Episode notes
Synopsis On today’s date in 1945, Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of an orchestral suite arranged from Aaron Copland’s ballet score Appalachian Spring . For the ballet’s 1944 premiere at the Library of Congress, Copland called for a chamber orchestra of 13 players, but for most music lovers, it’s as a work for a larger symphony orchestra that Appalachian Spring is most often remembered. He said he had conducted all of his own works but knew his Appalachian Spring best of all. He also had some specific advice for other conductors of his score.…
Podcast
Composers Datebook
American Public Media · Music · English
Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessi
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9 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Vivaldi’s 'Juditha Triumphans'
Synopsis On today’s date in 2001, the release of a CD of Vivaldi’s oratorio Juditha Triumphans launched an ambitious project to record nearly 450 works of the famous Italian Baroque composer that exist as manuscript scores in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, Italy. It’s the largest collection of manuscript scores by any 18th-century composer in existence and includes many Vivaldi works unperformed since his lifetime. Susan Orlando, the director of the recording project, explained how that came to be: “When Vivaldi died in Vienna in 1741, he had debts, so the authorities immediately sealed…
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8 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Ligeti's 'out there' Violin Concerto
Synopsis On today’s date in 1992, one of the strangest — and some would say most strikingly original — violin concertos of the late 20th century had its premiere performance in Cologne, Germany. It was written by Transylvanian-born Hungarian composer György Ligeti. He became famous in the west when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick used his music to evoke the eerie and empty vastness of outer space. And, in fact, Ligeti was fascinated by the sounds traditional orchestral instruments make when pressed to the extreme limits of their…
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7 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Jake Heggie's opera 'Dead Man Walking'
Synopsis As the 20th century drew to its close, some who followed the development of opera were struck by the number of new American operas on American themes. On today’s date in 2000, one of these new operas debuted in San Francisco. Dead Man Walking , an opera in two acts, was based on a 1993 book by Sister Helen Prejean, a book also made into a successful movie. The libretto for the operatic version of Sister Prejean’s book was crafted by Terrance McNally and set to music by American composer Jake Heggie. Now, an opera based on eyewitness accounts of American prisoners on death row might…
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6 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Music for the movies
Synopsis On today’s date in 1927, the landmark film The Jazz Singer received its premiere showing at the Warner Theater in New York. The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson and is usually credited with being the first “talkie” — the first motion picture to successfully incorporate prerecorded music and spoken dialogue. Both the music and dialogue were recorded using the Vitaphone process, essentially a set of disc recordings synchronized for playback with the film’s projector. The previous year, the New York Philharmonic had participated in the first Vitaphone projects, recording Wagner’s…
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5 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Grove and Sullivan 'discover' Schubert
Synopsis On today’s date in 1867, two eminent British Victorians arrived in Vienna in search of Franz Schubert. Now, Schubert had been dead for 39 years, as the two Brits were quite aware. George Grove, 47, was England’s finest musicologist, and Arthur Sullivan, 25, one of the country’s most promising young composers. Grove believed there might be forgotten manuscripts in the possession of the late composer’s relatives, so the pair met with Schubert’s nephew, Herr Doktor Schneider, who said he did have some pieces by Uncle Franz that no one had played for more than 40 years. If the two…
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3 Oct 2026 · 2 min
The Dream of Gerontius
Synopsis Despite a disastrous premiere in Birmingham on today’s date in 1900, Edward Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius has become one of his best-loved and most-frequently performed works in the U.K., where, in 2015, Classic FM offered a guide to what it called the work’s “most epic choral stupendousness.” Here’s Classic FM’s summary of its story: “The piece follows an ‘everyman’ character (the word ‘Gerontius’ comes from the Greek for ‘old man’) as he faces death, meets his guardian angel and goes before his God before being taken to Purgatory with the promise of everlasting glory.”…
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2 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Steve Heitzeg's 'Nobel Symphony'
Synopsis In 2001, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, commissioned American composer Steve Heitzeg to write a Nobel Symphony . In 1866, the Swedish engineer and scientist Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite. His patent helped him amass a great fortune, but, troubled by the destructive power and potential misuse of his invention, Nobel arranged that his estate would award annual prizes to those who made significant contributions to world peace. For his Nobel Symphony , Heitzeg chose to set quotes from a variety of Nobel…
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1 Oct 2026 · 2 min
Gabriela Lena Frank's 'Hilos'
Synopsis On today’s date in 2010, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, the ALIAS ensemble gave the premiere performance of a new chamber work by American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. It was titled Hilos — the Spanish word for “threads” — and scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet. Now, it’s not unusual for composers to tap their particular cultural background for inspiration, but she has a pretty wide variety of options in that regard: Her father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. They met when her…
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30 Sep 2026 · 2 min
A Vaughan Williams premiere in Liverpool
Synopsis Even during the bombing of London by the German Air Force, the London Blitz of World War Two, the BBC Proms Concerts continued. True, in 1941 a German incendiary bomb did destroy the long-time home of the Proms, Queen’s Hall on Langham Place, but, not to be deterred, the Proms simply moved to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. Wartime Proms programs included this printed notice: “In the event of an Air Raid Warning the audience will be informed immediately, so that those who wish to take shelter either in the building or in public shelters outside, may do so, The concert…
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29 Sep 2026 · 2 min
Tan Dun at the movies (and in the concert hall)
Synopsis On today’s date in 2000, a new cello concerto received its premiere performance at the Barbican Center in London. Billed as the Crouching Tiger Concerto , this score was by Chinese composer Tan Dun, and was derived from his film score for Ang Lee’s martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . That score featured a prominent cello part, tailor-made for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a variety of traditional Chinese instruments and a percussion battery that included a North African frame drum. The haunting score matched the film so effectively that it was nominated for — and won…
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