Basketball fans love March with its March Madness – the huge NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. BTPM Classical loves March too, not only for basketball, but for birthdays!
It’s March Birthday Madness – a month filled with great composer birthdays on BTPM Classical! A list of composers is below. For fun, I’ve included common nicknames I discovered while researching on “the internets.” You can “take ‘em or leave ‘em,” but it’s what people see when they’re doomscrolling.
Which composer is your favorite?
Which of their pieces do you like best?
Do you share a birthday with any of them?
Comment below or write to me at mwimmer@btpm.org.
March 1, 1810: Frédéric Chopin, “The Poet of the Piano”
March 2, 1824: Bedřich Smetana, “The Father of Czech Music”
March 3, 1913: Margaret Bonds, “Harlem’s Musical Voice” *
March 4, 1678: Antonio Vivaldi, “The Red Priest”
March 5, 1887: Heitor Villa-Lobos: “The Father of Brazilian Music”
March 7, 1875: Maurice Ravel, “The Swiss Watchmaker”
March 8, 1714: CPE Bach, “The Berlin Bach”
March 8, 1889: Ina Boyle, “The Irish Vaughan Williams”
March 9, 1910: Samuel Barber, “America’s Great Lyrical Composer”
March 14, 1681: Georg Philipp Telemann, “History’s Most Prolific Composer”
March 18, 1844: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, “The Master Orchestrator”
March 21, 1839: Modest Mussorgsky, “The Russian Storyteller”
March 25, 1881: Béla Bartók, “The Father of Ethnomusicology”
March 31, 1685: Johann Sebastian Bach, “The Father of Harmony”
March 31, 1732: Franz Joseph Haydn: “The Father of the Symphony”
*Please note that music by Margaret Bonds is on the BTPM Classical Live On Stage Event 37 program called, “Ebony in Harmony” on Sunday, March 1, 2 p.m. in the BTPM Performance Space. Tickets are free at btpm.org/events.
