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In 1726 Johann Sebastian Bach premiered his Sacred Cantata No. 52 (“Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht”) as part of his third annual Sacred Cantata cycle in Leipzig (1725/27). 

In 1839 Hector Berlioz’s dramatic symphony “Romeo and Juliet” was premiered at the Paris Conservatory. 

In 1859 the legendary American soprano Adelina Patti made her operatic debut at age 16 in New York City, singing in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”. 

In 1874 Antonín Dvořák’s opera “King and Collier” was premiered in Prague. 

In 1876 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s opera “Vakula the Blacksmith” was premiered in St. Petersburg (Gregorian date: Dec. 6). 

In 1886 Johannes Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 2 in F, Op. 99 was premiered in Vienna. 

In 1888 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy overture “Hamlet” (after Shakespeare) was premiered in Moscow (Julian date: Nov. 12). 

Erik Bergman

In 1911 Erik Bergman was born in Nykarleby, Finland. His style ranged widely, from Romanticism in his early works (many of which he later prohibited from being performed) to modernism and primitivism, among other genres. He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1994 for his opera Det sjungande trädet. He studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and afterwards with Heinz Tiessen in Berlin and with Wladimir Vogel in Ascona. Since 1963 he taught composition at the Sibelius Academy, besides working until 1978 as a choir conductor. He is considered a pioneer of modern music in Finland. Because of his training he was considered as a representative of the avant-garde; he developed the twelve-tone techniques of Arnold Schönberg learned from Wladimir Vogel. He composed song cycles, cantatas, pieces for piano and for organ, a guitar suite, a chamber concert for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion and piano and further chamber works. His Requiem for a dead poet (1970) and Colori ed improvvisazioni for orchestra (1973) gave him international recognition. He is also known for his extensive choral output. His latest works include concertos for cello, violin and trumpet. 1

Emma Lou Diemer

Happy 88th birthday Emma Lou Diemer! Born on this day in 1927 in Kansas City, Missouri. She has written many works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, keyboard, voice, chorus (women’s and men’s), and electronic media. She  is a keyboard performer and over the years has given concerts of her own organ works at Washington National Cathedral, The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, Grace Cathedral and St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco, and others. Works include many collections and single pieces for organ as well as many for solo piano, piano 4 hands, and two pianos. Her major chamber works include a piano quartet, string quartet, two piano trios, and sonatas and suites for flute, violin, cello, and piano as well as settings of the psalms for organ with other instruments. She has written many choral works as well. She has written numerous hymns, several of which appear in church hymnals. Her songs number in the dozens, using texts by many contemporary and early poets including Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Alice Meynell, Thomas Campion, Shakespeare, John Donne, her sister Dorothy Diemer Hendry, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and many others. Her compositional style over the years has varied from tonal to atonal, from traditional to experimental. She has written works for non-professional and professional performers, originally under the “Gebrauchsmusik” philosophy, but has produced many works, particularly for keyboard, that are difficult and challenging. The latter category includes her “Fantasy” for piano; Seven Etudes for piano; Homage to Cowell, Cage, Crumb, and Czerny for two pianos; Variations for Piano Four Hands (Homage to Ravel, Schoenberg, and May Aufderheide); Four Biblical Settings for organ, Concerto for Organ (“Alaska”); and many psalm setting collections. The totally serial “Declarations” for organ (1973) contrasts to the more tonal 2013 concerto for violin and orchestra “Summer Day”. Her work in the electronic field during her years on the faculty of the University of California influenced a number of works including her Toccata for piano that has a number of performances on YouTube. 2

In 1932 Hilding Rosenberg’s opera “Voyage to America” was premiered in Stockholm. 

Alfred Schnittke

In 1934 Alfred Schnittke was born in Engels, near Saratov, Russia. His early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich. He developed a polystylistic technique in works such as the epic Symphony No. 1 (1969–1972) and his first concerto grosso (1977). In the 1980s, his music began to become more widely known abroad with the publication of his second (1980) and third (1983) string quartets and the String Trio (1985); the ballet Peer Gynt (1985–1987); the third (1981), fourth (1984), and fifth (1988) symphonies; and the viola (1985) and first cello (1985–1986) concertos. As his health deteriorated, Schnittke’s music started to abandon much of the extroversion of his polystylism and retreated into a more withdrawn, bleak style. He and his music were often viewed suspiciously by the Soviet bureaucracy. His First Symphony was effectively banned by the Composers’ Union. After he abstained from a Composers’ Union vote in 1980, he was banned from travelling outside of the USSR. In 1985, Schnittke suffered a stroke that left him in a coma. He was declared clinically dead on several occasions, but recovered and continued to compose. In 1990, he left Russia and settled in Hamburg. His health remained poor, however. He suffered several more strokes before his death on August 3, 1998, in Hamburg, at the age of 63. He was buried, with state honors, at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where many other prominent Russian composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich, are interred. 3

In 1944 David Diamond’s “Rounds” for string orchestra was premiered by the Minneapolis Symphony, Dimtri Mitropoulos conducting. 

In 1945 Elie Siegmeister’s “Western Suite” was premiered by the NBC Symphony, Arturo Toscanini conducting. 

In 1949 Carl Ruggles’ “Organum” for large orchestra was premeired by the New York Philharmonic, Leopold Stokowski conducting. 

Tod Machover

Happy 62nd birthday Tod Machover! Born on this date in 1953 in New York City.  He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1971 and received a BM and MM from the Juilliard School in New York where he studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions(1973–1978). He also started his Doctoral studies at Juilliard before being invited as Composer-in-Residence to Pierre Boulez’s new Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in 1978. He was named Director of Musical Research at IRCAM in 1980. Joining the faculty at the new Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility. Currently Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, he is head of the Lab’s Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group and has been Co-Director of the Things That Think (TTT) and Toys of Tomorrow (TOT) consortia since 1995. In 2006, he was named Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has composed significant works for Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, Matt Haimovitz, the Ying Quartet, the Boston Pops, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Penn & Teller, and many others, as well as designed and implemented various interactive systems for performance by Peter Gabriel and Prince. Machover gave a keynote lecture at NIME-02, the second international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, which was held in 2002 at the former Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland, and is a frequent lecturer worldwide. Machover is a Finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his opera “Death and the Powers.” In the fall of 1978, Tod Machover arrived at IRCAM in Paris, and was introduced to Giuseppe di Giugno’s digital synthesizer 4 series. Light was premiered at the Metz Festival in November 1979 using 4C, the brain-child of di Giugno’s concept that “synthesizers should be made for musicians, not for the people that make them.” (Electric Sound, p. 181). In 1981 he composed Fusione Fugace for solo performance on a real-time digital synthesizer, called the 4X machine. At IRCAM 1986 and 1987 he was motivated to score for keyboard and percussion duet with emphasis on extending their performance into many complex sound layers. He composed Valis, again using di Giugno’s 4X system to process voices. This desire to enhance the human performance foreshadowed his concept of the hyperinstrument (term coined in 1986). At MIT’s Media Lab, he developed methods for taking many more sophisticated measurements of the instrument as well as the performer’s expression. He focused on augmenting keyboard instruments, percussion, strings, even the act of conducting, with the goal of developing and implementing new technology in order to expand the function of the musical instruments and their performers. He propelled forward-thinking research in the field of musical performance and interaction using new musical and technological resources. Originally concentrated to the enhancement of virtuosic performance, research has expanded in a direction of building sophisticated interactive musical instruments for non-professional musicians, children, and the general public. 4

Edgar Meyer

Happy 55th birthday Edgar Meyer! Born on this date in Tennesee in 1960. He grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where he learned to play the double bass from his father, the late Edgar Meyer, Sr., who directed the string orchestra program for the local public school system. Meyer later went on to Indiana University to study with Stuart Sankey. He is noted for achieving virtuosity on an instrument of unusual technical difficulty. Following in the footsteps of other bass players like Gary Karr and Mark Bernat before him, he has performed music originally composed for other instruments, such as Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. Meyer has also composed a number of works, including two double bass concertos, a string quintet, a double concerto for bass and cello, and a violin concerto in 1999 composed specifically for Hilary Hahn. In 2000, he won the Avery Fisher Prize, given once every few years to classical instrumentalists for outstanding achievement. In 2002, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Meyer’s collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor on the widely acclaimed Sony Classical disc Appalachia Waltz reached the top of the U.S. pop charts for 16 weeks when it was released. He collaborated again with Yo-Yo Ma and Mark O’Connor on Appalachian Journey, that earned a Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album. On his self-titled 2006 Sony Classical release, he performs accompanied only by himself on a wide variety of instruments besides his usual piano and double bass, including guitar, banjo, viola da gamba, mandolin and dobro. He is Adjunct Associate Professor of Double Bass at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, as well as at the Curtis Institute. He is also an artist-faculty member of theAspen Music Festival and School. 5

In 1963 Leonard Bernstein conducted New York Philharmonic in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at the JFK Memorial Concert telecast on CBS-TV.

In 1984 Christopher Rouse’s “The Surma Ritornelli “ for chamber ensemble was premiered by the Syracuse (N.Y.) Society for New Music. 

In 1987 Michael Torke’s “Adjustable Wrench” for chamber ensemble had its premier at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival by the Lontano ensemble, Odaline de la Martinez conducting.

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Erik Bergman,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erik_Bergman&oldid=676144378 (accessed November 24, 2015).
  2. Wikipedia contributors, “Emma Lou Diemer,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emma_Lou_Diemer&oldid=683209840 (accessed November 24, 2015).
  3. Wikipedia contributors, “Alfred Schnittke,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alfred_Schnittke&oldid=688633237 (accessed November 24, 2015).
  4. Wikipedia contributors, “Tod Machover,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tod_Machover&oldid=680295414 (accessed November 24, 2015).
  5. Wikipedia contributors, “Edgar Meyer,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edgar_Meyer&oldid=671636183 (accessed November 24, 2015).