2008 Composer Birthdays

This story is about Great Composers who should be brought to your atention this year. They all have anniversaries. Looking at their lives and works once more will make us a bit closer to the classic music an it’s real musical giants. There is no deep examination of the backgrounds, influences and relationships that make these composers part of the very fabric of the history of classic music. But still there is something. Each composer’s life and work is presented through performance sequences, and through the point of view of some of today’s greatest artists and most respected authorities.

So, this year we celebrate among others:

• Jacob Obrecht, 550 years
• Guiseppi Torelli, 350 years
• Eugène Ysaye, 150 years
• Giacomo Puccini, 150 years
• Olivier Messiaen, 100 years
• Elliott Carter, 100 years
• Esa-Pekka Salonen, 50 years
• Theodore Wiprud, 50 years

Jacob Obrecht, 550 years

Jacob Obrecht (1457/1458 – late July, 1505) was a Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous composer of masses in Europe in the late 15th century, being eclipsed by only Josquin Desprez after his death. Obrecht wrote mainly sacred music: masses and motets. His repertoire, though, did include some chansons. Combining elements of modern and archaic, Obrecht’s style is multi-dimensional. The presence of fluid melodies and stable harmonies characterize the Italian influence over his style; the fluidity, however, is sometimes deteriorated by over-repetition. His methodical, mathematical approach to rhythm is complex, resulting in a sense of rigidity. Obrecht’s style is, indeed, a fascinating example of the contrapuntal extravagance of the late 15th century. He usually used a cantus firmus technique for his masses: sometimes he took his source material and divided it up into short phrases; other times he used retrograded versions of complete melodies, or melodic fragments. In one case he even extracted the component notes and ordered them by note value, long to short, constructing new melodic material from the reordered sequences of notes. Clearly to Obrecht there could not be too much variety, particularly true regarding the musically exploratory period of his early twenties. He began to break free from conformity to formes fixes, especially in his chansons. Of the formes fixes, the rondeau retained its popularity longest. However, he much preferred composing in the Mass genre where he possessed greater freedom. In his Missa Sub presidium tuum, the number of voice parts in the six chants increases from three in the Kyrie, to four in the Gloria, and so on, until there are seven voice parts in the Agnus Dei.

The title chant is clearly heard in the top voice throughout the work. His late four-voice mass, Missa Maria zart, tentatively dated to around 1504, is based on a devotional song popular in the Tyrol, which he probably heard as he went through the region around 1503 to 1504. Requiring more than an hour to perform, it is one of the longest polyphonic settings of the mass Ordinary ever written. Despite being contemporaries, Obrecht and Johannes Ockeghem differ significantly in musical style. Obrecht does not share Ockeghem’s fanciful treatment of the cantus firmus but chooses to quote it verbatim. While the phrases in Ockeghem’s music are ambiguously defined, those of Obrecht’s music can be easily distinguished. Furthermore, Obrecht splices the cantus firmus melody with the intent of audibly reorganizing the motives; Ockeghem, on the other hand, exercises this treatment to a far lesser extent. Obrecht’s procedures show a startling contrast to the works of the next generation as well, exemplified by Josquin, who favored unity and simplicity of approach. Though he was renowned in his time, Obrecht had little influence on subsequent generations: most likely he simply went out of fashion.

Guiseppi Torelli, 350 years

Giuseppe Torelli (April 22, 1658–February 8, 1709) was an Italian violist and violinist, pedagogue and composer, who ranks with Arcangelo Corelli among the developers of the Baroque concerto and concerto grosso.

Torelli is most remembered for his contributions to the development of the instrumental concerto (Newman 1972, p. 142), especially concerti grossi and the solo concerto, for strings and continuo, as well as being the most prolific Baroque composer for trumpets (Tarr 1974).

Torelli was born in Verona. It is not known with whom he studied violin though it has been speculated that he was a pupil of Leonardo Brugnoli or Bartolomeo Laurenti, but it is certain that he studied composition with Giacomo Antonio Perti (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). On June 27, 1684, at the age of 26, he became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica as suonatore di violino (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). By 1698 he was maestro di concerto at the court of Georg Friedrich II, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, where he conducted the orchestra for Le pazzie d’amore e dell’interesse, an idea drammatica composed by the maestro di cappella, the castrato Francesco Antonio Pistocchi, before leaving for Vienna in December 1699 (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). He returned to Bologna sometime before February (1701), when he is listed as a violinist in the newly re-formed cappella musicale at San Petronio, directed by his former composition teacher Perti (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). He died in Bologna in 1709, where his manuscripts are conserved in the San Petronio archives. Giuseppe’s brother, Felice Torelli, was a Bolognese painter of modest reputation, who went on to be a founding member of the Accademia Clementina. The most notable amongst Giuseppe’s many pupils was Francesco Manfredini.
Selected works

• 10 Sonate a 3, with Basso Continuo, op. 1. (1686)
• 12 Concertino per camera for Violin and Cello, op. 4. (1688)
• 12 Concerti musicali a quattro, op. 6. (1698)
• 12 Concerti grossi con una pastorale per il Santissimo Natale, op. 8. (1709)
• More than 30 concertos for 1 to 4 trumpets, including a Sinfonia à 4, composed after 1702 (Tarr 1974) and unpublished during his lifetime, which is a concerto for four trumpets, with an orchestra requiring a minimum of four oboes, two bassoons, trombone, timpani, four violins, two violas, four cellos, two double basses, and continuo.

Eugène Ysaye, 150 years Biography

Born in Liège, Belgium, Ysaÿe began violin lessons aged four with his father, and later studied with Joseph Massart, Henryk Wieniawski, and Henri Vieuxtemps. This places him in the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing, which dates back to the development of the modern violin bow by François Tourte.
Performing career
Ysaÿe with violinAs a performer, Ysaÿe was compelling and highly original. Pablo Casals claimed never to have heard a violinist play in tune before Ysaÿe, and Carl Flesch called him “the most outstanding and individual violinist I have ever heard in my life.” Ysaÿe was the possessor of a large and flexible tone, influenced by a considerable variety of vibrato — from no vibrato at all to very intense. He said, “Don’t always vibrate, but always be vibrating”. His modus operandi was, in his own words: “Nothing which wouldn’t have for goal emotion, poesy, heart.” Possibly the most distinctive feature of Ysaÿe’s interpretations was his masterful rubato. Ysaÿe’s rubato is something apart; “Whenever he stole time from one note, he faithfully paid it back within four bars,” said the conductor Sir Henry Wood, allowing his accompanist to maintain strict tempo under his free cantilena. This kind of rubato fits the description of Frédéric Chopin’s rubato. Although Ysaÿe was a great interpreter of late Romantics and early modern composers — Max Bruch, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Cesar Franck, who said he was their greatest interpreter — he was admired for his Bach and Beethoven interpretations. His technique was brilliant and finely honed, and in this respect he is the first modern violinist, whose technique was without the shortcomings of some earlier artists. An international violin competition in Brussels was created in his memory: in 1951, this became the violin section of the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition.

Giacomo Puccini, 150 years

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (December 22, 1858 – November 29, 1924) was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire. Some of his melodies, such as “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi and “Nessun dorma” from Turandot, have become part of modern culture.

Puccini was born in Lucca in Tuscany, Italy into a family with five generations of musical history behind them. His father died when he was five years old, and he was sent to study with his uncle Fortunato Magi, who considered him to be a poor and undisciplined student. Later, Puccini took the position of church organist and choir master in Lucca, but it was not until he saw a performance of Verdi’s Aida that he became inspired to be an opera composer. He and his brother, Michele, walked 18.5 mi (30 km) to see the performance in Pisa.

In 1880, with the help of a relative and a grant, Puccini enrolled in the Milan Conservatory to study composition with Amilcare Ponchielli and Antonio Bazzini. In the same year, at the age of 21, he composed the Messa, which marks the culmination of his family’s long association with church music in his native Lucca. Although Puccini himself correctly titled the work a Messa, referring to a setting of the full Catholic Mass, today the work is popularly known as his Messa di Gloria, a name that technically refers to a setting of only the first two prayers of the Mass, the Kyrie and the Gloria, while omitting the Credo, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. Puccini’s work is, in fact, a Messa.

The work anticipates Puccini’s career as an operatic composer by offering glimpses of the dramatic power that he would soon unleash on the stage; the powerful “arias” for tenor and bass soloists are certainly more operatic than is usual in church music and, in its orchestration and dramatic power, the Messa compares interestingly with Verdi’s Requiem.

While studying at the Conservatory, Puccini obtained a libretto from Ferdinando Fontana and entered a competition for a one-act opera in 1882. Although he did not win, Le Villi was later staged in 1884 at the Teatro Dal Verme and it caught the attention of Giulio Ricordi, head of G. Ricordi & Co. music publishers, who commissioned a second opera, Edgar, in 1889.

Puccini’s style has been one long avoided by musicologists; this avoidance can perhaps be attributed to the perception that his work, with its emphasis on melody and evident popular appeal, lacked “seriousness” (a similar prejudice beset Rachmaninoff during his lifetime). Despite the place Puccini clearly occupies in the popular tradition of Verdi, his style of orchestration also shows the strong influence of Wagner, matching specific orchestral configurations and timbres to different dramatic moments. His operas contain an unparalleled manipulation of orchestral colors, with the orchestra often creating the scene’s atmosphere.

The structures of Puccini’s works are also noteworthy. While it is to an extent possible to divide his operas into arias or numbers (like Verdi’s), his scores generally present a very strong sense of continuous flow and connectivity, perhaps another sign of Wagner’s influence. Like Wagner, Puccini used leitmotifs to connote characters (or combinations of characters). This is apparent in Tosca, where the three chords which signal the beginning of the opera are used throughout to announce Scarpia. Several motifs are also linked to Mimi and the Bohemians in La Bohème and to Cio-Cio-San’s eventual suicide in Butterfly. Unlike Wagner, though, Puccini’s motifs are static: where Wagner’s motifs develop into more complicated figures as the characters develop, Puccini’s remain more or less identical throughout the opera (in this respect anticipating the themes of modern musical theatre).

Another distinctive quality in Puccini’s works is the use of the voice in the style of speech: characters sing short phrases one after another as if they were talking to each other. Puccini is celebrated, on the other hand, for his melodic gift, and many of his melodies are both memorable and enduringly popular. These melodies are often made of sequences from the scale, a very distinctive example being Quando me’n vo’ (Musetta’s Waltz) from La Bohème and E lucevan le stelle from Act III of Tosca. Today, it is rare not to find at least one Puccini aria included in an operatic singer’s CD album or recital.

Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Lloyd Schwartz summarized Puccini thus: “Is it possible for a work of art to seem both completely sincere in its intentions and at the same time counterfeit and manipulative? Puccini built a major career on these contradictions. But people care about him, even admire him, because he did it both so shamelessly and so skillfully. How can you complain about a composer whose music is so relentlessly memorable, even — maybe especially — at its most saccharine?”

Olivier Messiaen, 100 years

Olivier Messiaen (December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11, and numbered Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré among his teachers. He was appointed organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death. On the fall of France in 1940 Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and while incarcerated he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (”Quartet for the end of time”) for the four available instruments, piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners to an audience of inmates and prison guards. Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941, and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod (who later became Messiaen’s second wife), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and George Benjamin.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources), and is harmonically and melodically based on modes of limited transposition, which were Messiaen’s own innovation. Many of his compositions depict what he termed “the marvellous aspects of the faith”, drawing on his unshakeable Roman Catholicism. He travelled widely, and he wrote works inspired by such diverse influences as Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Messiaen experienced a mild form of synaesthesia manifested as a perception of colours when he heard certain harmonies, particularly harmonies built from his modes, and he used combinations of these colours in his compositions. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrization associated with “total serialism”, in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many exotic musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works), and he also championed the ondes Martenot.

Messiaen found birdsong fascinating; he believed birds to be the greatest musicians and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer. He notated birdsongs worldwide, and he incorporated birdsong transcriptions into a majority of his music. His innovative use of colour, his personal conception of the relationship between time and music, his use of birdsong, and his intent to express profound religious ideas, all combine to make it almost impossible to mistake a composition by Messiaen for the work of any other western composer.

Elliott Carter, 100 years

Carter’s use of rhythm can best be understood within the concept of stratification. Each instrumental voice is typically assigned its own set of tempos. A structural polyrhythm, where a very slow polyrhythm is used as a formal device, is present in many of Carter’s works. The solo piano work Night Fantasies, for example, uses a 216:175 tempo relation that coincides at only two points in the entire 20+ minute composition. This use of rhythm is part of his goal to expand the notion of counterpoint to encompass simultaneous different characters, even entire movements, rather than just individual lines.

Carter developed his technique to further his artistic goals. His use of rhythm allows his music a structured fluidity and sense of time perhaps unique in classical music. The music also is overtly expressive and dramatic. He has said that “I regard my scores as scenarios, auditory scenarios, for performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the players as individuals and participants in the ensemble.” He has also talked about his desire to portray a “different form of motion,” in which players are not locked in step with the downbeat of every measure. He has said that such steady pulses remind him of soldiers marching or horses trotting, sounds that are not heard anymore in the late 20th century, and he wants his music to capture the sort of continuous acceleration or deceleration experienced in an automobile or an airplane. While Carter’s music shows little trace of American popular music or jazz, his vocal music has demonstrated strong ties to contemporary American poetry. He has set works of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams and, most recently, Wallace Stevens. Several of his large instrumental works such as the Concerto for Orchestra or Symphony of Three Orchestras are inspired by Twentieth Century American poets as well.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, 50 years

As is apparent with his interpretations of such avant-garde works as Jan Sandström’s Motorbike Concerto, Esa-Pekka Salonen voices a distaste for ideological and dogmatic approaches to composition and sees music creation as deeply physical. In the liner notes for Deutsche Grammophon’s release of Wing On Wing, he is quoted saying “Musical expression is bodily expression, there is no abstract cerebral expression in my opinion. It all comes out of the body.” A recurring theme in his music is the fusion of or relationship between the mechanical and the organic. He has also stated that his time in California has helped him to be more “free” in his compositions.

Salonen and his wife Jane, a former musician with the Philharmonia Orchestra, have three children, two daughters, Ella Aneira and Anja Sofia, and one son, Oliver

Theodore Wiprud, 50 years

Theodore Wiprud, 50 years

The original idea from: mldd.blogspot.com