1.
Lionel Monckton
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Lionel John Alexander Monckton was an English writer and composer of musical theatre. He became Britains most popular composer of Edwardian musical comedy in the years of the 20th century. Monckton was born in London, the eldest son of the Town Clerk of London, Sir John Braddick Monckton, and Lady Monckton, the former Maria Louisa Long and his sister was Mrs Augusta Moore, who wrote popular novels as Martin J. Pritchard. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Oriel College at Oxford University, there he acted in college theatrical productions and composed music for productions of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, of which he was a founder, and the Phil-Thespian Club. His first theatre work was Mummies and Marriage, an operetta produced by amateurs in 1888. At the age of 29, in 1891, he managed to place the song What will you have to Drink. with lyrics by Basil Hood. After this, his songs were included in several other London shows. s Beautiful Bountiful Bertie and he then added popular tunes to Carylls scores for The Circus Girl in 1896 and A Runaway Girl in 1898. The Girl musicals were followed by a number of Boy musicals, again with hit songs by Monckton, including The Messenger Boy in 1900, Moncktons songs continued to be performed long after the shows closed – some of them remaining popular into the 1960s. In 1902, he married Gertie Millar, one of the most successful actresses of the period and she starred in many of Moncktons shows, and he wrote some of his most popular songs for her, although their marriage was not a happy one for many years. She later sought a divorce from Monckton, which he refused, at the same time, Monckton also contributed songs for the musicals playing at Edwardess Dalys Theatre, which tended more towards romantic comedies, than the light musicals presented at the Gaiety. For Dalys Theatre, he collaborated with Sidney Jones, supplying numbers for hits such as The Geisha in 1896, A Greek Slave in 1898. Moncktons music was arranged and orchestrated by theatre conductor Carl Kiefert. Finally, in 1902, when Jones left Dalys, Edwardes gave Monckton the opportunity to compose his first complete score, A Country Girl and he also continued to contribute successful songs to other musicals, including The Orchid in 1903 at the Gaiety. The success of A Country Girl led to another musical with Monckton as principal composer and Rubens as contributor, Moncktons most successful songs in this score included The Island of Gay Ceylon and Pearl of Sweet Ceylon. Although the piece was successful, French operettas then became the fashion at Dalys Theatre, further collaborations with Caryll at the Gaiety included The Spring Chicken in 1905, The New Aladdin, in 1906 and The Girls of Gottenberg in 1907. These songs were among the most widely played and sung numbers of the light musical theatre. A last success at the Gaiety was Monckton and Carylls Our Miss Gibbs in 1909, after that, Monckton had his greatest success, in collaboration with Howard Talbot and the lyricist Arthur Wimperis, with The Arcadians, in 1909. The Arcadians, produced by Robert Courtneidge, was possibly Moncktons best score and is considered the musical of the Edwardian period
2.
Victor Herbert
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Victor August Herbert was an Irish-born, German-raised American composer, cellist and conductor. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor and he was also prominent among the tin pan alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. In the early 1880s, Herbert began a career as a cellist in Vienna, Austria, Herbert and his opera singer wife, Therese Förster, moved to the U. S. in 1886 when both were engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. In the U. S. Herbert continued his career, while also teaching at the National Conservatory of Music. His most notable compositions were his Cello Concerto No.2 in E minor, Op.30, which entered the standard repertoire. He led the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1898 to 1904 and then founded the Victor Herbert Orchestra, Herbert began to compose operettas in 1894, producing several successes, including The Serenade and The Fortune Teller. Some of the operettas that he wrote after the turn of the 20th century were more successful, Babes in Toyland. Modiste, The Red Mill, Naughty Marietta, Sweethearts and Eileen, after World War I, with the change of popular musical tastes, Herbert began to compose musicals and contributed music to other composers shows. While some of these were well-received, he never achieved the level of success that he had enjoyed with his most popular operettas. Herbert was born in Dublin, Ireland to Protestants Edward Herbert and his grandfather was the Irish novelist, playwright, poet and composer Samuel Lover. The Lovers welcomed a steady flow of musicians, writers and artists to their home, Herbert joined his mother in Stuttgart, Germany in 1867, a year after she had married a German physician, Carl Schmidt of Langenargen. In Stuttgart he received a liberal education at the Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium. Herbert initially planned to pursue a career as a medical doctor, although his stepfather was related by blood to the German royal family, his financial situation was not good by the time Herbert was a teenager. Medical education in Germany was expensive, and so Herbert focused instead on music and he initially studied the piano, flute and piccolo but ultimately settled on the cello, beginning studies on that instrument with Bernhard Cossmann from age 15 to age 18. He then attended the Stuttgart Conservatory, after studying cello, music theory and composition under Max Seifritz, Herbert graduated with a diploma in 1879. Even before studying with Cossmann, Herbert was engaged professionally as a player in concerts in Stuttgart and his first orchestra position was as a flute and piccolo player, but he soon turned solely to the cello. By the time he was 19, Herbert had received engagements as a soloist with several major German orchestras. He played in the orchestra of the wealthy Russian Baron Paul von Derwies for a few years and, Herbert joined the court orchestra in Stuttgart in 1881, where he remained for the next five years
3.
George M. Cohan
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George Michael Cohan, known professionally as George M. Cohan, was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and producer. Cohan began his career as a child, performing with his parents, beginning with Little Johnny Jones in 1904, he wrote, composed, produced, and appeared in more than three dozen Broadway musicals. Cohan published more than 300 songs during his lifetime, including the standards Over There, Give My Regards to Broadway, The Yankee Doodle Boy, as a composer, he was one of the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. He displayed remarkable theatrical longevity, appearing in films until the 1930s, known in the decade before World War I as the man who owned Broadway, he is considered the father of American musical comedy. His life and music were depicted in the Academy Award-winning film Yankee Doodle Dandy, a statue of Cohan in Times Square in New York City commemorates his contributions to American musical theatre. Cohan was born in 1878 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate from St. Josephs Roman Catholic Church indicated that he was born on July 3, but Cohan and his family always insisted that George had been born on the Fourth of July. Georges parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance, Cohan started as a child performer at age 8, first on the violin and then as a dancer. He was the member of the family vaudeville act called The Four Cohans. In 1890, he toured as the star of a show called Pecks Bad Boy and then joined the family act and he and his sister made their Broadway debut in 1893 in a sketch called The Lively Bootblack. Temperamental in his years, Cohan later learned to control his frustrations. During these years, Cohan originated his famous speech, My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you. The family generally gave a performance at the hall there each summer. Cohans memories of those happy summers inspired his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, as Cohan matured through his teens, he used the quiet summers there to write. When he returned to the town in the cast of Ah, in 1934, he told a reporter, Ive knocked around everywhere, but theres no place like North Brookfield. Cohan began writing original skits and songs for the act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows while in his teens. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a publisher in 1893. In 1901 he wrote, directed and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governors Son and his first big Broadway hit in 1904 was the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes Give My Regards to Broadway and The Yankee Doodle Boy
4.
Leslie Stuart
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Leslie Stuart was an English composer of Edwardian musical comedy, best known for the hit show Florodora and many popular songs. He began in Manchester as a church organist, for 14 years, in the 1880s, he began to promote and conduct orchestral and vocal concerts of popular and theatre music as Mr. T. A. Barretts Concerts. Stuart later campaigned against the interpolation of new songs into musical theatre scores, in 1895, Stuart began to write songs for George Edwardess London shows at the Gaiety Theatre and Dalys Theatre. His first full musical score was Florodora in 1899. The show became an hit, and its song Tell me, pretty maiden. Other musical comedy successes followed, including The School Girl, The Belle of Mayfair, of his later shows, only Peggy made much of an impact. By 1911, Stuarts gambling debts sent him into bankruptcy, unable to adapt to changing musical tastes, he was no longer in demand as a composer, although he had some success as a piano sketch artist in variety theatre. Stuart was born in Southport, on the Lancashire coast and his real name was Thomas Augustine Barrett, he was the younger son of Thomas Barrett, a cabinet-maker, and his wife, Mary Ann Burke, née Lester, who were both from western Ireland. He grew up in Liverpool, where he attended St Francis Xaviers College and his family moved to Manchester in the late 1870s. Stuart began his career aged 15 as organist at Salford Cathedral and he held the post for seven years, and then moved to be organist at the Church of the Holy Name, Manchester, where he remained for another seven years. To augment his salary he composed music and taught. Stuart also promoted and conducted orchestral and vocal concerts, in the 1880s and 1890s he presented Mr T. A. Barretts Concerts at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, and later at the larger St Jamess Hall. These concerts featured popular music and selections from comic operas by such composers as Sullivan and Cellier. Singers included Zelie de Lussan, Marie Roze, Ben Davies, David Ffrangcon-Davies, Durward Lely, instrumental soloists included Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Eugène Ysaÿe. Thomas Barrett had been property master at the Amphitheatre, Liverpool, Stuarts elder brother, Stephen, became a music-hall performer, appearing under the stage name Lester Barrett. Gradually the music Stuart composed for local shows, and his popular ballads and he composed music hall songs as T. A. Barrett and under the pseudonyms Leslie Thomas, Lester Barrett and, most notably, Leslie Stuart. He wrote many songs for the blackface performer Eugene Stratton, including perhaps his best-remembered music hall song, Lily of Laguna. He also wrote the patriotic ballad Soldiers of the King, Stuarts earliest theatrical composing and writing was also for the Manchester theatre
5.
Rudyard Kipling
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories and his poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Mans Burden, and If—. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, Henry James said, Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on occasions for a knighthood. Kiplings subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age, George Orwell called him a prophet of British imperialism. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote, is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary, but as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and a recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts. Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865, in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling, Alice was a vivacious woman about whom Lord Dufferin would say, Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room. Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal, John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 and they had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born they referenced it when naming him. Alices sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter, Kiplings most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s. Kiplings birth home on the campus of the J J School of Art in Bombay for many years was used as the Deans residence. Although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage may have torn down decades ago. Some historians and conservationists are also of the view that the bungalow merely marks a site close to the home of his birth, as the bungalow was built in 1882, Kipling seems to have also said so to the dean when he visited J J School in the 1930s. Kipling was to write of Bombay, According to Bernice M. Murphy, Kipling’s parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians and so too would their son, complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction. So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the idiom that one thought. Kiplings days of light and darkness in Bombay ended when he was five years old
6.
Scott Joplin
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Scott Joplin was an African American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime Writers. During his brief career, he wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, One of his first, and most popular pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became ragtimes first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. Joplin was born into a family of railway laborers in Northeast Texas. Joplin grew up in Texarkana, where he formed a vocal quartet, during the late 1880s he left his job as a laborer with the railroad, and travelled around the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the Worlds Fair of 1893, which played a part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and earned a living as a teacher, there he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden. Joplin began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 brought him fame and this piece had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life, though Joplin did not reach this level of success again, in 1901 Joplin moved to St. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish music, and regularly performed in the St. Louis community. The score to his first opera A Guest of Honor was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings because of a non-payment of bills and he continued to compose and publish music, and in 1907 moved to New York City to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the form that made him famous. His second opera, Treemonisha, was not received well at its partially staged performance in 1915, in 1916 Joplin descended into dementia as a result of syphilis. He was admitted to an institution in January 1917. His music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of an album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award–winning 1973 movie The Sting that featured several of his compositions including The Entertainer, the opera Treemonisha was finally produced in full to wide acclaim in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize, according to author Edward A. Berlin, One tenacious myth tells us that Joplin was born in Texarkana, Texas, on November 24,1868. The location is easily dispensed with, Texarkana was not established until 1873, consequently, it appears possible that Joplin, born 12 years later, could have been born in Texarkana. Despite evidence to such a conclusion, some insist that Joplin was born in Linden, Texas
7.
John Philip Sousa
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John Philip Sousa was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, known primarily for American military and patriotic marches. Because of his mastery of composition, he is known as The March King. Among his best-known marches are The Stars and Stripes Forever, Semper Fidelis, The Liberty Bell, The Thunderer, Sousa began his career playing violin and studying music theory and composition under John Esputa and George Felix Benkert. His father enlisted him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice in 1868, after departing the band in 1875, Sousa learned to conduct. From 1880 until his death, he focused exclusively on conducting and he eventually rejoined the Marine Band and served there for 12 years as director. On leaving the Marine Band, Sousa organized his own band and he toured Europe and Australia and developed the sousaphone, a large brass instrument similar to the helicon and tuba. At the outbreak of World War I, Sousa was commissioned as a lieutenant commander, following his tenure, he returned to conduct the Sousa Band until his death in 1932. In the 1920s he was promoted to lieutenant commander in the naval reserve, Sousa started his music education by playing the violin as a pupil of John Esputa and George Felix Benkert for harmony and musical composition at the age of six. He was found to have absolute pitch, during his childhood, Sousa studied voice, violin, piano, flute, cornet, baritone horn, trombone, and alto horn. When Sousa was 13, his father, a trombonist in the Marine Band, several years long after serving his apprenticeship, Sousa joined a theatrical orchestra where he learned to conduct. He returned to the U. S. Marine Band as its head in 1880, Sousa led The Presidents Own band under five presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to Benjamin Harrison. Sousas band played at two Inaugural Balls, those of James A. Garfield in 1881, and Benjamin Harrison in 1889 and he wanted a tuba that could sound upward and over the band whether its player was seated or marching. The sousaphone was re-created in 1898 by C. G. Conn and he organized The Sousa Band the year he left the Marine Band. The Sousa Band toured from 1892 to 1931, performing at 15,623 concerts both in America and around the world, including at the World Exposition in Paris, France and at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In Paris, the Sousa Band marched through the streets to the Arc de Triomphe – one of only eight parades the band marched in over its forty years, on December 30,1879, Sousa married Jane van Middlesworth Bellis. They had three children, John Philip, Jr. Jane Priscilla, and Helen, All were buried in the John Philip Sousa plot in the Congressional Cemetery. Wife Jane, daughters Jane Priscilla and Helen Abert joined the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1907 and their ancestor was Adam Bellis, who served under several different commands for the New Jersey troops in the American Revolutionary War. Late in his life, Sousa lived in Sands Point, New York, Sousa died of heart failure at the age of 77 on March 6,1932, in his room at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania
8.
Ethelbert Nevin
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Ethelbert Woodbridge Nevin was an American pianist and composer. Nevin was born on November 25,1862, at Vineacre, on the banks of the Ohio River, in Edgeworth, Nevins mother, Elizabeth Duncan Oliphant, was a pianist. The first grand piano ever taken across the Allegheny Mountains was carted over for Nevins mother. Other members of the Nevin family showed musical inclinations as well, Nevins younger brother, Arthur, also achieved renown as a composer, as did his cousins George. From a young age, Nevin was musically inclined and he began playing the piano by the age of four, although he needed cushions piled on the pedals to enable him to reach them. Nevins father provided for his son both vocal and instrumental instruction and he also took him abroad for two years of travel and music study in Dresden under Von Böhme. In 1878, he attended Western University, now known as the University of Pittsburgh, later he studied the piano for two years at Boston, under Benjamin Johnson Lang, and composition under Stephen A. Emery. After two years studying in Boston, in 1882 Nevin moved back to Pittsburgh, where he gave lessons, there he spent the years 1884,1885, and 1886, placing himself in the hands of Karl Klindworth. Of him Nevin says, To Herr Klindworth I owe everything that has come to me in my musical life and he was a devoted teacher, and his patience was tireless. His endeavor was not only to develop the student from a musical standpoint, to do this, he tried to teach one to appreciate and to feel the influence of such great minds of literature as Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. In 1885, Hans von Bülow incorporated the best four pupils of his friend, Klindworth, into an artist class, which he drilled personally. Nevin was one of the four, and appeared at the unique public Zuhören of that year, devoted exclusively to the works of Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt. Among the forty or fifty studious listeners at recitals, Frau Cosima Wagner, the violinist Joseph Joachim. Nevin returned to America in 1887, and took up his residence in Boston, in 1892 he went to Paris, where he taught singing, and he coached many American and French artists for the operatic stage. In 1893 he moved on to Berlin, where he worked so hard at composition that his health collapsed, the early months of 1895 he spent in concert tours through this country. As Klindworth said of him, he has a touch that brings tears, seeking solitude and the right atmosphere for composition, he went to live in Florence, where he composed his suite May in Tuscany. After a year in Venice Nevin made Paris his home for a year, then returned to America and his best-remembered compositions are the piano piece Narcissus from Water Scenes and the songs The Rosary and Mighty Lak a Rose. Nevin was married to Anne Paul Nevin with whom he had two children, despite being a prominent composer, Nevin had recurring debt towards the end of his life
9.
1901 in music
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This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1901. April 18 - Contralto Mariska Horvath marries politician J. Frank Aldrich, enrique Granados founds the Academia Granados in Spain. Geraldine Farrar makes her operatic debut, percy Grainger makes his recital debut. Thirteen-year-old Agustín Barrios begins attending university in Asunción on a music scholarship, aint That A Shame w. John Queen m. Walter Wilson All That Glitters Is Not Gold w. George A. Norton m. James W. Casey Any Old Place I Can Hang My Hat Is Home Sweet Home To Me w. William Jerome m, jean Schwartz At The Pan-I-Marry-Can w. Harry Dillon m. John Dillon Baby Mine w. Raymond A. Browne m, John N. Klohr Blaze Away m. Coon. by Leo Friedman & Gene Jefferson The Country Girl w. Stanislaus Stange m. Julian Edwards Davy Jones Locker w. m. H. W. Petrie Dont Put Me Off At Buffalo Any More w. William Jerome m. Jean Schwartz Down Where The Cotton Blossoms Grow w. Andrew B, sterling m. Harry Von Tilzer Eyes Of Blue, Eyes Of Brown w. m. Sterling Flora, I Am Your Adorer w. Vincent P. Bryan m. Charles Robinson The Fortune Telling Man w. m, Bert Williams & George Walker Go Way Back And Sit Down w. Elmer Bowman m. Ben Jansen He Ought To Have A Tablet In The Hall of Fame w. Arthur L. Robb m, John Walter Bratton Hello Central, Give Me Heaven w. m. Charles K. Harris Hiawatha w. James ODea m, high Society Porter Steele Hoity-Toity w. Edgar Smith m. Hughie Cannon I Love You Truly w. m. Carrie Jacobs-Bond I Want To Be A Lidy w. George Dance m. George Dee If You Love Your Baby, gus Edwards Im Tired w. William Jerome m. Jean Schwartz In The Shade Of The Palm w. m, leslie Stuart The Invincible Eagle March w. m. John Philip Sousa It Seems Like Yesterday w. Frederic Ranken m, isidore Witmark Ive Grown So Used To You w. m. Thurland Chattaway Josephine, My Jo w. Cecil Mack m. J. Tim Brymn Just A-Wearyin For You w. Frank Lebby Stanton m. Carrie Jacobs-Bond The Maiden With The Dreamy Eyes w. James Weldon Johnson & Bob Cole m. J. Rosamond Johnson Mamie, gus Edwards Mighty Lak A Rose w. Frank Lebby Stanton m. Ethelbert Nevin My Castle On The Nile w. Bob Cole & James Weldon Johnson m. J. Rosamond Johnson My Japanese Cherry Blossom w. Edgar Smith m, John Stromberg My Lady Hottentot w. William Jerome m. Harry von Tilzer My Lonesome Little Louisiana Lady w
