Composer facts

The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNa) and the Fayetteville Jazz Collective are coming together for a concert titled 250 Years of Greatest Hits on Saturday (March 10) at the Walton Arts Center’s Baum Walker Hall.

Those attending will no doubt be familiar with the music, but we’ve included some not-so-familiar facts about a few of the "250 Years" composers:

• Glenn Miller was a mild-mannered perfectionist who on at least one occasion mandated that everyone in his band wear maroon socks.
• Henry Mancini played piano with Glenn Miller before he became a staff composer at Universal Studios, where he eventually was nominated for an Academy Award for arranging the music for the film The Glenn Miller Story.
• Louis Prima downsized his big band in 1954 and became one of the founding fathers of the Las Vegas entertainment scene.
• Edward Elgar was largely self-taught as a composer and his long struggle to establish himself as a pre-eminent composer of international repute was hard and often bitter.
• Aaron Copland also composed nine film scores and received an Oscar for The Heiress.
• Rimsky-Korsakov retired as a Russian naval officer to become a professor of music composition.  
• Stravinsky entered law school then began private composition and orchestration studies with professor Rimsky-Korsakov. 
• Joe Zawinul had an epiphany: "One day I heard a pianist play ‘Honeysuckle Rose,’ … and I was hooked. I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘jazz,’ which was a word I had never heard, and I asked him to spell it for me. My life was changed after that."