December Musicians Birthdays on Stamps

It is time to celebrate December Musicians 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.

December Birthdays

December 1
John Densmore (b. 1944) is an American songwriter and drummer who played in “The Doors.” He was born in Los Angeles, California and grew up playing piano and drums. He attended attended Santa Monica City College and California State University, Northridge. Densmore along with Robby Krieger played in a band called the Psychedelic Rangers. On the side, he also played in a group with Ray Manzarek and his two brothers and the vocalist Jim Morrison. When Manzarek’s brothers left the second group, they invited Krieger to join and the Doors were formed. Densmore played on every recording of the band and is a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

December 2
Sir John Barbirolli (1899-1970) was a British cellist and conductor. He was born in Southampton Row, Holborn, London, a child of an Italian immigrant. His father was a violinist and Barbirolli started on the instrument, later switching to cello. He gave up music during service in World War I, but resumed after the War. However, his true passion was to conduct and by the 1920s he was regularly appearing in front of orchestras. He was Arturo Toscanini’s successor at the New York Philharmonic where he conducted from 1936 until 1943. He was also the guest conductor of such ensembles as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic. He was most associated, however, with the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester which he conducted from 1943 until his death in 1970.

December 3
Anton Webern (1883-1945) was an Austrian conductor and composer. Along with Schoenberg and Berg, Webern was part of the Second Viennese School. Their music was atonal and serial (using the twelve-tone method). Webern’s music was radical and in addition to serializing pitch, he also developed on organizational schema for rhythm, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and other musical variables.

December 5
Vítězslav Novák (1870-1949) was a Czech composer and teacher. He was born in a small town in southern Bohemia and he began studying both the piano and the violin as a child. As a teenager, he went to Prague to study at the Conservatory. There, he learned composition with Antonin Dvorak. Novák music was rooted in the neo-romantic tradition and the Czech national style, but he pushed forward with new ideas, becoming one of the first Czech composers of modernism.

December 8
Jimmy Smith (1925-2005) was a jazz organist. Smith was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, to a musician father. As a young child he joined his father on stage doing song and dance routines, but also began to teach himself piano. At the age of nine, he won a piano competition playing boogie-woogie music. In 1951, he began exploring the tonal possibilities of the Hammond organ. He gradually began to bring the instrument into his R&B bands, eventually choosing to specialize on the instrument by 1954. His playing helped to create the organ trio as a small jazz ensemble in the 1960s and led to its use in other genres including soul music. In 2005, the National Endowment for the Arts gave him a Jazz Masters Award.

Jim Morrison (1943-1971) was an American singer and songwriter, and lead vocalist for “The Doors.” He is one of the most mysterious and iconic figures in rock music. He co-founded the Doors along with keyboardist Ray Manzarek in 1965. Their breakthrough song was “Light My Fire,” from their 1967 eponymous album. Morrison recorded six albums with The Doors before his mysterious death in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27.

December 9
Joan Armatrading (b. 1950) is Kittian-British singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Born in Saint Christopher and Nevis, at the age of three she was sent to live with her grandmother in Antigua. In 1958, she moved with her family to Birmingham, England. She began to write songs at the age of 14, setting poetry to tunes she wrote at the piano. She soon began to learn guitar on an instrument purchased from a pawn shop. She began performing professionally in 1968. Over a fifty year career, she released nineteen studio albums and has been a three-time Grammy award nominee.

December 10
Cesar Franck (1822-1890) was a Belgian-born composer, pianist, and organist. Franck was born in Liege (now Belgium) and began studying music as a young child, giving public concert by the age of twelve. He moved to Paris and pursued a career as an organist and music teacher. He became famous for his ability to improvise and he toured widely throughout France. In 1858, he was named as the organist at the Basilica of St. Clotilde in Paris where he remained the rest of his life. In 1872, he joined the faculty of the Paris Conservatory. It is around this time he began composing. Many of his works called for large orchestras and choruses. One of his most famous pieces is his Violin Sonata of 1886.

December 12
Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) was an American pop singer. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Italian immigrants, Sinatra became one of the greatest musical artists of the twentieth century. It is estimated that he sold more than 150 million records worldwide. He signed with Columbis Records in 1943 and his first album The Voice of Frank Sinatra came out in 1946. In the 1950s, he became a mainstay on the strip in Las Vegas and also launched a successful acting career, including winning an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity. Among his hits are “Strangers in the Night,” “Come Fly with Me,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” and his anthem, “My Way.”

December 13
George Stephănescu (1843-1925) was a Romanian opera composer. He was born in Bucharest and studied music as a child leading to his enrollment in the Bucharest Academy of Music. In 1877, Stephănescu became the conductor of the National Theater Orchestra and singing teacher at the Academy. He raised the level of performances from vaudeville type acts to the production of full operas. Stephănescu also opened the country’s first professional opera company.

December 16
Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, and pedagogue. Born in Kecskemét, a city in Central Hungary, he learned to play violin as a child. He had an interest in early recording equipment and used it to gather folk music on wax cylinders beginning in 1905. Kodály used elements of this music in his own compositions. He also turned his attention to music education and developed an entire method, which is still in use today, for educating young children in the fundamentals of music.

December 17
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was an iconic German composer. Born in Bonn, he moved to Vienna at the age of 22 and spent the rest of his life in the “City of Music.” His works are beloved by audiences and musicians across the globe. While trained in the classical style of Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven helped to usher in nineteenth century Romanticism. His piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies all help to define those genres of music. Most incredibly, for much of his life he suffered from hearing deficiencies and was eventually completely deaf.

Arthur Fiedler (1894-1979) was an American conductor. He was a popular figure, particularly because he went to great efforts to bring “classical music” to a wider audience. Fiedler brought popular songs into the orchestral hall and was criticized with editing masterworks to make them more accessible to audiences. Fiedler was born in Boston and his career is most defined by his years conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops orchestra.

December 18
Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was an American pianist and composer. He was one of the first Americans to gain attention as a classical musician After showing talent at a young age, his parents sent him to Paris to receive a traditional conservatory training. There, he made acquaintance with many of the leading musicians of the time, and Franz Liszt helped to get his music published by Breitkopf & Härtel. Today, he is best remembered for his compositions for piano.

December 19
Édith Piaf (1915-1963) was a French singer. Piaf was born in Paris to a father who was an acrobat and a mother who was a singer and circus performer. After her mother abandoned her and her father went off to fight in World War I, she was raised by her grandmother in a bordello. In 1929, she began to perform with her father, singing during his street performances. After performing for years on the streets, she was discovered by a nightclub owner, thus beginning her career as a cabaret singer and one of the most popular musicians of twentieth century France.

December 21
Lorenzo Perosi (1872-1956) was an Italian composer of sacred music. Perosi was born in Tortona in the Piedmont region of Italy. His family, for more than two hundred years, had been musicians in the catholic church. He similarly trained and also decided to become a priest. In his twenties, his compositions gained international attention, especially his large scale oratorios. In 1898 he was named to be the director of the choir at the Sistine Chapel. He held the position for fifty years through the reigns of five popes.

December 22
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was an Italian operatic composer. He is widely regarded as the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi, and his works are among the most popular with opera lovers across the world. He recieved a music education at the Pacini School of Music in Lucca, studying there with his uncle. Puccini then went to the Milan Conservatory. He began composing operas in the 1880s and found great success. His most famous works are La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot.

December 28
Michel Petrucciani (1962-1999) was a French jazz pianist. He was born with a genetic disease that gave him a short stature and he suffered from brittle bones and pain in his arms throughout his life. Still, he became one of the greatest jazz pianists of his generation. Petrucciani was born into a musical family, his brother and father played guitar and his other brother the bass. After seeing Duke Ellington on television at the age of four, Michel wanted to play piano like him. He began classical music studies and appeared in public at the age of nine. He learned jazz by listening to recordings of Bill Evans. He moved to Paris at the age of 15 to pursue a professional career. He formed a partnership with the saxophonist Charles Lloyd in California and took their duo to the Montreaux Jazz Festival where they were warmly received, launching Petrucciani’s career and fame. He moved to New York City in 1984 and spent the rest of his life there, creating several recordings alongside American jazz greats. He died a week after his 36th birthday.

December 29
Pablo Casals (1876-1973) was a Spanish cellist. Casals was from town in Catalonia, Spain. His father was an organist and choir master who gave him his first music lessons. By the age of six, Pablo was performing on the violin in church. When he was eleven, he heard a cello for the first time and fell in love. In 1888, he went to Barelona and enrolled in a music school there where he could study cello, music theory, and continue to play piano. In 1899, Casals played at the Crystal Palace in London and for Queen Victoria, performances which launched his international career. He was largely considered the best cellist of the early twentieth century and his 1930s recordings of the Bach cello suites are still widely regarded as a masterpiece.

December 30
Josef Foerster (1859-1951) was a Czech composer and musicologist. He was born in Prague to parents of German ancestry. His father was a composer (also named Josef Foerster) who taught at the conservatory. He received training in both music and theater and early in his career was a critic. In 1901, he became a faculty teacher a the Hamburg Conservatory. This allowed him also the time to compose. His compositions include five symphonies and the opera Eva.

December 31
Mallikarju Mansur (1910-1992) was an Indian classical singer. Mansur was born to the village headman in a small town west of Dharwad, Karnatka. His musical talent was evident early and his father sent him to a traveling theater troupe. There he began to focus on learning classical Indian singing techniques. He was known for his knowledge of a wide range of rare ragas and for his ability to perform technically superior while not losing the emotion of a piece.