One of the composers whose music I didn’t get to play the other day during my “Neo-Baroque” show on WPRB was Paul Creston. Which is a shame, since Creston wrote so much finely-crafted music, and none of it is exactly overplayed.

Creston was born on this date in 1906, as Giuseppe Guttoveggio. This is interesting, in that historians believe that this was also the birth date of Giuseppe Verdi (though he always celebrated on the 9th). Creston was born in New York City to Sicilian immigrants. He chose his professional name from a character he played in a high school play, named Cresspino, which led to his classmates calling him Cress. He changed his name legally in 1927, when he married Martha Graham dancer Louise Gotto.

Creston was about as self-taught as a composer could get. He practiced after work on a ten-dollar piano purchased by his family and pored over scores of the Masters at the New York Public Library. From observing his wife, he developed an interest in rhythm and dance. He later wrote a book on the subject, “Principles of Rhythm.”

Allegedly, during the 1950s and ‘60s, he was the most performed American symphonic composer, championed by Toscanini, Ormandy, Stokowski, and Howard Mitchell of the National Symphony Orchestra. How often do we hear his music today?

Among his students was Gerard Schwarz, later music director of the Seattle Symphony. Schwarz returned the favor years later by recording a couple of albums of Creston’s music.

Here’s a piece I was hoping to play the other day, his Baroque-inflected Partita for Flute, Violin and Strings:

Creston was organist at the Chapel of St. Genesius (the patron saint of actors) for over 30 years, from 1934 to 1967. The chapel, located beneath St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church in Manhattan, was a primary place of worship for entertainment people since the 1920s. Parishioners included Jimmy Durante, Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, Danny Thomas and Spencer Tracy. This was the church that hosted Valentino’s funeral and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Crawford’s wedding (both occurred before Creston’s tenure). The church’s chimes literally played “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Creston considered the writing of music to be a spiritual practice.

“To me, musical composition is as vital to my spiritual welfare as prayer and good deeds, just as good food and exercise are necessities of physical health, and thought and study are requisites of mental well-being,” he wrote. “I believe that everyone should compose and that musical composition should be a required course in our educational system, as well as literary composition – not for the purpose of training composers professionally, as we do not expect to make authors of all students of literary composition – but for the development and joy of creativity.”

Happy birthday, Paul Creston!