951, it tells of the Magi following the star to Bethlehem. On their way, they came to the hut of Amahl, a crippled beggar boy. As a gift for the Holy Child, he gives them his crutches, the only thing of value he owns. Amahl finds that a miracle has taken place and he is able to walk. This touching opera has become a feature of many Christmas Eve programs.

The Saint of Bleeker Street won the Pulitzer Prize for Menotti. It also won awards from drama and music critics. It is a story of conflict and violence.

Menotti went on to compose more operas, ballets, concert works, and many other musical pieces. He also taught composition at the Curtis School.

In 1974, Gian Carlo Menotti retired to an estate he bought in Scotland. He is still an active composer and frequently travels to the United States for concerts of his new works.

Dmitri ShostakovichBorn: St. Petersburg, Russia. September 25, 1906Died: Moscow, Russia. August 9, 1975

Composer-laureate of the Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich was not always in the favor of the country’s officials. They held that his music was too modern and satiric and did not reflect the Communist ideology. When his dynamic Fifth Symphony was performed in Leningrad in 1937 and in Moscow in 1938, professional critics, fellow composers, and public figures gave it glowing reviews, and he was once more an accepted Soviet composer.

Dmitri’s parents were both musical. His father was a singer and amateur musician, and his mother was a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory. At the age of five, Dmitri was taken by his parents to a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Czar Sultan. The next day, little Dmitri surprised them by singing several of the arias from the opera.

Though recognizing their son’s musical ability, they did not believe in starting music lessons early. Dmitri was nine when he had his first piano instruction. He entered the Petrograd Conservatory in 1919.

These revolutionary times were difficult for everybody. In Petrograd, famine and disease were rampant. Shostakovich, a frail boy, suffered so greatly from malnutrition that the conservatory director petitioned personally to increase his food ration so that he might live. Shostakovich’s father had died, and his mother’s job as secretary could not support them. Shostakovich took a job playing piano in a movie house but held it for only a short time. Dmitri’s piano would often fall silent when comic scenes appeared on the screen, and the audience would hear roars of laughter from the piano pit. The management decided to part company with the young man.

Until his twentieth year, poverty and near starvation haunted Dmitri. Yet he somehow managed to keep up his studies at the Conservatory. When he was18 years old, Shostakovich completed his First Symphony and presented it as his graduation piece at the Conservatory. The school heads thought so highly of his composition that they paid to have it copied so that it could be publicly performed. It was first given by the Leningrad Philharmonic on May 12, 1926. From that date on, the work has been in the repertoire of orchestras all over the world.

Shostakovich at this point had produced a number of symphonies, two of which celebrated the Russian Revolution, as well as operas, ballets, music for piano and scores for film. In the spring o f1927 he was commissioned to write a Second Symphony commemorating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.

In the 1930’s Shostakovich was a highly regarded Soviet composer who expressed in his music the ideology of the Soviet people. Suddenly he was attacked. His opera The Nose was withdrawn quickly. What had been considered outside of the Soviet Union as the country’s finest opera, his successful Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk, was branded by the Russian newspaper Pravada “crude, vulgar, a bedlam of noise.” He tried again with the pastoral ballet The Limpid Brook, but his

music was again condemned. For more than a year he quietly rode out the storm, teaching at the Leningrad Conservatory and composing more music for piano, films, and chamber groups.

After the success of his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich was once again in favor with the government. At its first performance on November 21, 1937, there was enthusiastic response from public and the press. In 1940, he won the Stalin Prize for his Quintet for Piano and Strings. He was an honored Soviet composer.

World War II came and with it, the Nazi invasion of Russia. Shostakovich, who was head of the piano department at the Leningrad Conservatory, tried several times to join the Red Army but was turned down. To help in the war effort he served as a fire fighter. All through the savage bombardment of Leningrad, he continued to be engrossed in the writing o fhis Seventh Symphony. He conceived this piece as a patriotic symbol of the turbulent times and of the valiant defense of their motherland by the Russian people.

Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was introduced in the temporary Soviet capitol of Kuibyshev on March 1, 1942. The Symphony received a tremendous ovation from the audience of diplomats, Soviet officials, Red Army officials, and members of the American diplomatic and military corps. It was given the subtitle Leningrad Symphony. Its first performance outside the Soviet Union took place in London on June 19, 1942. The enthusiastic audience rose to its feet and cheered. Conductors all over the United States vied for the score. Arturo Toscanini won the distinction of being the first American conductor to perform the Seventh Symphony. It was heard on NBC radio on July 19, 1942. Since then, every major orchestra in the United States has played it.

Shostakovich’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies are patriotic in theme. The Ninth has many gay tunes, sometimes surprisingly accented with a mischievous wrong note or sudden change of mood – musical jokes by the composer.

Besides composing many major works, Shostakovich was a brilliant pianist who greatly enriched the literature of piano music. He was intense about all his interest. A great sports fan, he hated to miss a soccer game, an ice hockey game, or a boxing match. When engaged in writing music, he was oblivious to everything around him – his children playing or friends chatting in the room.

Shostakovich had praise and awards as well as criticism heaped on him during his life. His honors included the Order of Lenin, Laureate of the International Sibelius Prize, and honorary membership in the American Institute of the Arts. He completed fifteen symphonies, the same number of string quartets, and numerous other musical works.

Dmitri Shostakovich died in Moscow, Russia on August 9, 1975, leaving a wife and two children.

Aaron CoplandBorn: Brooklyn, New York, November 14, 1900Died: North Tarrytown, New York, December 2, 1990

Aaron Copland came from a background in which there was no hint that he might become a composer. Though his sister took piano lessons and his brother played the violin, his parents did not discuss music and never went to a concert.

Aaron’s sister gave him his first instruction on the piano and later he studied under a local teacher. At 16, he began to think seriously of becoming a composer and tried to learn harmony through a correspondence course. This was not too satisfactory so his piano teacher arranged for him to study music theory with Rubin Goldmark. Goldmark was a good teacher, but was not interested in modern music and did not encourage Copland in his endeavor to learn a new approach to composition.

Searching for other instruction, Aaron left for Europe in 1921, having read of a new music school for Americans in Fountainbleau, France. He was the first pupil to be accepted in the school. He studied composition and orchestration and was in a harmony class taught by the young Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger was a great influence in Copland’s development as a modern composer; in her teaching he found answers to his questions on contemporary music. Copland studied with Boulanger for three years.

When he returned to New York, Copland had a commission from Nadia Boulanger to write a symphony for orchestra and organ. With Boulanger at the organ and Walter Damrosch conduction, the premiere of Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was performed by the New York Symphony Society in the winter of 1925. The music world was impressed with the outstanding talent of the 25-year-old composer.

Later that year, under the baton of Serge Koussevitsky, music director of the Boston Symphony, Copland’s score Music for the Theater was played in Boston. Koussevitsky asked the young man to compose a new work of modern music which he would conduct in New York for the League of Composers. Copland wrote a piece incorporating jazz rhythm called Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. He had found a mentor in Koussevitsky, who introduced many of his works. In 1925, Copland became the first musician to win the Guggenheim Fellowship. It was renewed a second year, enabling Copland to concentrate on composing, free from financial worries.

A visit to Mexico in 1932 stimulated Copland to write one of his best-known works, El Salon Mexico, based on popular Mexican tunes and the spirited, sensuous rhythms of the music he heard there. As a composer, Copland borrowed liberally from the folk music of America. In his Billy the Kid, a ballet, one hears the plaintive songs of the Western cowboy. Appalachian Spring first was conceived as a ballet for the dancer Martha Graham, who introduced it with her company in Washington, D. C. on October 30, 1944. The music is based on white spirituals and the theme tells of the Shaker folk of the Pennsylvania hills. Since then, Appalachian Spring has appeared as an orchestral suite.

An impressive work composed by Copland for orchestra is the Lincoln Portrait with a narration from the Gettysburg Address. Copland, a prolific composer, has written for full orchestra, chamber music, ballets and for the theater, radio and films. He has always promoted the interests of contemporary composers. Unspoiled by fame he maintained a quiet, warm, tolerant personality.

His habit of composing at night with the help of a noisy piano forced Copland to move from several New York apartments.

George GershwinBorn: Brooklyn, New York, September, 1898Died: Hollywood, California, July 11, 1937

Once frowned upon by serious musicians, jazz became respectable largely through the efforts of George Gershwin. His Rhapsody in Blue, a symphonic work incorporating jazz, is now played by concert orchestras all over the world.

George Gershwin was almost 10 years old before he discovered the world of music. Until then, he was happy to be the roller-skating champion of his block and to join in the gang activities of his New York neighborhood.

George was playing ball outside a school when he heard Dvorak’s Humoresque being performed by a violinist in the school auditorium. He stood transfixed; in his mind his destiny in music was settled. Gershwin made friends with the violinist, a local boy named Maxie Rosenweig. A short time later, Gershwin showed him some music he had written. Maxie, expecting something with the feeling of Chopin or Mendelssohn, was taken aback by the ragtime rhythm of the piece.

By then his parents had purchased a second-hand upright piano so that George’s older brother, Ira, could take lessons. Before long George pushed Ira from the piano bench and took over the 50-cent lessons. George learned piano, and Ira was destined to become his lyricist, putting words to George’s melodies.

George’s second teacher was Professor Goldfarb, called Professor because he charged a dollar and a half a lesson. The Professor was no believer in scales or exercises. When George met his first good teacher, Charles Hambitzer, he played his best piece exactly the way the Professor had taught him to. When he finished, Hambitzer exclaimed, “Let’s go shoot the teacher who taught you to play like that.” Four years with Hambitzer made a real pianist of George Gershwin.

When he was 16, Gershwin went to work for Remick, a New York music publishing house. His job was to play the piano to boost sales of the popular songs they were publishing. As he played, Gershwin would include a few songs of his own. Soon people began to recognize his ability and gift for melody. He was offered a position at Harms, another publishing house. Here he received 35 dollars a week to write songs. Through Max Dreyfus, head of the publishing house, George Gershwin received his first commissions to write music for Broadway shows.

Gershwin’s is one of the great success stories of Tin Pan Alley. He wrote the music for many Broadway hits, composing tunes that swept the country. In 1924 the popular band leader, Paul Whiteman, commissioned Gershwin to write a symphonic-jazz piece which was to prove that jazz could be presented as art music. Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue in 10 days. It was orchestrated by Ferde Grofe, causing rumors that Gershwin could not score for instruments. The rumor was quickly refuted when Gershwin brilliantly scored several other orchestral works he had composed.

Rhapsody in Blue was first performed on February 12, with Whiteman conducting and Gershwin at the piano. The audience response was tremendously enthusiastic. Rhapsody in Blue is now heard all over the world in concerts, recordings and on radio.

Gershwin produced many scores for Broadway thaters and for Hollywood films. The former East Side boy now lived in a luxurious apartment in New York and had an estate in Hollywood. He became a collector of fine and valuable paintings.

Deciding that he would like further study in composition, Gershwin went to Paris and asked Igor Stravinsky for lessons. When Stravinsky questioned him about his income the previous year, he replied, “Oh, about $100, 000.” Inspired by his trip abroad, Gershwin wrote the tone-poem An American in Paris. The work has since been performed by many great orchestras.

His last work was Porgy and Bess, a folk opera in which he tells the story of Negro life in Charleston’s Catfish Row. Porgy and Bess has been called the complete American opera.

Gershwin strove to present jazz as vital and respectable. He wanted to prove its artistic importance. He accomplished both. George Gershwin died in Hollywood, California on July 11, 1937. He was just 38.

Howard HansonBorn: Wahoo, Nebraska, October 28, 1896Died: Rochester, New York, February 26, 1981

At the entrance to the town of Wahoo, Nebraska, is a sign reading, “Wahoo, Birthplace of Howard Hanson.” The sign honors not a war hero nor a politician, but a composer. The music of Howard Hanson often reflects the wide plains and the farm lands of Nebraska. In tribute to the Swedish settlers of Wahoo and to his Swedish parents, Hanson wrote his Nordic Symphony, the poem North and West and the string choral number “Hymn for the Pioneers.”

Hanson first studied music with his mother and, by the age of seven was already writing little compositions. While attending high school, he also studied music at Luther College in Wahoo. To further his musical education, he went to the Institute of Musical Art in New York. Later, in Illinois, he attended Northwestern University, from which he graduated at the age of 19. At 20, he joined the faculty of the College of the Pacific in California and, after three years, was made Dean of the Conservatory of Fine Arts. While there he devoted himself seriously to the writing of music.

One of his early works was the tone poem Before the Dawn. Another was a score for the California Forest Play, which he conducted at a festival under the giant redwood trees. He submitted these pieces to the jury of the American Academy of Rome in 1921, hoping for a chance to study in Italy. His works were accepted, and Hanson became the first Music Fellow in the Academy. He spent three years in Rome where became vitally interested in the ancient music of the Italian churches. Under this influence, he wrote a tone poem Lux Aeterna, which he introduced at a concert in Rome. In 1923, his Symphony No. 1 (the Nordic) was also presented in Rome, directed by the young composer.

After conducting the American premiere of the Nordic Symphony in Rochester, New York, Hanson was offered the directorship of the Eastman School of Music. He was then 28 years old. Under his leadership, the School of Music became one of the most progressive and outstanding institutions in the United States.

Hanson inaugurated the American Music Festivals in 1925. These festivals have become annual events devoted to presenting the works of contemporary American composers. The concerts have provided hundreds of American composers with the opportunity to have their music performed.

In 1930 Hanson was commissioned to compose a work for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Symphony No. 2 (the Romantic) is Hanson’s statement that American life is incurably romantic and not, as critic’s claim, completely materialistic.

The premiere of Hanson’s opera Merry Mount attracted wide attention and acclaim. It was given on February 10, 1934, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He produced a number of choral works such as “The Lament of Beowulf.” Using Walt Whitman’s inspiring poetry about the Civil War as his text, Hanson wrote three songs from “Drum Taps” in 1935. Almost 10 years

later his Symphony No. 4, composed as a requiem on the death of his father, became the first such work to win the Pulitzer Prize.

For the 100th anniversary of the National Educational Association and the 50th anniversary of the Music Educators National Conference, Howard Hanson was asked to write a composition for chorus and orchestra. He created Song of Democracy, using as text another Whitman poem. The National Symphony Orchestra presented the first performance of this work on April 7, 1957 in Washington, D. C.

Howard Hanson received more than 25 honorary doctoral degrees from universities, colleges, and conservatories. He was elected o membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1935), was appointed a Fellow in the Royal Academy of Music in Sweden (1938), received a Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Symphony (1944), and in 1945 was presented with the Ditson Award for his great influence on American music and his service to the musicians of America. His activities brought him to the front ranks of composers and music educators in our country.

For many years, Dr. Hanson directed the Los Angeles Orchestra in a series of concerts for the young people of the Los Angeles City Schools. He also conducted major orchestras both in the United States and in Europe.

Dr. Hanson made his home in Rochester, New York where he died on February 26, 1981.

Virgil ThomsonBorn: Kansas City, Missouri, November 25, 1896Died: New York City, September 30, 1989

Virgil Thomson’s music reveals both the sophistication of his many years in Paris and the fond memories of his boyhood in and around Kansas City, Missouri.

Neither of Virgil Thomson’s parents was musical. Indeed, his father was all but tone deaf. Still, they appreciated their son’s interest in music and provided piano lessons for him all during his schooling in Kansas City. He started to play the organ at the age of 12 and soon obtained a job as organist at the Calvary Baptist Church. He also earned money as a pianist in a movie house in the days of silent motion pictures.

In 1915 Virgil enrolled in the Kansas City Polytechnic Institute, but his studies were interrupted when the United States entered World War I. He enlisted in the army, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. After the war, he returned to Kansas City to graduate from the Polytechnic. In August 1919 Thomson entered Harvard University. To support himself, he obtained a job as church organist. Scholarships, organ playing, and concert engagements helped to pay his way.

In the spring of 1921 Virgil traveled to Europe as a member and assistant director of the touring Harvard Glee Club. In Paris, he was introduced to Nadia Boulanger. Thomson stayed to become her pupil. Boulanger was and is considered one of the great all-round musicians of the world. She was composer, pianist, organist, conductor and teacher of harmony, counterpoint, and composition. Virgil took a room in a small hotel not far from where she lived. It was a noisy place where lively tenants frolicked most of the night, so he could practice at all hours without disturbing anybody. During this period, he gained a little income from writing articles for American magazines and newspapers.

After a year in Paris, Virgil returned to Boston and to Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1923. He was recommended for a Julliard Fellowship, which gave him $1500. He longed for Paris but decided it would be wise to further his music education in New York. He studied conducting and composition at the Mannes School. When the Fellowship money ran out, Thomson took a job at Harvard as an assistant instructor in the Music Department. But Paris called to him, and he returned to that city in 1925. In those days, Paris was a center for most of the world-famous writers, painters, and musicians.

Virgil could have made a living by writing, teaching, or conducting, but he was determined to make his way as a composer. Up until 1925, his most important musical work was the Missa Brevis. In 1926 he finished the Sonata de Chiesa, which was played that year with some success at a concert in Paris.

That same year he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein, a writer and friend to the gifted and famous in art, literature, and music. She was fond of Thomson and stated that she thought his compositions were very pure and special. To show her confidence in his talent, she gave him the

libretto for an opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for which he wrote the music. Her usual text and the simplicity of his musical theme caused much comment when the opera was produced. It has been considered one of his greatest successes. Twenty years later, at Thomson’s suggestion, Gertrude Stein completed a story a bout Susan B. Anthony, the American feminist who staunchly fought for racial equality and the rights of women in the 1800’s. Virgil took about four months to set the libretto to music. It was called The Mother of Us All. IN the libretto Gertrude Stein’s words are often topsy-turvy, and Thomson’s music for this composition has been called sophisticated baby talk.

Thomson began a long series of “Portraits” around 1927. He sat his subjects down, studied them and wrote his impressions of their personalities in music. There are over a hundred of these musical portrayals of friends and acquaintances.

The Plow That Broke the Plains was Thomson’s first film score. This work was followed by music for the film The River.

All the while he was composing, Thomson had been steadily writing articles, which were appearing in various magazines. Interested American publishers gave him a $1000 advance to produce a book. The State of Music was written in Paris and published in 1939. He wrote well, and his book was well-received.

World War II had broken out in Europe, and, with the German army only a few days outside of Paris, Thomson left France. In December of 1939 he arrived in New York. A new phase of his career started almost immediately when he accepted the position of music critic of the New York Heral Tribune. He pulled no punches in his reviewing of music and musicians. Acid criticism and high praise were heaped upon him, but he was unperturbed, feeling that a critic is responsible only to himself. After 14 years, Thomson left the Herald Tribune to devote himself to writing music.

Virgil Thomson has been the recipient of many honors. He was given a degree as Doctor of the Fine Arts from Syracuse University. In 1948 he was appointed a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for his music for the film Louisiana Story. The French government in 1947 named him “Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.” And, in 1983, Thomson received the 6th Annual Kennedy Center Award for lifetime achievement.

Paul HindemithBorn: Hanau, Germany, November 16, 1895Died: Frankfurt, Germany, December 28, 1963

When young Paul Hindemith decided on a musical career, his parents strongly opposed his ambition. At the age of 14, already a good violinist, he went to Frankfurt to attend classes at the Hoch Conservatory. After finishing his studies at the Conservatory, Hindemith joined the orchestra of the Frankfurt Opera, becoming its concertmaster in 1915. He held this position until 1923.

In 1921, Hindemith helped to found the Amar Quartet. The group, sometimes called the Amar-Hindemith Quartet, made a specialty of introducing the music of modern composers. The violinist Licco Amar was leader, Paul Hindemeith played the viola, and his brother Rudolf was the cellist. That year they played Hindemith’s Second String Quartet with greast success at the first Donaueschingen Festival; it was performed again in 1922 at the international musical meeting in Salzburg. Critics wrote that his was a new and important talent. Hindemith toured with the quartet until 1929.

Hindemith took an active part in the Donaueschingen Festivals. Musicians from many countries attended the events. As they became familiar with him and his music, Hindemith developed an international reputation as an outstanding German composer. In recognition of his works, he was elected to the German Academy. Hindemith taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule and was considered a brilliant virtuoso of the viola.

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, life in his homeland became unbearable. Hindemith, married to a Jewish woman and with many friends among the Jewish musicians, refused to give up these associations. As a result, his influence in music was branded “degenerate,” and his works were banned in Germany. His opera Neues vom Tage, - an aria sung in a bathtub – outraged the Nazi Goebbels, who exclaimed that it was an obvious symptom of Hindemith’s corruption of the atmosphere of German music. His opera Mathis der Maler (Mathias the Painter), a story of the defeat of liberalism during a peasant uprising, was pronounced by Hitler to be unfit for human ears.

In 1939, at the age of 44, Hindemith emigrated to the United States. For a number of years, he was highly productive as a composer, conductor, and violist. He became head of the Music Department at Yale University, where he was an effective and much admired teacher. His knowledge covered many fields, and he was an interested participant in discussions of art and literature as well as music.

Hindemith always had a practical outlook, far removed from the dreamy dispositions of many musicians. To Hindemith, music was not the preserve of experts but something that was socially useful for everyone. Based on this belief, he wrote many pieces for amateurs to play.

Moving to Zurich, Switzerland in 1953, Hindemith joined the faculty of the University of Zurich. IN 1954, he received the Sibelius Award of $35,000, given annually to an outstanding musician. Paul Hindemith died in Frankfurt, Germany on December 28, 1963.

Ferde GrofeBorn: New York City, March 27, 1892Died: Santa Monica, California, April 3, 1972

The sounds and sights of America are in the music of Ferde Grofé. Even the pulsing rhythms of jazz from the Deep South are treated symphonically for concert orchestras by this American composer.

Ferde Grofé was a descendant of four generations of classical musicians. His father was a singer and gifted musician. His mother, who graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany, was an excellent cellist and a renowned teacher of that instrument. Before he was five years old, Ferde began to study piano, making rapid progress in his lessons. At nine years of age, to the delight of his musical family, he was composing chamber music.

When Ferde was still a boy, his father died. His mother remarried. His stepfather had no patience with Ferde’s ambitions to become a musician. He thought that Ferde should become a lawyer or a banker; much less precarious ways of making a living. Unable to accept this decision, Ferde ran away from home at the age of 14. The young boy supported himself by working as a milkman, driving a truck, helping in a book bindery, and toiling in an iron foundry. Eventually, Ferde joined up with a cornet player. With Ferde at the piano, the two played in cafes up and down the West Coast. One day, Ferde awoke in a small mining town in northern California to find that the cornet player had taken all the money and disappeared. To eat and pay his room rent, Ferde had to take a job in a tawdry local bar playing the piano for two dollars a night.

His family, hearing of his plight, decided to pay for him to study music in a more classic form. His grandfather Bierlich, a cellist with the Los Angeles Symphony, became his teacher. He made Ferde go through the repertoire of the orchestra and would become enraged if Ferde made the slightest mistake in reading the scores. By 1909 Ferde was ready to join the Los Angeles Symphony as a violist. He remained with the orchestra for 10 years, supplementing his income by playing in jazz bands. The years with the symphony had a great influence on his tastes in music. Now his favorite composers were Ravel and Sibelius.

With the advent of World War I, the Los Angeles orchestra could no longer pay its musicians. Ferde Grofé went to San Francisco where he found a job as pianist and arranger in Paul Whiteman’s band. For 10 years, Ferde arranged the jazz numbers for Whiteman’s orchestra. In 1923 the two men went to New York to produce an opening number for the jazz concert they planned to give the following year in that city. For the occasion, George Gershwin composed a piano solo, which Grofé scored for orchestra. It was the famous and successful Rhapsody in Blue.

Shortly after this event, Grofé wrote the tone poem Broadway at Night. He became a free-lance arranger and composer of serious music. His works include Mississippi Suite, Metropolis, Grand Canyon Suite, Tabloid, Symphony in Steel, Three Shades of Blue, Hollywood Suite, and Death Valley Suite. In the fall of 1961, he was asked to write a symphony for the upcoming World’s Fair in New York. Grofé accepted the commission. His World’s Fair Suite was premiered on the

Fair’s opening day, April 22, 1964. The composer dedicated the first and last movements of this interesting work to the hope of “peace in the world through understanding.”

Ferde Grofé became a member of the faculty of the Julliard School of Music, teaching orchestration. He was also well known as a conductor. Later in life, he made his home in Santa Monica, California, where he died on April 3, 1972.

Sergei ProkofievBorn: Sontzovka, Russia, April 23, 1891

Died: Moscow, Soviet Union, March 5, 1953

The musician in Sergei Prokofiev was awakened early. From the time, he was born and all through his early years, Sergei Prokofiev heard his mother playing the piano and playing it well. At his insistence, she gave him his first piano lessons when he was little more than a baby.

Prokofiev’s father was the manager of a large estate in the Ukraine in Russia. The family lived in a spacious country home near the village of Ekaterinoslav.

Sergei was five when he composed his first piece at the piano, a lively little melody he called the “Indian Gallop”; his mother wrote it down for him. During the next two years, the boy composed a waltz, a march, a rondo, and even a four-hands piece for his mother and him to play together.

Devoted a s his parents were, they were not indulgent. Sergei was expected to work hard at a well-rounded education. In the morning, he had a riding lesson, followed by a swim in the nearby river. He studied arithmetic and Russian with his father, while his mother taught him French and German. Every day there was music practice. The evenings were set aside for the reading and discussion of periodicals and books, and he developed what was to be a life-long interest in chess by playing the game with his father. There was time for play with the children of the village, but his chief love was always music.

By the time he was 12 years old, Prokofiev had written two operas, The Giant and The Feast During the Plague. He had also composed part of a third opera, a symphony, and a number of piano pieces.

A year later, Prokofiev entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There he studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, and piano and conducting with other eminent teachers. He was a revolutionary in composition, sometimes confounding his instructors with the liberties he took in music.

In the 10 years he spent in the Conservatory, Prokofiev wrote more than 100 pieces of music. During this period he won the coveted Rubenstein Award for his First Piano Concerto. He graduated in 1914 with diplomas in composing, piano, and conducting.

In London for a holiday, Prokofiev had the opportunity to meet S. P. Diaghileff, impresario of the Balle Russe. He played his arrangement of the Second Piano Concerto for Diaghileff. The impresario, sensing talent in the young composer, proposed making a ballet of the work, with Prokofiev in the orchestra pit as soloist. The next year, Diaghileff invited Sergei to Rome where, on March 7, 1915, with Molinari conducting, the Prokofiev Second Concerto was played by the composer. It had some success, but the music public was not ready to completely accept his original and modern style.

The clounds of World War I were hanging over Europe. Prokofiev, now the only son of a widow, was exempt from service. He devoted his time to composing. In Russian folk lore he discovered the tale of a droll harlequin. Out of this story, Prokofiev created The Clown, a comic pantomime ballet. Because of the war, Diaghileff could not produce it. Finally, in 1921, the Ballet Russe introduced the Clown in Paris, where it was greeted with much enthusiasm.

Prokofiev’s famous Classical Symphony, completed at the age of 26, was first performed in the spring of 1918. After conducting the performance, Prokofiev left for a tour of Japan and the United States. Three years later in Chicago, he conducted the first performance of his opera The Love For Three Oranges. The Chicago Symphony also premiered his Third Piano Concerto, with Prokofiev as soloist. American listeners did not always understand his music, but they gave the composer a warm welcome. In California, while on his concert tour, he met and fell in love with a young Spanish singer, Lina Llubera, whom he later married.

In 1922 Prokofiev and his wife left the United States to settle in the small village of Ettal in the Bavarian Alps. There, in the quiet countryside, he was busy and happy at his composing. From Ettal he traveled to give concerts in London, Europe, and the United States.

For a time the Prokofievs lived in Paris, where Diaghileff commissioned Sergei to write music for the ballets The Age of Steel and the Prodigal Son. These were active years for Prokofiev, who composed three symphonies, two piano concertos, and a Symphonic Song for orchestra.

At the age of 43, Prokofiev returned to Russioa and settled in Moscow with his wife. He found that the Soviet Union was not always a paradise for composers. A. A. Zhdanov, right-hand mand of Joseph Stalin, attacked Prokofiev’s music as tainted by Western decadence. Prokofiev, now considered one of the finest composers of the country, did not appreciate political interference with his art. With half an eye on Soviet idealogy, he continued to compose for concert hall and film, and he wrote many delightful songs for children. His Peter and the Wolf is a musical fairy tale with Peter and his animal friends represented by different instruments of the orchestra.

When the Nazis invaded his country in 1941, Prokofiev was inspired to express the patriotic spirit of the Russian people in stirring military marches and songs. Some of his major works composed during these war years are the Symphonic March; his Piano Sonata No. 7, which is sometimes known as the Stalingrad Sonata; Symphony No. 5, which had great success in the United States; and the ambitious opera War and Peace, which was of such proportions that it took two nights to perform.

In his musical expression, Prokofiev was always himself and always modern. He was business-like and efficient, working regularly every day between the hours of ten and noon.

Prokofiev died from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953. One of his last efforts was music for the ballet A Tale of The Stone Flower, which was premiered at the Bolshoi Theater a year after his death.

Heitor Villa-LobosBorn: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 5, 1887

Died: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 17, 1959

Heitor Villa-Lobos found inspiration for his music in the folklore and popular music of Brazil. His melodies and rhythms have qualities that are unmistakably Brazilian, and he often made use of the native percussion instruments in his compositions.

Villa-Lobos was the son of an amateur musician and cellist. When Heitor was six, his father gave him a few lessons on the cello and piano. Heitor had little formal training in music, preferring to pick up his own information. By trial and error, he learned to play the piano and several wind instruments. When he was 11, his father died. Young Heitor was obligated to make his living by playing cello in cafes and theater orchestras. He entered the National Institute of Music in Rio de Janeiro in 1907.

In 1910, Villa-Lobos decided to try to make his way to the United States but only got as far as Barbados. He became fascinated by the music there, particularly the African rhythms. He was inspired to write Three African Dances for orchestra and included in his score some of the primitive instruments he found in Barbados.

From Barbados, he joined a scientific expedition into the interior of Brazil in 1912. The trip afforded him the opportunity to study the music and view the ceremonies of different tribes. These experiences made a profound and lasting impression on Villa-Lobos. He discovered a new goal for his music, a merging of the music he knew, which was European in origin, with the exotic and strange culture of these primitive folk. He was also interested in the Negro influences in Brazilian music.

Villa-Lobos produce one work after another, making broad use in his scores of ancient folk melodies and the new popular music of Brazil. The first concert of his works was held in 1915 in Rio de Janeiro. Most Brazilian musicians either looked down their noses at him or called him a musical savage. His music adapted new and unusual forms which they found difficult to accept.

When he was 24, Villa-Lobos married Lucille Guiomares, a concert pianist. They made their home in Buenos Aires. He was playing cello in one of his own compositions in a local hotel lobby when Arthur Rubenstein chanced to hear him. Rubenstein was immediately attracted by the free and unusual approach of the music of Villa-Lobos. He asked to meet the composer and later invited Villa-Lobos to play for him in his hotel suite. Rubenstein wsa so impressed that he used his influence to obtain a government grant for the young composer. In appreciation, Villa-Lobos wrote and dedicated a piano piece called “Rudepoema” (Primitive Piece to Rubenstein. In 1923, with the money from his government, Villa-Lobos was able to go to paris for further study. Instead of absorbing French musical ideas, he preferred to remain himself. He insisted that he had come to France to show what he had to offer and not what he could borrow from the French composers.

Upon his return to Brazil in 1930, Villa-Lobos founded and conducted his own orchestra. He was made Superviosor and Director of Musical Education and made many changes in the way music was taught in Brazil’s public schools. He put children into enormous choruses and had them sing everything from solemn masses to popular songs. He encouraged them to express their feelings as they sang by shouting, whistling, clapping, or swaying. He led them with flags instead of a baton. On one of his supervisory trips, he took a train which wound on narrow tracks up and around a mountain. He was fascinated by the clicking of the wheels on the tracks, the tooting of the whistle, and the puffing of the engine as it climbed. Out of this experience came The Little Train of the Caipira.

Villa-Lobos first visited the United States in the winter of 1944-1945. By this time he was a well-known composer and musician. He was invited by major orchestras to give guest performances of his works, and the League of Composers honored him with “Villa-Lobos Week.”

Villa-Lobos composed a piece for the World’s Fair in 1940, producing music whose little black notes followed the outlines of the New York skyline. He was a prolific composer and wrote more than 2,000 compositions. He wrote so many that he did not bother to keep track of them. Scores vanished, perhaps taken as souvenirs by admirers. He did not seem concerned about their loss.

For one whose artistic interest was mainly in folk music, it is curious that Villa-Lobos worshipped at the shrine of Johann Sebastian Bach. To express the depth of his feelings for Bach, he composed his Bachians Brasileira, a favorite of symphony orchestras everywhere. In this work he combined the musical style of Bach with the elements of Brazilian folk melodies.

Toward the end of his life, he divided his time between New York and Rio de Janeiro. He died at his home in Rio de Janeiro on November 17, 1959.

Igor StravinskyBorn: Oranienbaum, Russia, June 17, 1882

Died: Los Angeles, California, April 6, 1971

Igor Stravinsky, the Russia-born composer and pianist, said of himself that he lived in the present, not the future nor the past. The music of this slight, dynamic man expresses the twentieth century and has had great impact upon the composers of our time.

Stravinsky’s father was the leading bass of the St. Petersburg opera. As a child, Igor had many rich musical experiences. He was often taken to concerts and to opera performances. Though he was started at piano lessons when he was nine, his parents did not seriously consider the idea of a musical career for their son. After preliminary studies in local schools, Igor entered the University of St. Petersburg, intending to study law. But he found himself more interested in harmony and counterpoint than in dry legal theories. Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, played in memory of the composer who had just died, moved him deeply and started him thinking that music, not law, would be his life. Stravinsky was still not convinced, however, of his musical ability and so continued to study law.

In the summer of 1901, the 19-year-old Stravinsky met Rimsky-Korsakov in Heidelberg, Germany and played some compositions for him. Rimsky-Korsakov was not particularly impressed and recommended further lessons in harmony and composition. He aslo advised Igor to go on with his law studies. He did not accept Stravinsky as a pupil until 1907, when he gave him private lessons. In 1908, when Rimsky-Korssakov’s daughter was to be married, Stravinsky sent him the score of his symphonic work Fireworks as a wedding gift. A few days later Rimsky-Korsakov died. Stravinsky spent a month grieving, unable to compose. Then, in July, he wrote a Funeral Chant in tribute to Rimsky-Korsakov.

Igor completed University studies in 1905. He was married in 1906 to his first cousin, Catherine Nossenko, in ST. Petersburg. She was sympathetic to his aims and encouraged him to make music his profession.

Stravinsky’s Fantastic Scherzon as premiered at a concert in St. Petersburg on February 6, 1909. Serge Diaghileff, impresario of the Ballet Russe, was in the audience. Excited over the piece, Diaghileff immediately commissioned Stravinsky to write a work suitable for the upcoming Ballet Russe performance in Paris. Stravinsky completed the score in May 1910, and a month later The Firebird, based on a Russian fairytale, was presented by the Ballet Russe at the Paris Opera House. For the first time, the music of a ballet was more talked about than the dance. Stravinsky was an overnight success.

Stravinsky’s second ballet for Diaghileff was Petrouchka, named after a pathetic puppet often seen at Russian fairs. First presented at the Chatelet in Paris, it became an even greater success than The Firebird, adding to the fame of the young composer. The markedly original musical style greatly influenced contemporary composers.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered on May 29, 1913, in a performance by the ballet at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in Paris. The reception for this work was vastly different. The music was unorthodox, and the audience resented the paganism expressed in the dance. They began to hiss and boo, shouting insults. Perhaps the audience would have eventually quieted down had not a group of Stravinsky admirers and musicians roughly handled the rebels in the crowd. The evening degenerated into a free-for-all fight in the concert hall. Stravinsky became the most publicized and provocative figure in music.

Stravinsky was always searching for new techniques in his music. In The Wedding, which some have called his masterpiece, he uses incessant rhythm. It is scored for four pianos, 17 percussion instruments, chorus, and solo voices. The beat of the rhythms is exhilarating and at times exhausting.

During World War I, Stravinsky lived in Switzerland. In 1919 he moved with his wife and four children to a suburb of Paris. His first visit to the United States was in 1925, when he conducted the New York Philharmonic in a program of his works. He also appeared with the Boston Symphony as pianist in the first American performance of his Piano Concerto, which had been commissioned by Sergei Koussevitsky. He came to the United States many times after that as a conductor of major orchestras. Stravinsky was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a pantomime for string orchestra; Apollon Musagete premiered in 1928.

Stravinsky was an intensely devout man. His Oedipus Rex, an opera-oratorio which reflects his religious views, was conducted by him in Paris on May 30, 1927. Symphony of Psalms, written for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony, was dedicated “to the glory of God.” It was performed in Boston on December 19, 1930.

When war threatened Europe in 1939, Stravinsky left Paris for Cambridge, Massachusetts. He applied for American citizenship in 1941. Soon after, he moved to California to make his permanent home in Los Angeles.

Stravninsky’s was a multi-faceted talent. His compositions include two ballets, two symphonies, and a number of suites arranged from his stage works: concertos for violin and for piano, songs, and piano pieces. He experimented with different type of instrumentation. He said that he always knew what he was doing in music, but the public sometimes did not follow him.

Stravinsky’s living and working habits were methodical. A certain time of each day was planned for his composing, which was done in a soundproof room. No one was allowed admittance when his door was closed. The evenings were for friends and occasional concerts. He was a Russian, a Parisian, and an American citizen and could be called an internationalist. His influence on modern music was great.

Igor Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971 at the age of 88.

Bela BartokBorn: NagysZentmiklos, Transylvania, March 25, 1881

Died: New York, New York, September 26, 1945

Early in his life, Bela Bartok became absorbed in the folk songs and dances of the peasants of his native Hungary. He dedicated his life to finding and publishing them and using what he learned from them as a basis for his own compositions.

Bartok’s father, the director of the School of Agriculture, died when Bela was eight. His mother, a music teacher, became responsible for supporting and raising the family. She was unmistakable signs of talent in young Bela and gave him his beginning lessons on the piano. When he was 10 years old, he made his first public appearance as a composer and pianist. In order to have a better opportunity to develop his musical abilities, the family moved to Pressburg, where he could go to concerts and operas. There he studied piano under Lazlo Erkel, who gave him encouragement in his creative efforts. From 1899 to 1903, Bartok attended the Royal Academy of Music n Budapest and completed his musical education at the age of 22.

His music at first showed the influence of Brahms, and later he was swayed by the works of Richard Strauss. By 1903, Bartok had found his goal in national music. He produced an ambitious work that was full of patriotic feeling, the Kossuth Symphony. The Symphony, a triumph for the composer, was premiered by the Halle Orchestra in Manchester.

Bartok was determined to write not just music, but Hungarian music. To do so he had to seek its source. He rebelled against the conventional way of presenting Hungarian folk music, saying that it was usually Gypsy music that was heard instead. With his friend Zoltan Kodaly, also a pupil at the Budapest Academy, he started hs search. For two years, with knapsacks on their backs, the two roamed the countryside, collecting folk songs. They visited one peasant cottage after another, sleeping on the dirt floors and sharing the peasant’s cabbage soup and black bread. The music they heard was strong and passionate.

In every land in which he traveled, Bartok sought out the authentic folk music. In time, he amassed 2700 Hungarian, 3500 Magyar-Rumanian, and several hundred Arabian songs, enough folk music to fill 12 volumes.

After leaving the Budapest Academy, Bartok earned his living playing the piano, teaching, and writing musical arrangements. In 1907 he was appointed professor of piano at the Academy.

Bartok and Kodaly were composers with original views. The Hungarian public reacted violently. The two men were in conflict with the conservative Philharmonic Society. In 1911 they founded the New Hungarian Musical Society. It fared no better in terms of public acceptance.

The folk songs and dances of Hungary became an essential part of Bartok’s musical compositions. But the Hungarian musical world was not ready to accept his works. He was better appreciated in France and England. A performance of his pantomime ballet The Wooden Prince

in Budapest in 1917 and later of his opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and his Second String Quartet finally brought him recognition as a leading composer of Hungary.

Bartok first visited the United States in 1927. Although critics conceded that he was a composer of importance, his reception was cool in the concert halls. Few of his compositions were heard in America.

During World War II, Bartok and his young wife, Ditta, made the United States their permanent home. Although Columbia University gave him an honorary Doctor of Music degree, Bartok’s years in New York were spent in dire poverty. He continued to compose but received very little recognition from the music world. He became seriously ill. Feeling neglected and alone, he was unable to write music.

Serge Koussevitzky came to visit him as he lay in a hospital bed. Koussevitzky asked him to accept a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation to write a new orchestral work. Overjoyed, Bartok felt enough energy surging within him. Accepting the commission, he was able to write some of his most important music – the Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, and the Concerto for Orchestra that Koussevitzky had ordered.

But his strength failed rapidly. He again took to his bed, mortally ill. Bela Bartok died in New York on September 26, 1945.

Maruice RavelBorn: Cibourne, France, March 7, 1875

Died: Paris, France, December 28, 1937

Maurice Ravel was born in a French-Basque seacoast town in France, close to the Spanish Pyrenees. Although his family moved to Paris soon after his brith, Ravel had a lifelong attachment to the music of Spain. Many of his outstanding works reflect this feeling vividly.

When Maurice Ravel was seven, he was encouraged by his father, an engineer and amateur musician, to take lessons in piano and harmony. In 1889, after successfully passing the entrance examinations, Maurice entered the Paris Conservatory. For the next 15 years, he studied at the Conservatory, where he was considered a brilliant pupil and a composer of promise.

Ravel competed four times for the Grand Prix de Rome but with no success. His rejection for the prize caused a storm of protest in Paris. Outraged admirers accused the Conservatory of passing over an artist of rare originality. The heat generated in newspapers and pamphlets eventually forced the resignation of the Conservatory’s director, Theodore du Bois.

Ravel’s music shows great versatility. His Spanish mood is best exemplified by his Rapsodie espagnole, L’Heure espagnole, and Bolero. He could be satiric and witty, as in his Histoires naturelles, or serious and classical, as in the tone picture and ballet, Daphnis et Chloe. He turned to waltz music with La Valse, a dance of Austria and revealed his love of children’s fantasies in his Mother Goose Suite.

The composer was 39 when World War I broke out. He enlisted in a motor corps, where he drove an ambulance. Because of the terrible suffering he witnessed, his health broke down. Once a gay young man, he became a nervous, high-strung man with graying hair.

Honorably discharged from the service, Ravel returned to composing, working from his villa in Monfort l’Aury, 40 miles from Paris. During this time, he finished Le Tombeau de Couperin, a piece dedicated to six comrades who had died in battle. Ravel gradually became a popular musical figure and was often called upon to be guest conductor of his own compositions in European performances.

In 1928 Ravel made his first appearance in the United States, directing the Boston Symphony in a program of his music. He gave 31 performances in this country. America fascinated Ravel with its great skyscrapers, its motion pictures, and the jazz of Harlem.

That same year, Ravel was commissioned to write a ballet for the dance Ida Rubenstein. She introduced the Bolero, with its repetitive crescendo theme, at the Paris Opera in November of 1928. It received a tremendous ovation. It is now heard in a variety of orchestral arrangements and even arrangements for jazz bands.

Maurice Ravel never married. He loved the quiet of his little villa, where he lived with a kindly housekeeper and six Siamese cats.

Following an automobile accident in 1932, Ravel suffered a mental breakdown. He never recovered his creative ability. After a brain operation from which he never gained consciousness, Ravel died in a Paris hospital on December 28, 1937.

Charles IvesBorn: Danbury, Connecticut, October 20, 1874

Died: New York, New York, May 19, 1954

Charles Ives credited much of his early musical development to the influence of his father, George. George Ives, leader of the Danbury town band, was a teacher of violin, piano, and theory. He was also actively interested in the study of acoustics, the measuring of sound. From him, Charles learned a great deal about music and was given encouragement when he experimented with a variety of sounds in his early compositions.

When Charles was eight years old, his father took him down to the village barbershop. The barber was an old German named Slier who played the drum in the town band. He sat the boy down with and empty tub and a couple of sticks and, between shaves and haircuts, taught Charles all the rolls and taps a good drummer should know. Charles was playing drums in his father’s band by the time he was 12.

His music education ws not confined to the drums. His father taught him violin, piano, cornet, harmony, and sight-reading as well. When he was 11 he began to study the organ and two years later was holding down a job as the organist of a Congregational Church in Danbury. All along, he had been composing and doing arrangements for his father’s various musical activities. The first piece he wrote was funeral music for Chin-Chin, the family cat. Following its premiere, he was commissioned by friends to write a number of dirges for assorted departed pets.

Charles was very fond of baseball and other sports, and he was good at them. He hated being called composer or piano player by friends his age. When asked what he liked to play, he would reply, “short stop.”

After his schooling in Danbury and in the Hopkins Preparatory School in New Haven, Ives entered Yale University. He took classes with Horatio Parker, a composer, but complained that he got a little fed up with repeating the same textbooks that he had studied as a child under his father’s guidance. When he brought in his compositions, filled with experimental ideas, the conservative Parker said with a smile, “Ives, must you try hogging all the keys?” Ives was undaunted by Parker’s comments and during this time, among other works, he composed his first two symphonies.

While at Yale, Ives wrote music for fraternity shows, played ragtime with a theater orchestra, and was active on the football and baseball teams. Graduating from Yale in 1898, Ives was tempted to make music his career but decided it was not practical. If music would not support him, then he must find a way to support music. He went to New York and took a job as a clerk with Mutual Life Insurance Company, earning $5.00 a week. Music became an avocation.

With a group of young men, he rented an apartment. At night, he would rush home from work, get into comfortable clothes, and sit down at the piano to compose. Among the pieces that he wrote was his Second Symphony, which was completed about 1902. His cantata, the Celestial Country, was given at the Central Presbyterian Church in New York in April of that year. It

received good notices from New York papers. At the same time, he was working on his Third Symphony.

In 1906, Ives formed a partnership with Julian Myrick, and the two set up an insurance agency. The partnership prospered and lasted until Ives retired in 1930.

Charles Ives and Harmony Twichell, daughter of a Hartford minister, were married in 1908. A few years later they adopted a little girl, Edith. The family spent their summers on their West Redding farm in the hills of Connecticut. The farm house had a big picture window overlooking peaceful meadows and rolling hills. Ives loved to walk in the nearby woods. He would find a log upon which to sit and quietly listen to the summer sounds around him. In winter, the family returned to its brownstone house in New York City.

Charles Ives was a pioneer in music. His sources were the music of the small American town church, the marching band, dance music, and the popular tunes of his era. He composed most of his major works between 1906 and 1916. After that, he wrote mostly songs. Some of his compositions were reputed to be outrageous and impossible to play. They are indeed often difficult. At his own expense, Ives published and distributed his great piano masterpiece, Concord Sonata, in 1919, and 1922, “114 Songs.”

As he grew older, Ives became devoted to the idea that an artist or composer must have his own particular means of expression, and that it must be a personal thing to be of value. Recognition of his greatness was late in coming. In 1947, many years after Ives had all but ceased composing, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony which he had written in 1911.

When he died after a heart attack on May 19, 1954, he left many volumes of orchestral and chamber music, most of which had not yet been performed. In 1964, professional musicologists took on the tremendous labor of arranging his Symphony No. 4. Ives had written it out on a myriad of separate sheets 50 years before. They finally assembled the score and the symphony was premiered with the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski stated that it was a most difficult score to conduct. The piece is a self-portrait of the composer and his interest in sounds. In it, one can hear a parade approaching, passing and disappearing in the distance.

Arnold SchoenbergBorn: Vienna, Austria, September 13, 1874

Died: Los Angeles, California, July 13, 1951

In the early part of the century, Arnold Schoenberg introduced new ideas into the writing of music. Though his works were vehemently attacked at the time, today Schoenberg is regarded as a major contributor to modern music.

Arnold Schoenberg studied violin and cello at the Vienna Realschule from the time he was 10. Not until he was 16 did he consider a career as a composer. That year his father died, and Schoenberg went to work as a bank clerk to support himself while continuing to study music.

As a composer, he was mostly self-taught. Schoenberg learned to play the cello and then composed music for the small groups with whom he played. When he was 20 he showed his early compositions to Alexander von Zemlinsky, a well-known teacher and composer. Impressed with Schoenberg’s obvious talent, Zemlinsky took him into the orchestra he conducted, the Polyhymnia Orchestra. From Zemlinsky, Schoenberg received his only formal instruction, which was in counterpoint.

Schoenberg’s first piece to be performed in public was a string quartet in D major. It was indifferently received and never published. A year later, in 1898, a performance of his earlier songs caused a negative reaction. During his apprentice period, he composed a sextet for strings, Die Verklarte Nacht. It remains his most frequently performed composition. He also started writing his most ambitious work up to that time, the Gurre-Lieder.

Having married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, in 1901, he earned his living by orchestrating six thousand pages of operetta music for other composers. Soon after his marriage, Schoenberg and his wife went to Berlin, where he taught at the Stern Conservatory.

Back in Vienna in 1903, he continued composing. As he developed his own ideas of music, he created the twelve-tone system. It was a revolutionary technique in music composition. He demonstrated it in his symphonic poem Pelleas and Melisande. With Gustav Mahler’s support, Schoenberg was able to present it in 1905 at the Society of Creative Musicians, conducting it himself. Neither audience nor critics hid their hostility. When his Kammershymphonie was played in 1907, there was an outburst of protest in the concert hall. For many years, whenever a work by Schoenberg was performed, loud and bitter arguments arose. Still, in 1910, Schoenberg was appointed to the Vienna Academy as a teacher of composition.

His music never left an audience unmoved. Critics cried that his work was ugly and unmusical. Friends retorted that his music was based on a new concept of harmony and introduced a new dimension into music. Schoenberg himself tried to explain his system in his textbook, Treatise on Harmony.

With the rise of the Nazi Government, Schoenberg could no longer remain in Germany. Dismissed by the Nazis from his position at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1933, he

went to Paris. There, as a symbolic gesture, he reassumed his Jewish faith, which he had abandoned in 1921. That same year he come to the United States and in 1941 became a citizen. He settled in Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and ant the University of California.

The bitterness of his early struggles remained with him to the end. He always felt that he was misunderstood. He complained that the critics attacked him, the public did not like him, and his works were not performed enough. Yet most contemporary writers of music regard him as a major creative force, and he received much adulation from his many disciples.

Schoenberg retired from the university in his seventieth year but continued private classes for a few pupils. He gave up teaching when he was 77, just a month before his death on July 13, 1951.

Sergei RachmaninoffBorn: Oneg, Russia, April 1, 1873

Died: Beverly Hills, California, March 28, 1943

Sergei Rachmaninoff composed to express his feelings about his country, his religion, the books he read, the paintings he admired, and, in fact, all of his life’s experiences. Though he fled his native land during the Bolshevik Revolution, he always remained extremely Russian in temperament.

Sergei’s father was a captain of the Russian Imperial Guards, and his mother was a wealthy woman. He was born on an estate at Oneg, in Novgorod. When he was little more than a toddler, his mother started teaching him music. The young boy showed signs of outstanding talent, having perfect pitch and exceptional aptitude for the piano.

Before Sergei was 10, misfortune depleted the family income. Bankrupt, they moved to St. Petersburg in 1882. There the boy entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Since his musical talent was so superior, he found that, with almost no effort, he could keep ahead of his classmates. He avoided piano practice and studying and often played tuant from his classes. It was decided that a change of scenery was needed for Sergei. He was enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory under Nikolai Zverev, at whose home he lived for many years.

Rachmaninoff’s skill increased rapidly with the new study habits insisted upon by Zverev. Zverev was a stern disciplinarian and would allow no laziness in his pupil. In his home, Rachmaninoff met Tchaikovsky, a frequent visitor who greatly influenced his life.

Rachmaninoff quarreled with his host and teacher and was invited to leave the home. He decided to remain in Moscow and went to live with his aunt. Her daughter Natalie later became his wife.

While a student at the Conservatory, Rachmaninoff not only won honors for his piano playing but was gaining recognition as a composer. One of his compositions, the Prelude in C# Minor, brought him worldwide fame when he was only 19. He failed to copyright this piece, and it earned him almost nothing.

The premiere of his Symphony No. 1 was given in St. Petersburg on March 27, 1897. The performance was poor, and, as he listened, he also found many defects in the composition. He fled the auditorium and for hours wandered in the streets, a stunned man. This torment led to a complete nervous breakdown. With the help of a celebrated Moscow physician, Rachmaninoff was able to regain his self-confidence. He completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 and dedicated it to the doctor. This work brought him back to music and to success. It remains a celebrated work to this day.

He continued composing and grew in fame as a piano virtuoso. He also became conductor of the Moscow Grand Theater orchestra. The future looked good when he married Natalie Satina on April 29, 1902.

Needing relief from his busy musical and social life in Moscow and wanting time for composing, Rachmaninoff moved to Dresden with his wife and daughter. There he wrote his Symphony No. 2 and the tone poem, The Isle of the Dead.

In 1909, he made arrangements for his first American tour, which included a piano recital at Smith College and the world premiere of his Concerto No. 3 with the New York Symphony Society under Walter Damrosch. He was enthusiastically received wherever he appeared – as composer, pianist, or conductor.

On his next return to the United States for a concert tour, Rachmaninoff also made plans to make his home here. It was 1918, and Russia was in the throes of a revolution for which he had little understanding. Although he never returned to his homeland, he nostalgically made his home life in America as similar as possible to what he remembered of Russia. He spoke the language and kept the holidays of his native land.

Rachmaninoff toured constantly and never stopped writing music. The 30th anniversary of his first appearance in America was celebrated in 1939. In Philadelphia, he conducted and played in three concerts of most of his major works. At Carnegie Hall in New York, he again took the triple role of composer, conductor, and pianist, directing his Symphony No. 3 and playing the piano for his Concerto No. 2.

Despite failing health in 1943, Rachmaninoff insisted on going on a extensive tour of the United States, starting from his home in California. By the time he reached New Orleans, he as very ill. His concerts were canceled, and he was brought back to California, where he died on March 28, 1943.

Jean SibeliusBorn: Tavastehus, Finland, December 8, 1865

Died: Järvenpää, Finland, September 20, 1957

The music of Jean Sibelius is full of his love for the forests and folklore of his native Finland. In appreciation, the people of Finland have made him a national hero.

As a child, Jean started to compose music even before he had any instruction. His first piece, written when he was 10, was called “Drops of Water.” It was a duet for violin and cello in which the strings were plucked to depict the dripping of water.

Christian Sibelius, his father, was a regimental doctor; his mother, Maria Carlotta, was the descendant of clergy and government representatives. The boy was given an excellent education. It was planned that he would study law.

When Jean Sibelius was 11, he was enrolled in the Finnish Model School When the subjects did not interest him, he was apt to sit and dream. The despairing headmaster would say, “Sibelius is in another world.” Nature was his close companion. He loved to hunt in the forest and to walk by the sea. Sibelius started to study the violin at 15 and thought for a time that he would like to be a virtuoso.

After graduation from high school, Sibelius attended the University of Helsinki, studying law. Before his first semester was finished, Sibelius had decided that the pursuit of law was not for him and that he would be a composer. With his parents’ blessings, Sibelius enrolled in the Conservatory of Music to study violin and composition. Two of his compositions were publicly performed in April and May of 1889 – a suite for strings in A minor, and a string quartet in A major. They received the praise of a leading music critic.

In 1889, with a scholarship and a government grant of 1500 marks to help him, Sibelius left Finland to study in Berlin. Later, he went to Vienna for further musical training, returning to Finland in 1891. His musical inspiration came from the forests and fields of his northern land.

In 1892 Sibelius married Aino Jarnefelt, daughter of a distinguished Finnish family. He taught at the Musical Academy and the Philharmonic Society and played violin in a small orchestra. Recognizing his genius, the Finnish Senate voted Sibelius an annual pension of 2000 marks in 1897. This pension enabled him to give up teaching and concentrate on composing. Later, in 1926, the Finnish government granted him a substantial raise in his pension. Sibelius became a national hero, his music inspired by Finnish legends. Children of Finland know his name and sing his tunes.

Ill health plagued Sibelius for a time. In 1901, he suffered with ear trouble and was fearful of deafness. Fortunately, he recovered. Seven years later, a growth was discovered in his throat which at first was thought to be cancerous. It was only after 13 operations that a cure was effected and Sibelius relieved of pain and anxiety.

Among his many works, Sibelius wrote seven symphonies. His first was completed in 1899, his last in 1924. Symphony No. 1 was premiered in Helsinki before an enthusiastic audience.

Finlandia is the most famous of his compositions. In it he speaks of Finland and its people and the good life of freedom. It so moved his Finnish audiences that he Czarist regime forbade its playing in times of political unrest. Tapiola is a tone poem capturing the sense of the dark forests of Finland. Tapio was an ancient forest god. In the score appears the poem:

Widespread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;Within them dwells the Forest’s might God,

And wood spirits in the gloom weave magic secrets.

For many years, Sibelius lived very quietly in his villa at Järvenpää. He encouraged few visitors. His main contact with the outside world was his radio, on which he would listen to the new music and occasionally hear his own works performed. Death came to him on September 20, 1957.

Richard StraussBorn: Munich, Germany, June 11, 1864Died: Garnisch, Germany, September 8, 1949

Bold and inspired passages mark the tone poems, operas, and songs written by Richard Strauss in the first part of hi smusical career. But during the second half of his life, the dramatic power in his music wanted. Although he continued to produce a great number of works, almost none showed the passionate genius of the earlier period.

Richard Strauss began his music education at the age of four, receiving instruction from the harpist of the court church. At every opportunity, the little boy would write music. Whenb he was only six years old, he wrote a jolly polka for the piano and a little song about Christmas and children playing. His father, Franz, was one of the finest horn players in Munich. When he was how well his son was progressing, he took a hand in his instruction. Herr Strauss was determined that Richard have a well-rounded education. In addition to lessons in violin, piano, and composition, the boy attended elementary and high school.

All through his school years, the young man continued to write music. Even before he finished high school at the age of 18, his works were being performed. When he was 17, his Symphony in D Minor was given in concert for the first time. After one year at the University of Munich, Richard decided to devote himself entirely to music.

Hans von Bulow, conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra performed Richard’s Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments in 1882. He was so impressed that he had the composer write several compositions for his orchestra. He later made Strauss his assistant, and sometimes Strauss would appear as solo pianist with the orchestra.

During this period, Strauss became an ardent admirer of the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz. For many years his compositions showed the influence of these men. He often used Wagner’s was of introducing a person or idea by a special theme. He followed the tone poem form of Liszt, but enlarged on it. The expressiveness of the music of Berlioz impressed him.

Within 10 years, 1887 to 1898, Strauss had composed the tone poems Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and a Hero’s Life. He was considered one of the greatest composers of his period. At times controversy raged over his music; some claimed that it was too realistic. Strauss became known as the “bad boy of music.” He seemed to enjoy being the subject of these arguments. Those close to him said they admired the music but not the man, who was vain and jealous of anyone who might be a rival.

Strauss’s wife, Pauline, dominated him completely. She arranged his schedules and advised him on business matters. Pauline gave him only a small allowance, which he supplemented by insisting on playing cards and winning from musicians in his orchestra, who could ill afford their losses. Strauss liked easy living and he liked money. He collected paintings of famous artists such as Renoir and Utrillo.

In 1898 Strauss received the important post of musical director of the Berlin Opera. He remained with this group for two decades.

At the turn of the century, Strauss began composing operas. For many, he collaborated with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The first work of their partnership, Electra, was given in Dresden in 1909 and caused a sensation. This drama relates a Greek legend of horror and revenge in which King Agamemmon, slain by his wife’s lover is avenged by his children, Orestes and Electra. Electra ends her own life in a mad dance of triumph.

The second opera produced with Hofmannsthal was Der Rosenkavalier, which is one of Strauss’s most important works. Gay and sentimental, it was a change of pace from Electra. Der Rosenkavalier was first heard in Dresden in January, 1911.

During the Hitler regime in Germany, Strauss was invited to become head of the Nazi Chamber of Culture. He accepted the post but soon became disillusioned with the Nazi doctrines. He resigned and went to live in Switzerland. When the American army occupied Bavaria at the end of World War II, they found Strauss living in a villa in Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. He was still busy composing. In 1948 he was cleared of the taint of collaboration with the Nazis.

Music lovers from all over the world made pilgrimages to visit him in his beautiful villa. His 85th

birthday in 1949 was an international celebration. A few months later, on September 8, he died at this home in the Alps.

Claude DebussyBorn: St. Germain-en-Laye, France, August 22, 1862

Died: Paris, France, March 25, 1918

Claude Debussy was an innovator in music, writing into his compositions his impressions of a changing world. Deeply interested in the relation of music to the other arts, Debussy explored a new musical vocabulary of sounds. He became regarded as the creator of musical Impressionism.

Claude was born in St.-Germain-en-Laye, where his mother and father ran a china shop. Unfortunately, they lost their little store when Claude was three years old. The family moved to Clichy, where the father tried several jobs. In order to relieve some of the burden of their poverty, they sent their little son to live with his aunt. Madame Roustan was fairly well off and was a lover of the arts. She took the child to many concerts and, when he showed evident pleasure, she made it possible for him to take piano lessons.

When his unusual talent at the piano became obvious, Madame Roustan engaged Madame de Fleurville, a pupil of Chopin, to teach him. Debussy studied with her for three years. With her help, he was prepared to enter the Paris Conservatory of Music, where he was accepted at the age of 10. For 11 years, he worked at the Conservatory, often shocking his professors with his approach to composition. He did not want to follow the rules of the textbook, and he was considered a problem.

Debussy was always trying out new ways to express himself musically. Throughout his life, this inventiveness brought him enthusiastic worship as well as strong attack.

In 1880, Debussy was recommended to Tchaikovsky’s patroness, Madame Nadezhda von Meck. She engaged him as a pianist for her group of household musicians. He also played duets with her and taught her daughters the piano. He was taken along on the family trips to Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Russia.

Debussy met and became very fond of Madame Vasnier, the young wife of an elderly architect. For almost five years he was a frequent visitor to their home, made welcome by both Madame and Monsieur Vasnier. Here he did his studying and composing, dedicating many of his songs to Madame Vasnier.

Meanwhile, Debussy made two attempts at winning the Grand Prix de Rome. His compositions were returned as not acceptable to the standards of the Prix. His third try, though, was successful. In 1884 he received the coveted award for his cantata L’Enfant prodigue. As a Grand Prix de Rome winner, Debussy was to live for three years at the Villa Medici in Rome. He spent a little over two years in Rome, protesting all the while to the Vasniers that he as in prison. Everything upset him – the people, the food, the climate, and the music.

He fled back to Paris in 1887 and spent the next 10 years composing happily. He frequented the cafes of Paris, meeting progressive poets and painters. Greatly influenced by their advanced

ideas, he tried to put into music what they were saying in poetry and art. From that point he began to produce many of his major works.

On December 29, 1893, Debussy’s Quartet in G Minor was successfully introduced at the Societe Nationale. One year later his overture L’Apres-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun) was performed there as well.

He continued composing, producing nocturnes for orchestra and song cycles. For 10 years, he worked on an opera based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Pelleas et Melissande. The premiere took place on April 30, 1902 in an atmosphere of hostility and misunderstanding. Maeterlinck had expected his girlfriend, Georgette Leblanc, to be cast in the role of Melisande; when the part went instead to the glamorous Mary Garden, Maeterlinck was furious. He did everything in his power to discredit the opera, wishing it only failure. The controversy created such a furor that the public’s curiosity was aroused, and the theater was soon sold out. The opera was given 14 times in May and June.

Debussy married twice. He fell in love with his first wife, Rosalie Texier, for her simplicity, charm and chestnut hair. It was soon apparent that their interests were completely different. In a few years, they were divorced. In 1905, Debussy married Emma Bardac. To them was born a daughter whom Debussy affectionately called Chou-Chou. He later wrote the Children’s Corner Suite for her, a work consisting of musical descriptions of a child’s game.

On March 25, 1918, a heavy bombardment of German shells fell on Paris. The papers, concerned with the war, gave scant attention to the news that during the bombardment, Debussy had died. His funeral was attended by only a few. Years passed before the world suddenly awakened to the beauty of a master’s music.