Today we remember and honor the Dutch composer Leo Smit, who was born on May 14, 1900 – 118 years ago today – in Amsterdam. As regular readers of this blog are aware, while I opine (and even bloviate) with fair regularity, I rarely get personal in my posts: Music History Monday is about events and people in music history, and is not intended as a platform for my own life and issues. But today is a bit of an exception, for which I will be forgiven. The degree to which musicians identify with their primary instruments is primal; it’s something that non-musicians have probably never really thought about. A professional musician has, in all likelihood, been playing her instrument since her age was in single digits. Over time that instrument becomes a best friend (and sometimes a worst enemy). A musician shares her life with her instrument; grows up and meets puberty and adulthood with her instrument; and in the end perceives her world through her instrument. If you’re a pianist, for example, you perceive the world through the sound, physiognomy, and repertoire of the piano; it’s inevitable, given the ten-of-thousands of hours a professional has spent camped out […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Music History Monday – Page 31
I have come to realize over the eighteen months I’ve been writing these Music History Mondays that a date-sensitive blog (like this one) is a metaphor for life itself. On some days you just can’t buy a break while on others there are so many different possibilities that choosing one becomes well nigh impossible, a case of feast or famine. For example. Last week – Monday, April 30th – it was famine. Bereft of a major (or even minor) musical event to write about, I unearthed the fact that on April 30th, 1977 the rock band Led Zeppelin set a new attendance record for a single-act, non-festival ticketed concert, when it played to an audience of 77,229 at the Pontiac (Michigan) Silverdome. This week, today – May 7th – it is feast. And not just any feast; no, today’s date in music history is a cornucopia of gustatory delight; a smörgåsbord the length and breadth of Stockholm; the Carnival World Buffet at Rio Casino in Las Vegas (reputed to be the largest daily pig-out in the world). Check it out: May 7, 1747: Johann Sebastian Bach met with King Frederick II (Frederick the Great) of Prussia in Potsdam. May 7, […]
Continue ReadingOn April 30th, 1977 – 41 years ago today – the English rock band Led Zeppelin set a new attendance record for a single-act, non-festival ticketed concert, when it played to an audience of 77,229 in Pontiac, Michigan at the Pontiac Silverdome, the capacity of which was a bit over 82,000. That information got me to thinking about the impact of amplification on the performance of music, particularly the amplification of music performed by the human voice. While the first microphones were developed independently by David Edward Hughes, Emile Berliner, and Thomas Edison in the 1870s, they were not employed in ballrooms and theaters to actually amplify a human voice performing live music until the very early 1930s. Up to that time, the largest possible performance venue for a trained singer was an opera house, and for most pop singers, spaces considerably smaller. Microphones and amplification rendered venue size moot; miked and amplified, anyone could be heard anywhere. Microphones and amplification also had a tremendous impact on voice type as well. You see, until the advent of amplification, the primary male voice type in popular music was the tenor voice. With its natural intensity and relatively high tessitura (vocal range), […]
Continue ReadingOn April 23, 1891 – 127 years ago today – the composer and pianist Sergei Prokofiev was born in the village of Sontsovka, in Ukraine. He was, very simply, one of a kind: a brilliant, tungsten-steel-fingered pianist; a great composer; and one of the most irksome and narcissistic artists ever to ply his trade (no small statement given the character flaws of so many professional artists). He grew up an isolated, only child on an estate managed by his father. He was homeschooled and rarely played with the local kids, who were considered to be “social inferiors” by his parents, a parental attitude that no doubt helped to foster the overweening arrogance and snobbery that characterized Prokofiev’s personality from the beginning. A prodigy as both a pianist and composer, in 1904 – at the age of 13 – he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Prokofiev was not a popular student. He was, by pretty much all surviving accounts, a total jerk. For example, he laughed out loud when his fellow piano students made mistakes and went so far as to actually keep a roster of the mistakes committed by his classmates. (This would have earned him a dislocated jaw where […]
Continue ReadingApril 16 is one of those dates during which pretty much nothing of interest happened by way of music history. Now please, that’s not to say that nothing happened on this date. For example, on April 16, 1954, Roy Orbison attended an Elvis Presley show in Dallas Texas. Wow. On April 16, 1983, Kirk Hammett played his first show with Metallica in Dover, New Jersey. Whoa. And on April 16, 1996, KISS announced a reunion tour with makeup; be still our hearts. (Or did they makeup in order to announce a reunion tour? Inquiring minds.) Noteworthy though they may be, I will be forgiven for choosing not to write 1100 words about any of these events. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to tell you about an awesome musical podcast called “The Break It Down Show” (established in 2012; 250-plus shows to date) and the two fascinating renaissance dudes who created it, host it, and produce it: in alphabetical order, Jon Leon Guerrero and Pete Turner. The mission statement for “The Break It Down Show” is simple: “To tell stories of interesting people doing fascinating things, with the intention of enriching the lives of all concerned.” That’s a pretty […]
Continue ReadingOn April 9, 1939 – 79 years ago today – the American contralto Marian Anderson performed before an audience of over 75,000 people on the National Mall in Washington D.C. It was one of the most important and inspirational concerts ever to take place on American soil; a concert that to this day has the power to bring us to tears when we consider the circumstances under which it took place. Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1897, the granddaughter of slaves. Her prodigious talent as a singer revealed itself early, and at the age of six she joined the choir of the Union Baptist Church in South Philly. Even as she developed as a singer, poverty precluded her from attending high school; she didn’t graduate from South Philadelphia High School until 1921, at the age of 24. On graduating – and with financial backing from Philadelphia’s Black American community – she attempted to apply to the Philadelphia Music Academy (today the University of the Arts). But she was rejected out-of-hand because she was black, being told by an admissions officer that “we don’t take colored.” Undeterred, she continued to study privately thanks to the continued support […]
Continue ReadingOn April 2, 1800 – 218 years ago today – Ludwig van Beethoven staged his first public concert, a so-called “Akademie” or “benefit concert”, in which the financial beneficiary was to be one Ludwig van Beethoven. Among the works on the program were the premiere performances of Beethoven’s Septet for Winds and Strings, Op. 20 and his Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21. Yes! By April, 1800 the 29 year-old Beethoven was prepared to go the distance, take the plunge, go mano-e-mano with the Viennese musical establishment taken as widely as we please: he was ready to stake his claim as a mature compositional artist and put forward his first symphony! Beethoven placed the following advertisement in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (meaning, “General music newspaper”; the most important German-language music periodical of its time). As has been pointed out, the ad copy drops all the right names and italicizes the single most important name five times: Today, Wednesday, April 2, 1800, Herr Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a grand concert for his benefit in the Royal Imperial Court Theater beside the Burg. The pieces which will be performed are the following: A grand symphony […]
Continue ReadingOn March 26, 1827 – 191 years ago today – Ludwig van Beethoven died at the age of 56 years, 3 months, and 11 days in his third story apartment (what in Europe would have been called the second story) at Schwarzspanierstrasse 15, in a building called the Schwarzspanierhaus. (Schwarzspanierhaus means the “House of the Black-Robed Spaniards”, so-called because it had once been part of a monastery built by black-robed, Montserrat Benedictine monks from Spain. The order auctioned the building off in 1781, at which point it was turned into rental units. Painfully – and despite tremendous contemporary outcry – the building was demolished in the name of “progress” in 1904.) Even by the standards of his day, Beethoven cannot have been considered a particularly healthy man. Along with his chronic hearing disability (which resulted in clinical deafness after 22 years), Beethoven suffered from smallpox, rheumatism and rheumatic fever, typhus, colitis, all sorts of skin disorders and infections, abscesses, ophthalmia (eye inflammations, in particular conjunctivitis or “pink eye”), chronic bronchitis, inflammatory degeneration of his arteries, colic, irritable bowl, foul body odors and extreme halitosis: bad breath. At the end of his life, let us add to this woeful list hepatitis, pancreatitis, jaundice […]
Continue ReadingIt was 219 years ago today – on March 19, 1799 – that Joseph Haydn’s epic, one hour and forty-five minute long oratorio The Creation (Die Schöpfung) received its public premiere in Vienna. Completed in 1798 when Haydn was 66 years old, The Creation is considered by many to be Haydn’s greatest work; truly, a masterpiece among masterpieces. That public premiere of The Creation on March 19, 1799 was one of the great events in the dazzling history of Viennese music. The performance was sold out far in advance, and such was the excitement preceding the performance that Haydn felt it necessary to request – on the posters announcing the premiere, no less – that the audience control itself and not applaud between the numbers (and thus encourage encores): “for otherwise, [wrote Haydn] the true connection between the various single parts, from the uninterrupted succession of which should proceed the effect of the whole, would necessarily be disturbed.” A critic in attendance from Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung confirmed that the audience took Haydn’s injunction to heart; he reported that: “No one can imagine with what silence and attention the entire oratorio was heard – only gently interrupted at the most […]
Continue ReadingRoughly two years ago, in preparation for creating these “Music History Monday” posts, I spent several days putting together a calendar of musical events from which I could draw my topics. The internet made this job a gazillion times easier than it would have otherwise been; instead of spending untold hours in a music library or with my head in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, transcribing dates one at a time, the internet offered a ready supply of lists. However – as is usually true when dealing with info gleaned from the web – one must carefully verify that info. (I’m glad I did. I have seen many an incorrect date. For example, on one site, all the dates given for Russian musical events were based on the Julian, rather than the Gregorian calendar.) On occasion I will find entries that are not just wrong but wrong-wrong. For example, the following entry for March 12 can be found on a site called ClassicalAlmanac.com: “604: Birth of Pope Gregory, developed the Gregorian chant.” Sweet Pater in caelis, talk about wrong-wrong! In fact, Pope Gregory I died on this day 1414 years ago. As for the second phrase, “developed […]
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