Celebrating Important September Music Events and Birthdays with Stamps

It is time to celebrate September Musician Birthdays with stamps. A lot of musicians and composers appear on stamps. You can read about many of them on this blog, from classical composers to American pop stars. Yet, in order to highlight a few more of these stamps and the musicians on them, I am sharing a monthly calendar of musicians birthdays. It will not even be close to complete. Yet, each moth I will select a few stamps from my collection and share them with links to relevant articles elsewhere on my blog. If you are looking for more musician birthdays you can check out this site.

September Musician Birthdays

September 2
Mihaly Mosonyi (1815-1870) was a Hungarian composer. Particularly, Mosonyi wanted to create a Hungarian national style of music. Originally, he was born as Michael Brand, but took a more Hungarian sounding name. Mihaly is the Hungarian equivalent of Michael, and Mosonyi, in honor of the district of Moson where he was born. Mosonyi was primarily an instrumental musician and composer and wrote a lot of piano music. He is, undoubtedly, best known for his Funeral Music.

Sept. 3
Woody Guthrie died in New York City in 1967 at the age of 52.

September 4
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) died in Bergen, Norway

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) was an Austrian organist and composer. His music is written in the late style of German Romanticism. His large scale works including symphonies, masses, and choral works are best known. Throughout his life, Bruckner was celebrated as a great organist. He is buried in the old cathedral in Linz, below an organ bearing his name. Learn more here.

September 5
Freddie Mercury (1946-1991) was a British singer, songwriter, and lead vocalist for the rock band Queen. He was known as a flamboyant performer who had a four-octave vocal range. He died of AIDS at the age of 45 and was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. His number one hits include “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love,” “We are the Champions,” and Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

September 7
Buddy Holly (1936-1959) was an American rock & roll singer. Born in Lubbock, Texas, Holly was originally a country musician. After opening for Elvis Presley in 1955, he made a switch to an entirely rock & roll style. His biggest hits were “That’ll Be The Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Everyday.” Sadly, Holly died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, along with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. That tragedy was dubbed as “The Day the Music Died” in Don McLean’s song “American Pie.”

September 8
Beethovenhalle Concert Hall opens in Bonn, Germany, September 8, 1959.

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) was a Czech composer who became famous across the world. His fame allowed him to move to the United States to earn a significant amount of money. Dvorak wrote nationalist music, originally, creating a Czech national style. Examples include his Slavonic Dances. Later, he did the same in America. Specifically, his American style include pieces such as the American String Quartet. Also, his New World Symphony which draws on American folk tunes, particularly from Black and Native American communities.

Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) was American singer-songwriter and foundational figure in country music. He is often called the “Father of Country Music.” Rodger’s first jobs were all for the railroad. It was there that he picked up songs from Black railroad workers, and learned folk songs from across the American south. At 27, he left to start his musical career. Significantly, Rodgers and his group took part in the famous recording session in Bristol, Tennessee in early August of 1927. This session, remarkably, launched the careers of Rodgers and the Carter Family, and is often thought of as the birth of country music. Unfortunately, Rodgers died at the age of 35 from tuberculosis.

Patsy Cline (1932-1963) was an American country singer. She was also one of the most important female vocalists of the mid-twentieth century and was able to make a crossover into pop music. During her short career, she had many big hits, including “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and “Crazy.” Unfortunately, Cline died in a plane crash at the age of 30, tragically cutting short her phenomenal career.

September 9
Otis Redding (1941-1967) was an American singer-songwriter and one of the greatest vocalists in soul and R&B music. Significantly, Redding’s style of music was greatly informed by the gospel music of his youth. At the age of 15, he joined Little Richard’s back up band and started his professional career. He became a headline performer in both Europe and the United States, even appearing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. His biggest hit, “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay,” was recorded a few weeks before Redding died in a plane crash and became a posthumous number one hit.

September 11
Carlos Puebla (1917-1989) was a Cuban singer, guitarist, and composer. Although born into a modest family, Puebla began teaching himself the guitar as a child. By the 1930s, he was already composing his own songs. He gained popularity with love songs, but later turned political, writing about the difficult living conditions under the Batista Government. Instead, he was a supporter of the Castro government and the Revolution. His most famous song was “Hasta Siempre, Comandante.”

September 13
Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) was an Italian baroque composer. He is particularly remembered for his keyboard music, written for both harpsichord and organ. Famously, Frescobaldi served as the organist for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His compositions helped shape later baroque composers including Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell.

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was a German pianist and composer. She was one of the most important pianists of the nineteenth century and knew most of the significant European musicians and composers of the century. She was also the wife of Robert Schumann. Originally from Leipzig, she studied with her father, Friedrich Wieck. She began touring at the age of eleven. At 18, she married Schumann and eventually had eight children with him. After his tragic death, she resumed her career touring, composing, and teaching.

September 14
Michael Haydn (1737-1806) was an Austrian composer and younger brother to Joseph Haydn. He was to follow his older brother to become a boy soprano in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. In fact, it was said that his voice was more admired this Joseph’s. Michael also earned extra money as an organist. He spent his career as the concertmaster in Salzburg where he met Mozart and would teach Carl Maria von Weber and Anton Diabelli. He wrote more than 360 compositions, mostly for church, but also for secular music entertainments.

Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) was an Italian opera composer. Born in Florence, Luigi was a child prodigy on the harpsichord and was composing by his early teens. He was awarded a scholarship to study music in Bologna and Milan, where he began studying the works of the great Italian opera composers of the late eighteenth century. He later travelled to London and Paris and adopted some of their styles into his work. Cherubini was prolific, writing more than three dozen operas as well as masses, and motets for choir.

September 15
Roy Acuff (1903-1992) was an American fiddler and country musician.

September 16
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was a French music teacher and conductor.

September 17
George Folescu (1884-1939) was a Romanian bass-baritone opera singer.

Hank Williams (1923-1953) was an American songwriter and country musician. Born in Alabama, Williams was taught to play the guitar by a Rufus Payne, a Black blues musician. Williams would go on to become one of the most important songwriters of the century,recording 35 original songs that reached the top 10, and eleven that became number one hits. Some of his iconic songs include “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Hey, Good Lookin'”, and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Tragically, his abuse of drugs and alcohol led to his death of heart failure at the age of 29.

September 18
Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) died in London of a drug overdose at the age of 27.

September 20
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was a Finnish violinist and composer. He is the greatest composer of the country and he helped to create a musical identity for the small country. Sibelius wrote a wide variety of music, much of which is still regularly performed, including all seven of his symphonies. Most famous, was his tone poem Finlandia, written in 1899-1900 as a piece in protest of control and censorship by the Russian Empire. The final hymn of the piece is one of the most important national songs of Finland.

September 21
Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was an English composer. He is best known for his largescale work The Planets. His music shows the influence of Romantics like Wagner, but with nationalist influences from the English folksong revival. He studied the piano and became a professional trombonist, before dedicating himself to teaching music.

September 23
John Coltrane (1923-1967) was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. His career was at the forefront of jazz styles ranging from bebop and hard jazz to free jazz. Coltrane was a prodigious player, leading more than fifty recording sessions and appearing alongside such jazz greats as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Among his compositions, his most famous are A Love Supreme and Ascension.

September 25
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was a French harpsichordist and composer. In 1722, he published an important treatise on harmony that established his reputation as a music theorist and teacher. It was not until he was nearly fifty that he turned his attention towards writing French opera, though his operas gained immediate success. He was quickly regarded as the most important composer of French opera since Lully, although he was controversial for his originality and display of technical brilliance. While his music fell out of fashion by the end of the eighteenth century, it enjoyed a resurgence in the twentieth century.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was a Russian composer and pianist. He became known internationally for his large scale works including operas, ballets, and symphonic pieces. Shostakovich came to prominence under Stalin, but had a fraught career in the communist regime, alternately holding important offices and gaining rebuke for his work.

September 26
George Gershwin (1898-1937) was an American pianist and composer. His work bridged classical and popular genres of music. He began his career by writing Broadway theater songs and shows with his brother Ira. Gershwin moved to Paris, where he hoped to study with Nadia Boulanger, but she refused him fearing rigorous classical training would damage his creativity. Gershwin became famous for incorporating jazz elements into classical forms including in works such as Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess.

September 28
Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) was a French composer and member of Les Six.

September 30
The opera Porgy & Bess premieres in Boston in 1935.

Johan Svendsen (1840-1911) was a Norwegian violinist, conductor, and composer. He was born in Oslo, but spent most of his life out of the country, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Svendsen’s output of original compositions is fairly sparse, including two symphonies and a few instrumental solos. He became best known as an orchestral conductor and was popular in both Norway and Denmark. He also befriended some of the leading musicians of his day including fellow Norwegian Edward Grieg and with the German composer Richard Wagner.