Composers

Johann Joseph Fux (c. 1660 - 1741) was an Austrian composer and music theorist who is better known for his treatise on Palestrinian style of Renaissance polyphony.

This Austrian stamp was issued in 1985 on the occasion of his 325th birth anniversary.

Just for the sake of 'completeness' --

Here are the Austrian stamps commemorating W.A. Mozart's death:



Left: Issued in 2011 on the occasion of Mozart's 220th death anniversary.

Right: The souvenir sheet issued in 1991 on the occasion of Mozart's 200th death anniversary.

The pane for the 2011 stamp features an excerpt from Mozart's Magic Flute (why not the Requiem? I have no idea).



Here are the Austrian stamps commemorating W.A. Mozart's birth (except the leftmost one which was issued on no particular anniversary). They have been cancelled in Salzburg with a special pictorial cancellations. (See my cover in honour of W. A. Mozart here.)

Oskar Nedbal (1874 - 1930) was a Czech composer, conductor and violinist.

This stamp was issued in Czechoslovakia in 1960 as part of the series "Cultural Anniversaries" (2 out of 5 stamps commemorate composers, the other being Otakar Ostrcil).



The other stamps in this series commemorate the actress Hana Kvapilova, the writer K.M. Čapek-Chod, and the painter Alfons Maria Mucha.

Here is Arthur Honegger. A Swiss citizen all his life, though he was born in Paris and as far as I can determine hardly ever lived in Switzerland, he was another one of Les Six, the French group of composers that was introduced to us by Linda a few posts ago.



Honegger had a brief flirtation with fame in the United States back in the 1960s. Frank Zappa frequently mentioned Edgard Varèse as one of the composers he most admired, and as it happens the most widely available recording of Varèse's Amériques was a budget release on Vanguard Records that also contained Honegger's Pacific 231, which...well, it imitates a steam locomotive. And it's good music! Because Honneger was really good at writing music that sounds like trains!! So Honegger reached an unexpected audience. Most of his work was far more serious, even somber. He worked in a variety of musical media: cantatas, operas, chamber music, and five full symphonies along with several other symphonic-sized works. At any given moment, he can sound like any number of 20th-century composers, but over a span of more than a couple of minutes, he really doesn't sound like anybody except himself.

You can read more at this Web site, which is aptly named "Arthur Honegger".


I like that word "quilldriver" and I'm going to borrow it! I can't listen to a whole lot of flute music at one time, which limits my ability to appreciate Telemann, but he did come up with some cool and cheerful melodies, and I am in absolute awe of his ability to spin out music for any occasion. I should listen to a cantata by him.

Go for it. See how it looks in line with the others, maybe separated from them by an extra ½" or so - or under the second stamp. I can't switch them in my head, but I wonder how those placements would look in comparison?

I didn't take the opportunity to say it at the time, but this cover that you composed is just plain beautiful. It somehow captures the most serene aspects of Bruckner's music. Those adagios got me through a very overstressed few months in my life.

Hmm, another reason for my hesitation is that, if I put the stamp of Ansfelden on this cover paying tribute to Bruckner, maybe I should put a stamp of Vienna and/or Linz as well to do these cities which are equally significant to Bruckner's life justice? Wouldn't this addition make the cover too crowed?

Here's Hildegard von Bingen. I'm not sure anybody can beat her for being the "oldest" composer; she lived 1098-1179, and, while earlier music is known, I don't know of any composers previous to Hildegard who can be dated or even conclusively identified.



Liturgical music from that time tends to be ethereal, but to my ears her music (which was utilitarian - composed for daily prayers for the nuns in the convent where she lived) truly floats. It's strictly tonal and plays by the rules of medieval liturgical music, but it's in some realm beyond tonality, mysticism brought into words and notes. If you dislike early music or monastic music, or early monastic music, you may or may not appreciate Hildegard; if you do have an ear for those styles, you'll love her. The World History Encyclopedia, which is one of my favorite sites on the Web (they will nag you for donations), has a thorough description of her life and ideas. The writing is gushy by the encyclopedia's normal standards, but she was a truly remarkable woman, thoroughly medieval in many ways but centuries ahead of her time in many others.


I think that having all three of them could make it crowded. Vienna and, to a lesser extent, Linz, are associated with all sorts of people and events; Ansfelden is basically known for Bruckner, and they even put a pipe organ on their coat of arms. Wikipedia also cheerfully tells me that Werner Gruber, who has an interesting dual career as physicist and cabaret singer, grew up there. But Bruckner was born there! So I think it would be appropriate to feature Ansfelden.

WOW, I didn't know women composer existed at that time! Thank you for introducing her to me. I love early music and do go to church for the sole purpose of listening to ancient (Gregorian) chant

If you've ever heard any music by a Bulgarian composer, it was probably by Pancho Vladigerov.



Vladigerov (1899-1978) had a brief run of popularity in European concert halls in the 1920s and 1930s because of his Bulgarian Rhapsody (a.k.a. Vardar Rhapsody), which was compared to Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody, though I don't personally hear that much of a connection. And Shostakovich said about Vladigerov's First Symphony, Jewish Poem, "a work like this...comes along every hundred years." (I've never heard it, but I expect to remedy that tonight or tomorrow.)

As for recordings, there haven't been that many until very recently, when the composer's son Alexander Vladigerov started recording most of the orchestral works with the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra, which is pretty darn good. The Bulgarian label Balkanton recorded seven (I think) LP's worth in the 1950s, but Balkanton had almost no distribution outside of southeastern Europe and those performances have never made it onto CD or into any digital formats as far as I can tell. All you could find in the West was some piano music, which invoked Bulgarian folk melodies, but to my ears tends to be polite and doesn't conjure up Bulgarian folk music, which is often raucous and exciting - exactly what you'd expect from a country sandwiched between Greece, Serbia, Turkey, and Romania. I had a two-hour playlist of this stuff on Spotify, but I quit Spotify and I haven't recreated it yet on Tidal, which pays better royalties to performers.

As for why Pancho Vladigerov was named "Pancho", I have no idea. It is a Bulgarian given name but nobody has even entered it that way in Behind the Name, my favorite source for all name lore. All they have is the diminutive for "Francisco".