Today's Birthdays

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Vernon Duke (1903-1969)
Paul Creston (1906-1985)
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982)
Gloria Coates (1938)
Sir Willard White (1946)
John Prine (1946)
Steve Martland (1959)
Evgeny Kissin (1971)

and

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)
Harold Pinter (1930)

From the New Music Box:

On October 10, 1940, Virgil Thomson began a 14 year stint as chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, arguably the most visible journalistic position ever held by a prominent American composer.

With his first published review, titled "Age Without Honor," Thomson set the tone for an agenda that put American composers first, excoriating the New York Philharmonic for a program that "was anything but a memorable experience." In this first of his many pronouncements against the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, he denounced as "vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description." His most biting prose, however, he saved for the orchestra itself: "As a friend remarked who had never been to one of these concerts before, "I understand now why the Philharmonic is not a part of New York's intellectual life.'"