THE DICTIONARY OF COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC
A LISTENER'S COMPANION
by
ERIC GILDER
Hans
Memling
(1433 - 1494) Les Anges Musiciens Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts,
Anvers
This work
is reproduced here by the very kind
permission of Eric Gilder's daughter,
Paula Day and the copyright holder,
Tamara Gilder, his grand-daughter.
It was published in
1982
This work may not be copied or
reproduced in any form except with the prior permission of Paula
Day and Tamara Gilder.
PLEASE NOTE: We have attempted to put this on the web as quickly
as possible. The entires do vary in the amount of detail. If you
would like to add additional detail, such as a complete worklist,
to an entry please send it to Len Mullenger len@musicweb-international.com
Profile
Preface
Acknowledgements
Part 1
Abbreviations
A-Z Composer Index
CHRONOLOGY
1300
1600
1700-1750 1750-1800
1800-1825 1825-1850
1850-1875 1875-1900
1900-1910 1910-1920
1920-1930 1930-1940
1940-1950 1950-1960
1960-1970 1970-1980
1980-1983
ERIC GILDER - A Brief Profile
b. 25 December 1911
d. 1 June 2000
Eric Gilder was a composer, teacher, conductor,
pianist and musicologist. He trained at London's Royal College
of Music studying under John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams,
Constant Lambert and Sir Malcolm Sargent. A prolific composer,
Gilder wrote for the orchestra, voices, the theatre and television.
He served as a choral conductor and appeared at London's Royal
Festival Hall both as a conductor and as a pianist. He began his
career as a teacher at a London music college that some years
later was renamed as the Eric Gilder School of Music. He taught
and lectured on a variety of music subjects.
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PREFACE
To school children, history means learning the
dates of kings. The real historian, however, may know the dates
engraved on historic milestones, but is unlikely to remember the
dates of the thousands of little incidents occurring during his
journey through time; he is more interested in the scenery
Having spent a large part of my life teaching musical
appreciation and history, I know that 1685 was a good year for
composers, bringing forth Bach, Handel and the younger Scarlatti;
but if you asked me when Liadov wrote Kukalki I really could not
tell you off-hand. In order to be equipped for all the questions
thrown at me by students I needed to go to the lecture room carrying
a dozen bulky volumes. (Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians
has lengthened my left arm considerably.) What I required was
certain factual ungarnished information contained snugly between
the covers of one book. I combed the libraries for such a book,
but could not find one; so I wrote my own, and the present volume
is the result. Research of a different nature has shown that this
could be of lasting value as a permanent reference work, not only
to the academic student, but also to the vast numbers of interested
laymen - the music-lovers, concert-goers, record collectors, and
listeners.
The original intention has become Part One of this
book - an alphabetical list of composers with their music arranged
chronologically. To have called it 'A Complete List of Everything
Ever Composed by Anybody' would have been an absurd boast; call
it rather 'A List of Everything That Mattered Composed by Anyone
Who Mattered'. All composers must have their jottings, tentative
pieces, trifling things that have been discarded as unworthy,
mere exercises. Some of these have been preserved, and may be
seen in museums in the composer's own handwriting; but their contribution
to the world's musical treasury is too inconsiderable to make
them worthy of special mention. There are some works that composers
themselves would not wish to be immortalised. Dukas, for example,
who was his own severest critic, burned all his unpublished compositions
when in his early forties and, although still composing, published
no more.
Omissions and exceptions are therefore inevitable.
One of my sourcebooks lists 6,000 Contemporary American Composers!
My apologies for not including all of them, but I had to bear
in mind the intended size of this book. Of the countless people
who have written music, the 426 represented here are those whose
works may be heard today in the concert hall, the opera or ballet
house and the church. Many of these composers have also written
incidental music and music for the theatre which is included here;
but a complete list of works for the theatre could fill a large
book by itself and, in general, composers who have written for
that medium alone have been omitted. The lists of works are reasonably
comprehensive, but the student requiring more definitive lists
is recommended to the great number of much bulkier volumes.
One can suppose that the history of music truly
began when our cave-dwelling mothers chose certain words in their
limited language and intoned them, while our fathers were banging
on hollow tree trunks. The development of the art, bearing in
mind the frailty of the human voice and the poverty of ancient
instruments, was slow and seemingly casual. My contention is that
the flowering of music, modern music as we know it today, has
occurred in fact only in the last 60(!) years. It is therefore
a very young art, which explains why during our own lifetimes
there have been such impressive steps forward.
Using this as a milestone, the earliest composer
mentioned in this book is Guillaume de Machaut, born around 1300,
and the lists go up to 1984. In later editions this could be updated.
For each composer there is a short biography, then a chronological
list of works. Beside each date is the composer's age, for the
sake of the student who is not also a profound mathematician.
As far as possible the dates given are those when the work was
first conceived - there was sometimes a long gestation period
before the work was finally born into the world.
It was during the compiling of Part One that the
ideas for Parts Two and Three emerged, and for me these became
the most fascinating sections in some respects.
Part Two is a chronological survey, enabling the
reader to turn to any year from 1300 to 1984 and see exactly what
music was written, which composers were born and which died. Such
a historical overview can perhaps best be appreciated if one sticks
a pin somewhere in the calendar. Take the year 1847. That was
the year Mendelssohn died. Spontini who had been so prolific writing
operas in the classical mould, was still alive; Balakirev, Brahms,
Bizet, Dvorak, Fauré, Grieg, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Saint-Saëns, Sullivan and Tchaikovsky were children; Donizetti,
whose operas were well rooted in tradition, still had a year to
live; and in that year Verdi wrote Macbeth and Wagner was already
working on Lohengrin, to be produced four years later. It was
a good year for opera, contributions coming from Balfe, Dargomizhsky,
Flotow and Schumann. Berwald, Meyerbeer and Rossini were all writing
with middle-aged maturity, while the fourteen-year old Borodin
produced his Flute Concerto; Glinka, called the father of Russian
music, wrote Greeting to the Fatherland, Berlioz was in his forties,
Liszt his thirties, and Chopin was an ailing man of thirty-seven
with only two years to live. Offenbach and Franck were both in
their twenties and already established as powers in the musical
world. Lalo, the elegant Frenchman of Spanish descent, was already
writing music of Spanish flavour which was to influence Falla,
Debussy and Ravel. Smetana was twenty-three and was later to establish
the great nationalist school of Czech music and to conduct the
Czech Opera in which Dvorak played the viola.
When Spontini was born, Boyce was still alive;
when Boyce was born. Corelli was still alive; and Corelli was
born a mere ten years after Monteverdi died. In this year of 1847
Spontini still had four more years to live; by the time he died,
d'Indy was born, and he lived until 1931, by which time Boulez
was very much alive. So, with the names of five men - Corelli,
Boyce, Spontini, d'Indy and Boulez - who could just have met each
other, we span the whole of musical composition from the glees,
madrigals and motets to the music of today, a matter of something
over 300 years.
Part Three is a timeline, enabling one to see at
a glance which composers were contemporaries, when each was born
and died. It is a visual aid to gaining a clear perspective of
musical history. Research for this book brought up copious anomalies.
Standard books on the subject have often been at variance with
each other in the matter of dates. This is something quite understandable.
Certain modern composers, for example, were only accepted by publishers
or performing or copyright organisations quite late in their composing
careers, and a large collection of early works bears only the
date of such acceptance. Not all manuscripts bear a date in the
composer's handwriting. I am a very minor composer myself, and
if I were asked the date of a certain composition I might easily
say, 'Oh, about twenty years ago,' unable to be any more accurate.
With the more ancient composers there was often little or no documentation
at all, and in some cases we do not even know exactly when they
were born. Many composers did not give their works opus numbers,
and some who did appeared to be unable to count! Such catalogues
as Köchel's of Mozart must be accepted as definitive; but
for the rest, I have been ruled by the greatest consensus of opinion.
There has been a great variety of spellings of the names and works
of Russian composers. The only accurate way to spell them, of
course, is in the original Russian; any other spelling must be
purely phonetic. We must almost be grateful that there are no
Chinese or Japanese in our lists! This book incorporates spellings
that are generally accepted in the Western world. In a similar
way, the titles of works given are the titles by which they are
best known, be they translated or in the original language. thus,
L'Après-midi d'un faune and Night on the Bare Mountain.
Special mention must be made of the list of works
by Johann Sebastian Bach, which can generally only be dated according
to the years he spent in various appointments; i.e. during the
nine years between 1708 and 1717 while at Weimar, as court organist,
chamber musician and finally Kapellmeister, he composed most of
his great organ works. Then at Cothen, between 1717 and 1722 as
Kapellmeister and conductor of the court orchestra, he wrote the
Brandenburg Concerti, the suites for orchestra, the violin concerti
and much chamber music. From 1722 until his death in 1750 he was
Cantor of the Leipzig Thomasschule, and there he composed approximately
265 church cantatas as well as compositions for one of the Leipzig
musical societies of which he was conductor.
Eric Gilder
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In making acknowledgements, I must mention first
June G. Coombs, without whose dedicated research on my behalf
and whose typing, retyping, editing and proof-reading this book
might never have appeared at all. I must thank a large number
of modern composers who have written to me personally with lists
of their works - I have one from Shostakovich in fractured French
- and the many publishers, notably Messrs Boosey and Novello,
who have been so co-operative in helping me fill the gaps. My
sincere thanks, too, to Sir Adrian Boult, Sir David Willcocks
and Sir Anthony Lewis, among many others, for their encouragement.
Among the many source-books were such standard
works as Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Oxford
Histories, Scholes's Oxford Companion to Music, the International
Cyclopaedia of Music and Musicians, Osborne's Dictionary of Composers
and Anderson's Contemporary American Composers. The British Performing
Right Society and the American ASCAP contributed much information
on the contemporary scene; for the rest, the reference books in
French, German and Italian, and the biographies of composers,
have been too numerous for me to be able to remember all of them.
To all these, who furnished me with such great
excitement over years of research, I give my grateful thanks.
Eric Gilder
___________
PART ONE
In this alphabetical listing of composers, their
music is arranged in chronological order. The dates, next to which
appear the composers' ages, are those when the music is first
mentioned. It is not always possible to ascertain whether these
dates refer to the commencement or to the completion of a piece
of music. Where possible, both dates are given, as Stravinsky:
Les Noces (1917-1923). In some cases, the first information available
is a mention of a first performance, in which case the name of
the work is prefaced with the letters f.p.; in others, the first
information may refer to the date of publication, when the letter
p is used. For some works, the letter c for circa prefaces the
nearest approximation. Posthumous in the age column indicates
that the work was published, or first performed, after the composer's
death. When dates of some of a composer's music cannot be traced,
those works are listed at the end of the entry and undated.
Collections of short works are sometimes not listed
individually. Consider the five hundred chamber cantatas of Alessandro
Scarlatti, or the two hundred songs of Charles Ives: to list all
such music would require many volumes. Instead, in such cases,
works are referred to as so many 'songs', 'piano pieces', 'cantatas',
etc.
Key signatures are generally given in full, such
as Rhapsody in C# minor. However, if a number of works of the
same kind were written in any one year, keys are abbreviated:
for example, Four string quartets in Dm: C: A: F#m, indicating
works in D minor, C major, A major and F# minor.
In the section for Bach, a number of works bear
the suffix (& continuo). This indicates that the continuo
is not generally used in modern performance.
A few composers, although generally considered
as being of a particular nationality, were born in another country.
In these instances both countries are listed: for example, USA
(b Germany). In cases where the country of a composer's birth
no longer exists, the modern equivalent is also included: Bohemia
(Czechoslovakia).
As explained in the preface, works are given the
names by which they are best known to English-speaking people.
________
ABBREVIATIONS
fp First performance
p Date of publication
SATB Soprano, alto, tenor and bass
SPNM Society for the Promotion of New Music
SSA Soprano, soprano and alto
vv Voices
A-Z COMPOSER INDEX