Music for Emily

Synopsis

The great American poet Emily Dickinson was born on today’s date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death in 1886. The seemingly confined and rather mundane chronicle of her life stands in stark contrast to the breathtaking scope of her imagination, as expressed in the 1,147 poems her sister Lavinia discovered in a cherry-wood cabinet after her death.

Dickinson’s poetry has provided the inspiration for many American composers, and hundreds of them have been set to music, but her works have also inspired a number of purely instrumental pieces as well.

This music, for example, entitled “Three Pieces for String Quartet after Emily Dickinson,” was written in 1941 by the American composer Mary Howe. Each movement is coupled with a line from a Dickinson poem, but Howe was quick to explain her music was not a setting of them. “For some reason unknown to me,” explained Howe, “the last line in each poem called upon in my mind not a musical theme but the sort of music I wanted to write.”

Mary Howe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1882, and studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. She was by nature a conservative composer, but not rigidly so. As she herself put it, "my back foot is in the garden gate of the Romantics, but I feel no hesitation in thumbing the passing modern idiom for a hitch-hike to where I want to go." Mary Howe died in Washington, DC, in 1964.

The book "Musicians Wrestle Everywhere" by Carlton Lowenberg ( ISBN# 0914913204) provides a detailed inventory of 1,615 musical settings of Emily Dickinson's texts, by 276 composers, written between 1896 and 1991.

Music Played in Today's Program

Mary Howe (1882–1964) Three Pieces after Emily Dickinson Chamber Arts Society of the Catholic University of America CRI 785

On This Day

Births

• 1822 - Belgian composer and organist César Franck, in Liège;

• 1908 - French composer and oranist Olivier Messiaen, in Avignon;

• 1913 - American composer and conductor Morton Gould, in Richmond Hill, N.Y.;

Deaths

• 1965 - American composer Henry Cowell, age 68, in Shady, N.Y.;

Premieres

• 1825 - Boieldieu: opera "La dame blanche" (The White Lady), in Paris at the Opéra-Comique;

• 1854 - Berlioz: oratorio "L'Enfance du Christ," in Paris;

• 1886 - Chadwick: Symphony No. 2, by the Boston Symphony, with the composer conducting;

• 1895 - Rimsky-Korsakov: opera "Christmas Eve," in St. Petersburg, Napravnik conducting (Julian date: Nov. 28);

• 1896 - Mussorgsky: opera "Boris Godunov" (Rimsky-Korsakov version), as a concert performance at the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Julian date: Nov. 28);

• 1910 - Puccini: "La Fanciulla del West" (The Girl of the Golden West), in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera, with a cast including soprano Emmy Destinn and tenor Enrico Caruso, with Arturo Toscanini conducting;

• 1936 - David Diamond: "Psalm" for orchestra, in Rochester, N.Y.;

• 1937 - William Grant Still: Symphony in g, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting;

• 1950 - B.A. Zimmermann: Violin Concerto, in Baden-Baden, Germany;

• 1963 - Bernstein: Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"), at Frederic Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, by Israel Philharmonic and choirs conducted by the composer, with speaker Hannah Rovina and mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel as vocal soloist;