by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Composer Hale Smith was born in Cleveland on this date in 1929. A precocious musician whose talents were recognized early on by Duke Ellington, after service in the U.S. Army, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1950 and 1952. Smith went on to enjoy a widely varied career in New York, where he moved easily between classical styles (including serial music), and jazz. He died in New York in 2009 at the age of 84.
As Dennis Dooley wrote when Smith won the Cleveland Arts Prize for Music in 1973,
His prolific output includes everything from TV advertising jingles to incidental music for stage productions of Lysistrata and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. His “Castle House Rag” was used in the documentary The Making of Citizen Kane. Smith has, nevertheless, always found time to lend his prodigious energies to such important undertakings as the Detroit Symphony’s annual Symposium on Black American Composers. He gladly served as an advisor to the Chicago-based Center for Black Music Research, but “bristled at the designation [Black composer],” The New York Times noted in its lengthy obituary, “He wanted his work, and that of his black peers, to appear on programs with that of Beethoven, Mozart and Copland” and to be judged simply as music.
A list of Hale Smith’s works (click the link to “Hale’s Music”) suggests that Cleveland should rediscover one of its hometown composers. Sample some of his music here,.
Among the better-served composers born on this date are Leroy Anderson (1908, beloved Boston creator of light classical music), Frank Loesser (1910, Broadway tunesmith), and Bernard Herrmann (1911, popularly known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, but a fine composer in his own right).
On June 29, 1934, radio station W2XR, a “noncommercial high fidelity experiment,” began broadcasting in New York City, soon to become WQXR when it was granted a commercial license in 1936. Always at the forefront of experimental broadcasting, in 1952, the station devised a way to broadcast in stereo, using two microphones placed six feet apart. Listeners could enjoy the stereo effect by similarly positioning two radios, one tuned to the station’s AM feed, the other to its FM feed.
And on this date in 1941, Polish piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski died in New York at the age of 80. Also a diplomat and statesman, the pianist had served as the newly independent Poland’s prime minister and foreign minister in 1919 when he participated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I.
Paderewski’s dual career led to a curious situation after his demise in a New York hotel room while on a concert tour. Because of his diplomatic service and the exigencies of the Second World War, President Roosevelt granted permission for his body to be temporarily laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. But there it stayed in the vault of the U.S.S. Maine Mast Memorial until the fall of communism in 1992 when his remains were transferred to Warsaw Cathedral. With the exception of his heart, which is preserved in a bronze sculpture in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Read about that strange saga in detail here.
