image courtesy of stampcenter.com

It’s super hot out today, so once again we’re going to keep it light and easy here at Salon97. Grab an ice tea or your cold beverage of choice and sit back and enjoy some music by Henry Mancini!

b. April 16, 1924 in Cleveland

d. June 14, 1994 in Los Angeles

Henry Mancini (born Enrico Nicola Mancini) grew up playing piano and flute and became interested in jazz as a teenager. He went on to serve as a member of military bands in WWII and later became a pianist and arranger for the Glenn Miller-Tex Beneke Orchestra.

In 1952, Mancini joined Universal Studios, where he worked as an arranger and composer. He wrote music for a collection of comedies, mysteries, westerns and monster movies. Upon Universal’s consolidating of music staff, Mancini began working on his own and wrote the theme for the Peter Gunn, a new television series.

He also became a successful recording artist, and he turned many of his film scores into best-selling commercial albums. Additionally he made a significant contribution to classical/popular crossover when he recorded albums with James Galway and Luciano Pavarotti.

Mancini won 20 GRAMMY awards and 4 Academy Awards, and his notable scores include  ”The Pink Panther,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Victor/Victoria,” “Charade,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Touch of Evil”. He composed over 90 albums in the big band, classical and pop genres.

Where to start

Anywhere! All of Henry Mancini’s music is very accessible and you will be surprised at how much of it you’re already quite familiar with.

Here are a few favorites:

The Pink Panther Theme:

Mr. Lucky:

The Windmills of My Mind:

image courtesy of www.r2ok.co.uk

Sometimes you just gotta have some light music. For the times when all you want is a simple, happy, classic Hollywood-esque melody, Eric Coates is all you need. Really.

b. August 27, 1886 in Hucknall, England
d. December 23, 1957 in Chichester, England

Eric Coates studied violin and viola as a child and went on to study viola at the Royal Academy of Music. He performed as a principal violist with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. In addition to being a fabulous violist, he won a competition amongst his fellow musicians to determine who could memorize and perform an entire score the fastest. Well, okay then!

From 1919 on, Coates composed exclusively. He largely wrote waltzes and marches and had no interest in writing more complex works. He established relative popularity in Europe and his works were used to introduce a number of British radio shows, including Desert Island Discs, which still airs today.

Someone once said that the marches of Souza would make a man with a wooden leg step out; a man would have to have a wooden heart not to respond to the music of Eric Coates. –Sir Charles Groves, conductor

By the Sleepy Lagoon. So lovely!

Saxo Rhapsody:

photo courtesy of myspace.com

John Adams is an incredibly awesome San Francisco Bay Area-based composer. You also may have noticed that many of my posts on Twitter are labeled with the #JohnAdamsFanClub hash tag.  I may be biased, but either way, his music is fantastic.

b. Feb. 15, 1947 in Worcester, MA

Adams began composing at age 10 and was still a teenager when he heard his own works performed.  Adams’ compositional style bridges minimalism, serialism, and romantic styles.

After moving to California in 1971, Adams taught and led ensembles at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for about 10 years. He was a composer in residence at the San Francisco Symphony from 1982-1985. Several of his major orchestral works were written for and performed by the Symphony in this time period, including Grand Pianola Music, Harmonielehre, and Harmonium.

Adams has also written six operas: Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky (1995), El Nino (2000), Doctor Atomic (2005) and A Flowering Tree (2006). In 2003 Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls which was a piece written for the New York Philharmonic to commemorate the first anniversary of the 2001 World Trade Center bombings. The work also won GRAMMY awards for “Best Classical Recording”, “Best Orchestral Performance”, and “Best Classical Contemporary Composition”.

Where to start:

-See a performance of one of John Adams’ operas or rent one on DVD. Doctor Atomic, The Death of Klinghoffer and El Nino are available on Netflix.

-listen to the emotion-evoking On the Transmigration of Souls.

Here’s a YouTube video of the first movement from John Adams’ Violin Concerto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmdLYGrtbBM

image courtesy of emmasmusic.com

b. November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, NY

d. December 2, 1990, North Tarrytown, NY

Aaron Copland was a famed American composer and an accomplished pianist. He was known as the “Dean of American Composers.”

His composition style was a unique hybrid of American folk idioms and modern classical music and is identified by his iconic use of percussive orchestration, changing meter, polyrhythms, polychords and tone rows. Many of Copland’s works incorporated slowly changing harmonies that aptly depicted open landscapes.

In addition to composing famous American classical works, Copland wrote books, taught and conducted his own works. Pretty magnificent!

As a result of his support of the Communist movement in the 1936 election, Copland was blacklisted and his work Lincoln Portrait was removed from the program for the 1953 inaugural concert. Despite his political troubles, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his famous composition Appalachian Spring. Additionally, his scores for “Of Mice and Men” (1939), “Our Town” (1940), and “The North Star” (1943) all received Academy Award nominations, while ”The Heiress” won Best Music in 1949.

Where to Start:

-listen to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Appalachian Spring

-listen to the iconic Fanfare for the Common Man

Remember the beef commercial? You’ll recognize the music here–it’s Copland’s “Hoedown” from the ballet Rodeo.

photo courtesy of www.keepaa.com

b. 1874   Danbury, Connecticut

d. 1954   New York, NY

Charles Ives was a super-cool, trail-blazing composer who also had a successful career as an insurance salesman. He’s our composer of the week!

Charles Ives grew up in Danbury, Connecticut, where his father, George Ives, worked as a music teacher and band leader. George Ives had a tremendous impact on young Charles’ musical development from the very beginning, teaching him to engage in inventive thought when playing music. At age five, Charles Ives began playing the piano with his fists. He never stopped.

Beginning at age 14, Ives worked as a church organist, which influenced many of his early works. He went on to study music at Yale while also playing on the varsity football team. As he grew older, his works became more dissonant. Ives was known for his use of polytonality, polyrhythms, tone clusters, and quarter tones.

Despite the general awesomeness of Ives’ music, he was relatively unknown as a composer until after his death. As such, he was a very successful insurance salesman who specialized in life insurance for the wealthy.

Charles Ives stopped composing in 1927 but continued revising his earlier works for many years.

Where to start:

-Charles Ives’ early music was fairly easy on the ear and also quite fabulous! I highly recommend his String Quartet No.1.

-A highly patriotic individual, Ives wrote much of his music as aural descriptions of places he visited. These works include Three Places in New England and A Symphony: New England Holidays.

Here’s a YouTube video containing a recording of Ives performing a portion of his Concord Sonata:

A selection from Three Places in New England (Pop-up Video-style commentary included!):

“The Washington Post” was written as a tribute to the newspaper by the same name and gained worldwide popularity when listeners realized the piece had the perfect beat for dancing the two-step.

photo courtesy of wikipedia.org

b. May 15, 1908 in Akarp, Sweden

d. December 26, 1986 in Helsingborg, Sweden

Lars-Erik Larsson’s Nordic Romanticism awesomeness makes him our composer of the week!

Larsson worked as a music critic in addition to working as a conductor, composer, and producer for Swedish radio after studying at the Stockholm Conservatory. Holding these positions presented Larsson with an opportunity to greatly influence the musical tastes of his country.

Additionally, his studies with composer Alban Berg later inspired him to write his own 12-tone technique. Twelve-tone works by Larsson were the first ever to be written in Sweden.

Larsson’s compositional style, which is similar to that of Jean Sibelius, is referred to as Nordic Romanticism. Great music for a pensive day.

Lars-Erik Larsson’s Pastoral Suite:

The final movement to Larsson’s “A Winter’s Tale”:

image courtesy of www.klavier-noten.com

Felix Mendelssohn, a musical prodigy who is known as the Mozart of the 19th Century, is our Composer of the Week, and he was also featured at our recent Summer Music Soiree listening party!

b. February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany

d. November 4, 1847 in Leipzig, Germany

Felix Mendelssohn began writing masterpieces at the tender age of 15 and wrote the amazing Opus 21, Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at age 17.

His childhood was unquestionably interesting. Though his grandfather was a rabbi, Mendelssohn’s father decided the family would convert to the Lutheran church. As a result, Mendelssohn was secretly baptized at age seven, and his name was changed to Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Whew! He never took a liking to his additional three names, however, and decided to stick with the name Felix Mendelssohn.

Many of Mendelssohn’s early works were influenced by Bach and Mozart. A few years after writing Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he conducted a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion which brought Bach’s music into the mainstream at a time when his works were mostly studied by scholars rather than enjoyed by the general public. (Bach’s works are, of course, still studied by scholars and music students everywhere.)

Felix Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory in 1842 — the school still exists today. He also worked as a composer for King Frederick of Prussia, for whom he wrote many great works including Op. 61 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which included both the Op. 21 overture and newly written incidental music for the play.

Sadly, Mendelssohn died at age 38 as a result of overwork, the devastation of death of his beloved sister, and a series of strokes.

Where to start:

-listen to Op. 61 A Midsummer Night’s Dream

-listen to Symphony No. 4 “Italian Symphony”

Here’s a YouTube video of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture:

Here’s the first movement of his Symphony No. 4, conducted by Leonard Bernstein:

photo courtesy of www.brightcecilia.net

Few people have heard of Quincy Porter or his fabulous compositions. His undeniable underdogness makes him our Composer of the Week.

b. February 7, 1897 in New Haven, Connecticut

d. November 12, 1966 in Bethany, Connecticut

Quincy Porter, who’s compositional style bridged Impressionism with chromaticism to create his own idiom, composed a catalog of music including two symphonies, a cycle of nine string quartets, and numerous other orchestral and chamber works. Among these are the seven pieces he wrote with the violist in mind—the largest of them being a concerto with orchestral accompaniment. Though he wrote for ensembles both large and small, Quincy Porter’s most sought-after and rewarded musical contributions were the pieces he wrote for chamber ensembles. He was awarded the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for his “eminent service to chamber music” and the Pulitzer Prize, which he won for his Concerto concertante for two pianos and orchestra. Porter also earned an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Rochester.

As was typical of many of his contemporaries and predecessors, Porter did a great deal of teaching in addition to his composing.  He held a professorship at Vassar College and in 1938, left the position to take on the role of dean of faculty at the New England Conservatory in Boston. In 1942, Porter assumed the role of conservatory director. Porter returned to Yale as a professor of music in 1946, which also defined the time he spent writing the viola concerto. In 1958 he became master of Pierson College, one of Yale’s twelve residential colleges, in addition to teaching at Yale. Porter retired from teaching in 1965.

Where to start:

-listen to Eliesha Nelson’s album of Quincy Porter’s complete viola works.

-download Quincy Porter’s string quartets

Here’s Blues Lontains in the form of a music video by Eliesha Nelson and John McLaughlin Williams: