Young composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg’s followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, neo-Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?

For American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the first option was not appealing. “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to,” he said, “but I said ‘to hell with it.’”

According to Bolcom’s teacher and mentor, French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was “as gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in his compositions. Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow.

Bolcom’s chamber work, Five Fold Five, for example, premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. The piece starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.

William Bolcom (b. 1938): Five Fold Five; Detroit Chamber Winds; William Bolcom, piano
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On today's date in 1950, the orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California gave the premiere performance of this music by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The Sinfonietta La Jolla was Martinu's response to the Society’s call for a tuneful and approachable piece of new music for their chamber orchestra.

Martinu modeled his 20th century work on the 18th century symphonies of Haydn, a composer he very much admired. In fact, in 1890, when Martinu was born, his native Bohemia was still a part of the Austria-Hungarian empire in which Haydn had lived and worked a hundred years earlier.

Martinu’s music blends the modernism of 20th century composers like Stravinsky with the rich 19th century tradition of Czech national composers like Dvořák — but Martinu’s relations with his native land were anything but smooth. He was twice kicked out of the Prague Conservatory for his supposed lack of academic discipline, and instead established himself as a freelance composer in France and Switzerland. Then, just as his music began to receive some recognition and performances back in Prague, the Nazi invasion of World War II led to his works being banned.

In 1941, Martinu settled in the United States, where his music was very well received. In 1948, Martinu returned briefly to Prague, but found the new Communist government there as distasteful to him as the Nazis. Martinu’s Sinfonietta La Jolla was written shortly after he returned to the United States.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959): Sinfonietta “La Jolla”; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Christopher Hogwood, conductor; London 433 660

Each summer, music lovers congregate about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago for the annual Ravinia Festival, the oldest outdoor music festival in America, and since 1936 the summer home of the Chicago Symphony.

But on today’s date in 2013, Ravinia was the venue for world-premiere performances of several new art songs, including Twilight Butterfly, by American composer Augusta Read Thomas, a setting of a poetic text written by the composer herself.

“The poetic is always in my music”, she explained. “In writing Twilight Butterfly … I began with a mental picture … [of] someone, viewing a butterfly fluttering on a deep summer evening beneath the twilight moon. This imagery became so specific that writing my own lyrics was almost inescapable.”

Now even at their most poetic, composers must keep practical considerations in mind, as Thomas explained:

“Beyond the evocative, impressionist nature of the piece … I sought to provide a comfortable performance environment for the singer. My lyrics integrate words whose open vowel sounds suit the voice ... The piano gives the singer pitches at every entrance … [and] rubato indications allow the singer delicate rhythmic and interpretive flexibility.”

Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964): Twilight Butterfly; Yvonne Redman, soprano; Julie Gunn, piano; Nimbus 6306

Elia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront, a 1954 black and white classic starring Marlon Brando, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was also nominated for — but didn’t win — that year’s Oscar for best original score. It was Leonard Bernstein’s first film score, and his last. He didn’t enjoy the experience:

“I had become so involved in each detail of the score, that it seemed to me the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the least important part,” Bernstein recalled. “Sometimes the music would be turned off completely to allow a line to stand forth stark and bare, and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, planned as a composition with a beginning, middle and end, would be silenced seven bars before the end … And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting with a heavy heart the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort you. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. It’s good for the picture, you repeat numbly to yourself … it’s good for the picture.”

But Bernstein did fashion a concert suite from On the Waterfront and, not one to waste time, conducted the first performance with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood on today’s date in 1954, exactly two weeks after the film opened.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): On the Waterfront Suite; Israel Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 415 253

On today’s date, Wolfgang Mozart completed two of his most famous works: on August 10, 1787, the Serenade known as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and, on the same day 10 years later, the Jupiter Symphony — Mozart’s Symphony No. 41.

Despite the fame of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik — which translates as A Little Night Music — nothing is known for certain about the circumstances of its composition. Since a Serenade is a suite of orchestral movements normally written as background music for some rich patron’s patio party, we can assume Eine Kleine filled such a function some pleasant evening in Vienna. We can only hope the patrons appreciated what they got for their money.

Hardly any more is known about the composition of Mozart’s final symphony, the Jupiter, as no relevant letters or documents survive from this period of his life. The Jupiter nickname appears to have originated years later in London. In Germany it was just called “the symphony with the fugal finale.”

There’s a classic recording of Mozart’s symphony favorites featuring the Marlboro Festival Orchestra with Pablo Casals conducting. The Marlboro Festival is held each summer for seven weeks in a cluster of old farm buildings on a hilltop in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Talented young professional musicians from all over the country gather here, principally to study, secondly to perform, for audiences eager to hear both the emerging and established Marlboro musicians.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; EMI Classics 65690

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter); Marlboro Festival Orchestra; Pablo Casals, conductor; CBS/Sony 47294

In the 19th century, the German spa town of Baden-Baden was the place to be in the summer. Wealthy international tourists could bathe in artesian wells by day, and by night, gamble at the casino or attend performances at a splendid theater modeled on the Paris Opera.

That theater opened on today’s date in 1862 with the premiere of a new comic opera by French composer Hector Berlioz, based closely on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, titled Beatrice and Benedict after the witty pair of lovers in the play. The composer conducted.

“A great success … applauded from beginning to end. I was recalled to the stage I don’t know how many times,” Berlioz wrote the next day. Despite the success, he confessed, “My infernal neuralgia was so bad that I mounted the podium … without feeling the slightest emotion. This bizarre indifference meant I conducted better than usual!”

Despite making light of his increasing illness, possibly Crohn’s Disease, this opera proved to be his last work, and Berlioz had only a few more years to live. His biographer David Cairns wrote: “Listening to the score’s exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death.”

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Beatrice and Benedict Overture; Boston Symphony; Charles Munch, conductor; RCA Victor Gold Seal 61400

French composer and concert pianist Cecile Chaminade was born in Paris on this date in 1857. She wrote symphonic works and even operas, but it was her piano pieces and songs that became enormously popular with amateur musicians around the turn of the century, especially in America.

In the decade before World War I, over a hundred Chaminade Clubs sprouted up in America, where her music was performed by and for her fans. So imagine the excitement when it was announced that Madame Chaminade would be giving a concert tour of Eastern and Midwest states in 1908. Her American tour opened and closed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and over a two-month period she performed in Philadelphia, Louisville, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston and Washington, D.C.

In 1908, the majority of amateur musicians in America were women, but the majority of music critics were men — the latter gave Chaminade’s concerts mixed reviews at best, and downright sexist put-downs at worst. For her part, she was used to that sort of reception in Europe — and the limited role society allowed women artists in her day.

But in a Washington Post interview published during her American tour, she remained optimistic: “There is no sex in art,” she said. “Genius is an independent quality. The woman of the future, with her broader outlook, her greater opportunities, will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description.”

Cecile Chaminade (1857-1944): L’Ondine and Scherzo in C; (Peter Jacobs, piano; Hyperion 66584

On today’s date in 1829, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn and his friend, Karl Klingemann, were on the North Sea bound for Glasgow.

Klingemann was not impressed with Scotland and wrote home that the rough North Sea passage had made most of the passengers sick — with one remarkable exception. “An 82-year old woman sat calmly by the smoke stack, warming herself in the cold wind. She was determined to see Staffa before she died. Staffa, with its silly basalt columns and caves, is in all the picture books. So, we were put into boats and clambered past the hissing sea on stumps of columns up to the odiously celebrated Fingal’s Cave. I must say, never did such green and roaring waves pound in a stranger cave. The many pillars make the inside resemble a monstrous organ. Black, resounding and utterly without any purpose at all…” he said.

Well, perhaps not utterly without purpose, since Felix Mendelssohn sent a letter home to his family on August 7 which included a scrap of musical notation. “To give you an idea of how strange I felt, this music occurred to me,” wrote Mendelssohn. It was the opening theme of what would become his concert overture, The Hebrides, or Fingal’s Cave.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave); Overture BBC Symphony; Sir Colin Davis, conductor; Philips 426 978