by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
12 Noon – Tuesdays at The Covenant: Organist Christa Rakich, faculty, Oberlin Conservatory, plays music by Lübeck, Rakich, Talma, and J.S. Bach. Church of the Covenant, University Circle. Freewill offering.
5:30 pm – Fairmount Presbyterian Church Rush Hour Concerts: Tyler Young, saxophone, Irwin Shung, piano, and Elora Karras, cello, will dive into seminal saxophone works by composer David Maslanka at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
Several big names share anniversaries on September 23. Those who died on this date include Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35) and English composer Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006). On the less grim end of the spectrum, pioneering jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67) shares a birthday with a giant of the flute, Julius Baker (1915-2003), who was born in Cleveland.
Soon after completing his studies at Eastman and then at Curtis, Baker took up a post as second flute in The Cleveland Orchestra from 1937-41. Short stints as principal flute with the Pittsburgh and Chicago Symphonies followed before he found a home for eighteen years in that position with the New York Philharmonic.
His powerful legacy extends from the orchestral side of the field to chamber music — he was a founding member of the Bach Aria Group — and pedagogy. He taught at Curtis, Juilliard, and Carnegie Mellon, and his many famous students include The Cleveland Orchestra’s own Joshua Smith and Mary Kay Fink. Baker’s dedication to teaching continued until the week he died at age 87 in 2003.
Among his many recordings, here’s a video of Baker playing the first movement of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with David Nadien on violin, Leonard Bernstein on piano, and the New York Philharmonic.
On a different note, on September 23, 1938, a time capsule was buried in Queens, New York City. The 7.5-foot-long, bullet-shaped container made of copper alloy is not to be opened until 6939, or five thousand years after the 1939 World’s Fair.
Sealed inside are over 100 objects that, it was decided, captured the spirit of the time — “including a pack of cigarettes, a 35mm camera, a safety razor, children’s toys, money, millions of pages of text on a microfilm, seed samples from common crops such as wheat, corn and cotton, and even handwritten messages from figures such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann,” according to the Bureau International des Expositions.
That raises a question that’s maybe a little fun, maybe a little sad: what objects would you bury to represent these times?
