On today’s date in 1923, the League of Composers presented its first chamber concert in New York City. Their stated mission was to present music by living composers whose works represented new trends in music.

Actually, the League was founded as a splinter group, seceding from a more radical International Composers Guild founded two years earlier by Edgard Varese. The Guild’s concerts were restricted to previously unheard works, and favored what was then called the ‘ultra-modern’ school, shutting out some less aggressively radical composers in the process. The newly formed League set out to be more inclusive.

Their opening concert included a world premiere: a piano quintet by the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch, who was then living in America. While not a radical work, Bloch’s quintet was strong stuff for 1923, and even included some quartertone elements. The New York Times was impressed, but not won over: “To the inevitable question, ‘Do you like it?’ it seems almost impossible to answer, but if pressed I should say, no, not for any fault in the work but simply because of its too apparent determination to be emotionally stirring.”

The British critic Ernest Newmann, on the other hand, singled out Bloch’s First Quintet for special praise: “No other piece of chamber music produced in any country during that period can be placed in the same class with it.”

For his part, Bloch said simply: “I write without any regard to please either the so-called ‘ultra-moderns’ or the so-called ‘old-fashioned.’”