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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 accessible music related to each.
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A weekly review of cases decided by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, hosted by Legal Style Blog's Elijah Granet.
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If you love documentary films, hear from the top storytellers on Pure Nonfiction. Host Thom Powers is well-connected in this world as a documentary curator for the Toronto International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and SundanceNow Doc Club. He leads conversations that are frank, funny and revealing. Listen to interviews with Oscar-winning filmmakers Barbara Kopple, Alex Gibney, and Roger Ross Williams; as well as the directors of “Making a Murderer,” “Weiner” and “OJ: Made in America.” Often the ...
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Synopsis On today’s date in 1956, the English composer Gerald Finzi died in Oxford at 55. Finzi suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, and shortly before his death had caught chickenpox from some children he had visited, an infection that proved fatal. Finzi was born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His mother was musical, and an amateur compos…
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200: Beadie Finzi & Judy Kibinge on DISCO & the Independence Project
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Episode 200 is dedicated to the legacy of Jess Search, the visionary producer and co-founder of Doc Society. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews Beadie Finzi of Doc Society and Judy Kibinge of Docubox in Kenya. They are two members of DISCO (Decentralised Independent Story and Culture Organizers), a network of documentary organizations arou…
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201: Angela Patton & Natalie Rae Robison on "Daughters"
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"Daughters," now streaming on Netflix, follows a Daddy Daughter Dance held in a prison. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews the film's director Angela Patton and Natalie Rae Robison, who collaborated on the feature documentary debut. They also discuss the contributions of cinematographer Michael "Cambio" Fernandez and executive producer Ker…
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Synopsis Today’s date in 1922 marks the birthday of Héctor Campos Parsi, one of Puerto Rico’s finest composers. Campos Parsi originally planned to become a doctor, but after a meeting with the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, ended up studying music at the New England Conservatory in 1949 and 1950 with the likes of Aaron Copland, Olivier Messiaen an…
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Synopsis The old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” pretty much sums up the career of the French composer Georges Bizet. Bizet died at 36 in 1875, the same year his opera Carmen premiered. Now, Carmen soon became acknowledged as one of the great masterworks of French opera, but poor Monsieur Bizet wasn’t around to experience any…
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Synopsis Yes, Juliet, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a catchy title alone can’t help a piece of music that’s uninspired or just plain boring. An intriguing title, however can sometimes help put audiences into a more receptive frame of mind — or at least pique their curiosity. From the very beginning of his career in the 1980s, the…
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Synopsis Today’s date in 1913 marks the birthday of American composer Vivian Fine in Chicago. At the tender age of five, she became a scholarship piano student at the Chicago Musical College. As she grew up she became enthralled with the great composers and performers she heard at her regular visits to the Chicago Symphony. Fine initially intended …
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Synopsis On today’s date in 2000, King’s Chapel in Boston presented a festival of music by the early American composer William Billings, honoring the 200th anniversary of his death in 1800. As the Chapel’s records of 1786 stated, Billings taught singing “to such persons of both sexes as incline to sing psalm-tunes.” They must have liked him, becaus…
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Synopsis In the 1920s, German composer Paul Hindemith wrote a set of seven concertos, which he collectively titled Kammermusik or Chamber Music. This generic title was part of Hindemith’s goal to foster a more “objective” musical style, modeled on 18th century composers like J.S. Bach. Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4, a work for solo violin and chamb…
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Synopsis Today’s date in 1914 marks the birthday of Polish-born composer and conductor Andrzej Panufnik, whose life was dramatic — and romantic — enough for a Netflix mini-series. It involved resisting the Nazis in war-torn Warsaw, struggles with the Communist Party in the post-war years, a daring Swiss escape to Great Britain worthy of a John Le C…
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Synopsis It was on today’s date in 1835 that Romantic opera composer Vincenzo Bellini died at a country home near Paris. He was only 34 but had achieved great fame in his brief lifetime. The long, elegant melodic lines Bellini spun out in his operas were much admired and proved to be a major influence on the solo piano works of his contemporary, Fr…
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Synopsis Today we celebrate the birthday of Leonardo Balada, an American composer born in Barcelona on today’s date in 1933. After studying at the Barcelona Conservatory, the 20-something composer came to New York on a musical scholarship. Balada recalls his arrival as both a cultural and climatic shock: “When I landed in New York — on a freezing d…
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Synopsis “Are people still writing concertos for harpsichord?” you ask. Well, today, we have an answer, which is “Yes!” On today’s date in 2002, this new Concerto for Harpsichord and Chamber Orchestra by Philip Glass had its premiere performance at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Glass was asked to write a new Harpsichord Concerto for the Northwest Chamb…
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Synopsis When we think of Russian music in Paris, the name Sergei Diaghilev comes first to mind. In the early years of the 20th century, that famous Russian impresario saw to it that not only the new music of Stravinsky was performed in the French capital, but also a historical panorama of earlier Russian works, including Mussorgsky’s opera, Boris …
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Synopsis During his later years, German composer Johannes Brahms was a frequent visitor to the town of Meiningen, where the Grand Duke had a fine orchestra that gave stellar performances of Brahms’ music. Early in 1891, Brahms heard one member of that orchestra, the clarinetist Richard Mülhfeld, perform chamber works by Mozart and Weber. Brahms was…
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Synopsis American composer Virgil Thomson was fond of writing what he called “portraits”: musical sketches of people he knew. When asked how he did this, Thomson replied: “I just look at you and I write down what I hear.” One of these works — a portrait in disguise — premiered on today’s date in 1954 at the Venice Festival in Italy. Identified simp…
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Synopsis In 1871, one year after the premiere in Munich of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, German-born American conductor Theodore Thomas wrote Wagner asking if he might perform excerpts of this new work in the United States. Wagner turned him down, worried that loose American copyright laws might not protect his new music. Undeterred, Thomas t…
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Synopsis The book Great Operatic Disasters chronicles the sometime humorous — and sometimes harrowing — mishaps that have befallen opera singers and productions over the last few centuries. According to that book, September 16 seems to have been a particularly unlucky day. Consider that on today’s date in 1782, Italian castrato Farinelli, one of th…
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Synopsis On today’s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by American composer Charles Ives. Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work — its manuscript is dated 1896, back when Ives was a 21-year old student at Yale. W…
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Synopsis Today’s date marks the birthday in 1885 of María Joaquina de la Portilla Torres, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Under her married name of María Grever, she became the first female Mexican composer to achieve international fame. She composed her first song at age four, studied in France with Claude Debussy among others, and at 18, one …
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Synopsis The Grove Dictionary of Music defines “aleatory” as follows: “music whose composition and/or performance is, to a greater or lesser extent, undetermined by the composer.” But isn’t music supposed to be organized, planned, determined sound? Isn’t “aleatoric music” a contradiction in terms? Well, not necessarily. Musicians throughout the age…
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Synopsis In 1840, immensely talented German pianist Clara Wieck was eagerly awaiting the eve of her 21st birthday, when she would be free to legally marry the 30-year-old composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The couple had hoped to wed years earlier, but the match was bitterly opposed by Clara’s father. Clara and Robert kept in touch by lette…
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