In 1893, when Antonín Dvořák suggested that American composers look to Native American tribal songs and African-American spirituals as themes for original American concert music, not everyone necessarily agreed, including some prominent American composers and critics of the day.

Remember, this was the age of "progress," and, some argued, how could the primitive and "backward" folk cultures Dvořák recommended compete with the sophisticated and "advanced" concert music of Europe? As you might suspect, what we now call "racism" had a lot to do with it, too.

For her part, the Bostonian composer Amy Beach agreed with Dvořák that folk themes could and should be used as the basis of new American concert music, but disagreed that Indian and Negro melodies were the only possibilities. "We of the North," she wrote to the Boston Herald, "should be more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors."

And so, on today's date in 1896, Amy Beach put her ideas into practice, when her "Gaelic" Symphony had its first public performance by the Boston Symphony. As themes for her symphony, Beach used actual folk tunes found in an old collection of Irish melodies. "Their simple, rugged, and unpretentious beauty led me to try to develop their ideas in symphonic form."