Composers Corner

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COMPOSERS CORNER JOHN WILLIAMS The most popular film composer of the modern era, John Williams created music for some of the most successful motion pictures in Hollywood history. In a career that spans five decades, John Williams has become one of America’s most accomplished and successful composers for film and for the concert stage. Born in New York City on February 8, 1932, John Williams was the son of a musician and was exposed to music at a young age. He began studying piano as a child, and began writing and orchestrating music in his teens. In 1948 Wlliams moved to Los Angeles with his family, where he studied composition privately and also attended the University of California. In 1951, he was drafted into the U.S. Air Force, and during his service, he arranged band music and began conducting. Upon his return, Williams studied piano at the Julliard School of Music and also worked as a jazz pianist and studio musician before starting to compose music for television and film. His career took off in the 1970’s, since then, he has scored more than 100 films, including Jaws (1975), the Start Wars films, ET (1982), Schilndler’s List (1993) and Harry Potter (2004). John Williams’ compositions have continued to earn him many honours and awards, including more than 45 Academy Award nominations for his work. HECTOR BERLIOZ Hector Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastiue and Grande messe des morts (Requiem). Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Orchestration. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works, and conducted several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He also composed around 50 songs. His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Fanz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others. In 1827 the composer Hector Berlioz went to see production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Paris. It was a life-changing experience and he was bowled over by the Bard’s drama and became completely besotted with the Irish actress playing Ophelia, Harriet Smithson. Berlioz went on to write various works inspired by Shakespeare, Roméo et Juliette and Béatrice et Bénédict, and his infatuation with Smithson inspired his greatest work, Symphonie fantastique. ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK Antonín Leopold Dvořák born 8 september 1841, and was widely regarded as the most distinguished of Czech composers of Romantic music and one of the first to achieve worldwide recognition. Following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predecessor Bedřich Smetana, Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvorak’s love of iconic Czech poetry, led him, in his later career, to write a musical setting to Karel Jaromir Erben’s poem Polednice, from the Kytice collection. The Noon Witch Op. 108, was written in 1896, and is the second of his four symphonic poems. .

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Gustav Mahler : Conducting Multiculturalism
GUSTAV MAHLER : CONDUCTING MULTICULTURALISM Victoria Hallinan 1 Musicologists and historians have generally paid much more attention to Gustav Mahler’s famous career as a composer than to his work as a conductor. His choices in concert repertoire and style, however, reveal much about his personal experiences in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his interactions with cont- emporary cultural and political upheavals. This project examines Mahler’s conducting career in the multicultural climate of late nineteenth-century Vienna and New York. It investigates the degree to which these contexts influenced the conductor’s repertoire and questions whether Mahler can be viewed as an early proponent of multiculturalism. There is a wealth of scholarship on Gustav Mahler’s diverse compositional activity, but his conducting repertoire and the multicultural contexts that influenced it, has not received the same critical attention. 2 In this paper, I examine Mahler’s connection to the crumbling, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century depiction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as united and question whether he can be regarded as an exemplar of early multiculturalism. I trace Mahler’s career through Budapest, Vienna and New York, explore the degree to which his repertoire choices reflected the established opera canon of his time, or reflected contemporary cultural and political trends, and address uncertainties about Mahler’s relationship to the various multicultural contexts in which he lived and worked. Ultimately, I argue that Mahler’s varied experiences cannot be separated from his decisions regarding what kinds of music he believed his audiences would want to hear, as well as what kinds of music he felt were relevant or important to share.
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