01-05: Mingus At Monterey 1964 - The Doors Isle of Wight 1970 - Love : Forever Changes 1967 - Alan Rawsthorne Symphony No. 3 | Roberto Gerhard Concerto for Orchestra / Del Mar 1967 - Cher and Sonny & Cher Greatest Hits

Not shown: Johann Schneider, Ferdinando Orlandi, Leonce Gras & Victor van Os

1740 – Antonio Lotti (Italian composer, organist & singer)
1788 – Johann Schneider (German organist, violinist & composer, pupil of Bach)
1848 – Ferdinando Orlandi (Italian composer, organist & singing teacher)
1862 – Franz Joseph Fröhlich (German teacher & musicologist)
1888 – Henri Herz (Austrian-born French pianist & composer)
1891 – Emma Abbott (American soprano, impresario, pianist, guitarist & violinist)
1919 – Sumako Matsui [松井 須磨子] (Japanese actress & singer)
1946 – Kitty Cheatham (American singer, monologist & actress)
1956 – Mistinguett [Jeanne Bourgeois] (French actress, singer & dancer)
1970 – Roberto Gerhard [i Ottenwaelder] (Spanish composer & writer)
1974 – Lev Oborin [Лев Оборин] (Russian pianist)
1976 – Georges Migot (French composer, poet & painter)
1976 – Mal Evans (English road manager and assistant to The Beatles)
1979 – Charles Mingus (American jazz bassist, composer, pianist, cellist, trombonist & civil rights activist)
1992 – Hans Federico Neuman (Colombian composer & pianist)
1993 – Leonce Gras (Belgian conductor, singer & teacher)
1994 – Victor van Os (Dutch jazz guitarist)
1995 – Francis Lopez (French dentist & operetta composer)
1996 – Danny White (American R&B singer, Huey Smith & the Clowns)
1997 – Burton Lane (American theatrical composer & lyricist, Finian's Rainbow, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever)
1998 – Georgy Sviridov [Гео́ргий Свири́дов] (Russian composer, pianist & balalaika player)
1998 – Ken Forssi (American rock bass guitarist, Love, The Surfaris)
1998 – Sonny Bono (American pop singer, songwriter, record producer, entertainer & politician)
2003 – Doreen Carwithen (English composer, pianist & violinist, spouse of William Alwyn)
2005 – Danny Sugerman (American rock manager & author, The Doors, Iggy Pop)

A lot of great Chers, er, shares here, this time all from the 60s and 70s. There's something for just about everybody here!

11-14: Mingus Changes One & Two 1975 - Falla : El sombrero de tres picos | El Amor brujo / Dutoit 1981 - Joseph Allard 78s 1920s-30s

1692 – Christoph Bernhard (German composer & music theorist)
1831 – Ignaz Pleyel (Austrian-born French composer, music publisher & piano manufacturer)
1915 – Theodor Leschetizky (Polish pianist, teacher & composer)
1922 – Carl Michael Ziehrer (Austrian composer)
1925 – Agnes Zimmermann (German pianist & composer, active in England)
1944 – Carl Flesch (Hungarian violinist & teacher)
1946 – Manuel de Falla (Spanish composer)
1947 – Joseph Allard (Canadian folk fiddler & composer)
1977 – Richard Addinsell (English film composer, Warsaw Concerto from Dangerous Moonlight)
1982 – Joachim Stutschewsky [יהויכין סטוצ'בסקי‎] (Ukrainian-born Israeli cellist, composer & musicologist)
1992 – George Adams (American jazz tenor saxophonist, flutist, bass clarinettist & singer)
2002 – Elena Nikolaidi (Turkish-born American operatic mezzo-soprano & teacher of Greek ancestry)
2004 – Michel Colombier (French film composer, songwriter, arranger & conductor)

I'm going to assume that you all know plenty about Manuel de Falla, the great Andalusian master of Spanish music; and that the name of Ignaz Pleyel may ring a bell, if not for his fame as a piano manufacturer, then for the name of the Parisian concert hall named after him, the Salle Pleyel, which serves as the residence for the Orchestre de Paris.

Christoph Bernhard was a figure whose figures we learned about in my graduate studies in music theory. These are contained in the Tractatus compositionis augmentatus (c. 1660), one of a few treatises Bernhard wrote, which were unpublished but circulated widely through manuscripts during his lifetime. These figures illustrate, in a clear and concise form, the differences in the concurrent compositional styles of the 17th century in terms of how it was acceptable to treat dissonances in these styles, which Bernhard labeled stylus gravis, stylus luxurians communis, and stylus theatralis.

The conservative stylus gravis is the 16th-century polyphonic vocal style, represented most iconically by the sacred music of Palestrina - the style which Monteverdi referred to as the prima pratica. In this strict style, the only dissonances allowed are passing and neighboring tones, both unaccented and accented, as well as certain very specific kinds of suspensions, both tied and rearticulated. Of course, by Bernhard's time, the stylus gravis was considered old-fashioned and had largely fallen out of use, but it remained at the very least as a standard against which the more modern styles could be compared.

The stylus luxurians communis is a more progressive style, one which covers a wide variety of both sacred and secular composition, and represents the most common style in Bernhard's day for general compositional use, both vocal and instrumental. In this style, a greater variety of types of suspensions is allowed, and the style accommodates devices such as large melodic leaps, and dissonances such as anticipations and incomplete neighbor tones.

Stylus theatralis is the term Bernhard uses for what Monteverdi had called the seconda pratica. It's the style in which the music becomes subservient to the text, a reversal of the roles assumed in the stylus gravis. For the purpose of illustrating the emotional content of a word or phrase, many more compositional devices are allowed, including extreme chromaticism, the prolongation of a dissonance, the alteration or even omission of a dissonance's resolution, and the use of normally-avoided melodic intervals such as the augmented 2nd.

Well, I realize some of the above might as well have been in Taushiro for those of you not conversant in musictheoryese. Let me just make this point: In the past, there were rules even for how one broke the rules. That's not a familiar concept to us children of the 20th century. We've come to assume that an artist can do pretty much whatever he or she wants, and that the sky's the limit as far as creativity is concerned. Really, that's only been the case for about 100 years, if that long. And it's only been in the most recent decades that advances in technology have made such a concept of artistic freedom truly possible in a practical sense. File under "things we take for granted"!

10-02: Hazel Scott / Charles Mingus / Max Roach 1955 - Bola de Nieve 1950 - Violin Concertos Mendelssohn | Bruch 1 + Scottish Fantasy / Chung 1972 - Gene Autry 16 Country Classics

1559 – Jacquet de Mantua (French composer & cathedral music director, active in Italy)
1629 – Antonio Cifra (Italian composer & church music director)
1823 – Daniel Steibelt (German pianist & composer, active in France, England & Russia)
1842 – José Mariano Elízaga (Mexican composer, court music director, music theorist, pianist, organist, teacher & music publisher)
1915 – Russell Alexander (American composer, vaudeville entertainer & circus band euphonium soloist)
1920 – Max Bruch (German composer & conductor)
1943 – Robert Nathaniel Dett (Canadian composer, pianist, organist & choir director, active also in the United States)
1960 – Jaroslav Doubrava (Czech composer, painter & teacher)
1970 – Bo Linde (Swedish composer & conductor)
1971 – Bola de Nieve [Ignacio Jacinto Villa] (Cuban cabaret singer, pianist & songwriter)
1981 – Hazel Scott (Trinidadian-born jazz & classical pianist, singer & actress)
1983 – Gerald Strang (Canadian composer, teacher & author)
1996 – Frida Knight (English musicologist, author, pianist, violinist & socialist activist)
1998 – Gene Autry (American country singer, guitarist, actor, & entrepreneur)
2001 – Franz Biebl (German composer, "Ave Maria")
2007 – Tawn Mastrey (American hard rock disc jockey & music video producer, Hair Nation, Absolutely Live High Voltage)
2008 – Rob Guest (English-born New Zealander/Australian musical theater performer & television host)

October 2 saw the passing of two particularly famous musical notables: Gene Autry, everyone's favorite singing cowboy, both on the phonograph and on the Silver Screen; and Max Bruch, who with his three violin concertos and Scottish Fantasia was one of the 19th century's most prolific contributors to the standard repertoire of concerted works for the violin. Another one of Bruch's most famous works is his Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra, based on Hebrew themes. When the Nazis came to power and started banning public performances of works by Jewish composers, Bruch was one of the composers they targeted. Just one little problem: Bruch wasn't Jewish! In fact, there's no evidence of him having had any ancestors who were Jewish either. The Nazis merely assumed he was because of his Hebrew-themed and Hebrew-titled work. Clearly they were living by their usual maxim, "When in doubt, err on the side of extreme ignorance and stupidity."

We also remember two great Caribbean pianist-vocalists: Trinidadian jazz musician and actress Hazel Scott - like Mary Lou Williams, one of those all-too-rare lights in the "man's world" of instrumental jazz - and Cuban cabaret entertainer Ignacio Jacinto Villa, who went by the nickname of Bola de Nieve ("Snowball") because of his round head, and who was one of the gay men lucky enough to escape persecution under the Castro regime, thanks only to the great respect his pure talent afforded him.

Two musicians who are less well-known than they once were, but who have interesting stories to tell. Canadian-born composer, keyboardist & choirmaster Robert Nathaniel Dett was, in the 1920s, the first black student ever to complete the five-year course of study at Oberlin Conservatory. In 1929, he traveled to Paris to study with... guess who? That's right... like Virgil Thomson and Roy Harris, from the past two days' posts, Dett was also a pupil of Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleu. Then in 1932, he received his Masters degree from Eastman. Dett went on to have some considerable critical and public successes, most notably with the premiere in 1937 of his oratorio The Ordering of Moses by the Cincinnati Symphony under Eugene Goosens, at a festival where the chorus numbered 350. His last duties took him to Europe, contributing to the war effort as a choral advisor to the USO. He died of a heart attack there in 1943.

The German Daniel Steibelt was also a composer and pianist. His reputation hasn't held up quite as well as Dett's, however. His studies began with Johann Kirnberger, who himself had been a pupil of J. S. Bach. After Steibelt's father forced him to join the Prussian army, he soon deserted and became an itinerant musician, finally dividing most of his time between Paris and London, where his abilities as both a pianist and a composer gained recognition. In 1799, Steibelt embarked on a tour of German and Austria. It was when he arrived in Vienna in May 1800 that Steibelt made the unfortunate mistake of challenging Ludwig van Beethoven, 5 years his junior at the age of 29, to a trial of improvisational skill at the home of Count van Fries. Beethoven prevailed handily in the duel, delivering his coup de grâce with a lengthy improvisation on a theme from one of Steibelt's own works - which he read after turning the sheet music upside down on the music rack!

Steibelt cancelled the remainder of his tour after this public humiliation, but he went on to enjoy further success in his musical career, finally ending up comfortably in St. Petersburg, in the service of Tsar Alexander I as director of Russia's Royal Opera. Steibelt's last public success as piano soloist came in 1820, with the premiere of his own Concerto No. 8, which is remarkable as the first piano concerto ever written to feature a choral finale, and which predates Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - the first symphony to feature a choral finale - by four years (although with the composition of his concerto, Steibelt was quite likely influenced by Beethoven's one-movement Choral Fantasy for piano, orchestra, and chorus, which had appeared 12 years earlier). Later piano concerti to feature choral parts include the rarely-heard Concerto No. 6 (1858) by Henri Hertz, and the Piano Concerto of Ferrucio Busoni (1904).

Well, you have to give Daniel Steibelt some credit for trying, don't you? By 1800, Beethoven's reputation had certainly preceded him. But, it's like the late Jim Croce used to sing: "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and for God's sake, you don't challenge the most famous composer and pianist in history to a cutting contest!" I'm pretty sure that's how that song goes.