In a passing comment, Deryk mentioned 1874 as an "annum mirabilis" for
composers.  I presume he was referring to the fact that Reynaldo Hahn,
Gustav Holst, Charles Ives, Franz Schmidt, Arnold Schoenberg, Josef Suk,
and Sergey Koussevitzky were all born in that year.

An interesting crop, to be sure.  However, I've always considered 1685, the
year J.S. Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti were born,
to be the annum mirabilis.

But it's been a long time since I took a close look at this, so I went
to the trusty database, which now lists more than 1460 composers in my
collection, and scanned through for clusters of composers born in a certain
year.  I satisfied my curiosity, and thought I might share what I found.

The earliest year to jump out at me was 1653, in which Arcangelo Corelli,
Georg Muffat, and Johann Pachelbel were born.  OK, kinda light (not as
light as you might think - Pachelbel was a significant composer of organ
music), but what the heck.

The next big year after 1685 was 1810 which gave birth to Frederic Chopin,
Felicien David, Ferenc Erkel, Carl Nicolai, Robert Schumann, Ludwig
Schuncke, and Samuel Wesley.  If you include 1809 and 1811, we can add
Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, but that would be cheating.

Next we have 1874, and then the big years of 1881: Bela Bartok, Georges
Enescu, Nicolai Miaskovsky, Paul Le Flem, Nikolay Roslavets; and 1882:
Ignaz Friedman, Percy Grainger, Zoltan Kodaly, Gian Francesco Malipiero,
Manuel Ponce, Artur Schnabel, Igor Stravinsky, Karol Szymanowski, Joaquin
Turina, and Haydn Wood.

And that's pretty much it.  I would have thought there were more miraculous
years out there, but the spread seems fairly even.  I guess it's been a
miracle millennium.

Dave
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