1621 – Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (Dutch composer, teacher & organist, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam)
1655 – Joseph Solomon Delmedigo [ישר מקנדיא] (Crete-born Italian rabbi, author, physician, mathematician & music theorist, active in Europe & North Africa)
1750 – Sylvius Leopold Weiss (German composer & lutenist)
1814 – Juan José Landaeta (Venezuelan composer)
1893 – Carlo Pedrotti (Italian conductor & composer)
1920 – Alberto Nepomuceno (Brazilian composer, pianist, organist & conductor)
1946 – Sir Granville Bantock (English composer & conductor)
1949 – Hale Ascher VanderCook (American composer, conductor, cornettist & teacher, founder of VanderCook College of Music)
1959 – Minor Hall (American jazz drummer)
1973 – Gene Krupa (American jazz drummer & composer)
1975 – Vittorio Gui (Italian conductor)
1982 – Mario Del Monaco (Italian dramatic tenor)
October 16th wasn't a very good day for jazz drummers, was it? We just said goodbye to Art Blakely in edition 10-16b, and here in 10-16a we have Minor Hall, a major (heh) New Orleans drummer, who played with Kid Ory, among others, and Gene Krupa, almost surely the greatest drummer of the Big Band/Swing era, who's most famous for his work in the Benny Goodman orchestra, and his highly energetic, almost frenetic style of playing.
We also have Sweelinck, one of the most important keyboard composers active around 1600; Mario Del Monaco, one of the greatest operatic dramatic tenors of the 20th century; a couple of quite notable South American composers; Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, who sounds like a very interesting figure I must get to know better; and Granville Bantock, who provides an interesting comparison with Kaikhosru Sorabji, whom we only just remembered on the 10-15 edition.
For both composers were British and had a spiritual and aesthetic affinity with the East, but Sorabji also had ethnic roots there, while Bantock did not. For him, the legends of those exotic lands, which he toured briefly as a young man while conducting a musical comedy troupe, simply held a special fascination that stuck with him his entire life, and which permeates many of his works, most famously his epic choral work Omar Khayyám, based on the Rubaiyat of that 11th-century Persian poet.
Okay, so there's your write-up. Happy? Oh, I also moved the Follow & Subscribe gadgets to a more convenient place on the page. I think I may monetize the blog soon, so expect to see the place plastered with Donate buttons. I spend a lot of time working on this place, you know.
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