Josiah Flagg, Music Man?

Synopsis

If you wanted to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name Josiah Flagg.

Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

He was a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes, published in 1764. Although the music was all by a British composer, it was — symbolically — the first to be printed on American-made paper.

Acting as an impresario, Flagg also organized concerts in Boston for about a decade and gave some of the first Boston performances of music by George Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which proved to be his last. He included excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, but closed with his band’s rendition of the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of the Boston patriots.

Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early music history.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Greenwood The Hessian Camp First Michigan Colonial Fife and Drum Corps Private release

G.F. Handel (1685 – 1757) Water Music English Concert; Trevor Pinnock, cond. DG 439 147

On This Day

Births

• 1737 - American bandmaster and music publisher Josiah Flagg, in Woburn, Massachusetts. He organized the first militia band in Boston, published music engraved by Paul Revere, and in 1773 organized a “Grand Concert” at Boston’s Faneuil Hall involving 50 players, one of the first public concerts in America which presented European music.

• 1779 - Irish singer, poet and composer Thomas Moore, in Dublin

• 1841 - Italian composer, conductor and pianist Giovanni Sgambati, in Rome

• 1883 - English composer Sir George Dyson, in Halifax (Yorkshire)

• 1913 - Soviet composer Tikhon Khrennikov, in Elets (Gregorian date: June 10)

• 1923 - Hungarian composer György Ligeti, in Dicsöszentmartin (now Tirnaveni), Transylvania

Deaths

• 1787 - Leopold Mozart, composer, and Wolfgang’s father, 67, in Salzburg

• 1805 - Italian composer Luigi Boccherini, 62, in Madrid

• 1836 - Czech composer Anton Reicha, 66, in Paris

Premieres

• 1608 - Monteverdi: opera Ariana, for a ducal wedding in Mantua. This opera now lost.

• 1904 - Puccini: Madama Butterfly (successful revised version), in Brescia. The opera’s original version, premiered on Feb. 17 at La Scala in Milan, was hissed.

• 1922 - Zemlinsky: opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), at the Cologne Opera

• 1938 - Hindemith: opera Mathis der Mahler, in Zurich at the Stadttheater, conducted by Robert Denzler

• 1966 - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 11, in Leningrad, by the Beethoven Quartet

• 1993 - Stockhausen: opera Dienstag aus Licht (Tuesday from Light) at the Leipzig Opera

• 1993 - Michael Torke: Proverbs for female voice and ensemble, at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, by the Present Music ensemble, conducted by the composer