Early in April in the year 1845, a 15-year old American pianist named Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. On the program was Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor, and Chopin happened to be in the audience and congratulated the young American on his performance.
What exactly Chopin said depends on whom you asked. Gottschalk’s first biographer claims it was, “Very good, my child, let me shake your hand,” while Gottschalk’s sister insists it was, “I predict you will become the king of pianists!”

In 1845, Parisian society was curious about anything American after experiencing other exotic exports from the New World, including P.T. Barnum’s circus and George Catlin’s paintings of Native American life. Anything American was definitely “hip.”

Four years later, on today’s date in 1849, Gottschalk returned to the Salle Pleyel, this time performing some of his own compositions, including a work entitled Bamboula, after the name of a deep-voiced Afro-Caribbean drum. The Parisian audiences had never heard anything like it and gave him a standing ovation. Gottschalk was born in New Orleans and was exposed from childhood to Cuban and Haitian music and went on to write original works which anticipate both the rhythms and colors of American jazz.

Frederic Chopin (1810 – 1849) Piano Concerto No. 1 Krystian Zimerman, piano; Polish Festival Orchestra DG 459 684

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869) Bamboula Alan Feinberg, piano Argo 444 457

For the 1958-59 season of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, the orchestra’s newly-appointed music director, was eager to program as much new American music as he dared. As luck would have it, early in 1958, the 35-year old American composer Ned Rorem had just returned from Europe with a new symphonic score.

“I wrote most of my Third Symphony in France,” recalled Rorem. “It’s a big piece but not a commission—I was still writing for the love of it in those days… So I showed it to Lenny and he said ‘OK, I’ll do it, but I wish you would re-orchestrate the slow movement entirely for strings.’ I replied ‘Sure,’ but didn’t, because Bernstein was always saying things like that and then would forget all about it.”

The premiere of Rorem’s Third Symphony—as written—occurred at Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1959, but for its composer, the thrill was tempered by some harsher realities.

Rorem recalled, “I came late to the first rehearsal because in those days I was living off unemployment insurance … and I had to go down and stand in line to pick up my check. I guess they managed without me because Lenny conducted four wonderful performances.”

Ned Rorem (b. 1923) Symphony No. 3 Utah Symphony; Maurice Abravanel, conductor. Vox Box 5092

Over the centuries, a wide range of composers have created musical settings of the Latin mass, but one of the more unusual and distinctive settings received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1973 at a concert at Finch College in New York City devoted entirely to the music of the American composer Vivian Fine.

At that time, Fine was teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, and her Missa Brevis, or Short Mass, was inspired by some of her colleagues there. Cellist George Finckel had organized cello quartet at the college, and for one semester as a sabbatical replacement, mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, a noted new music advocate, taught at Bennington.  Vivian Fine crafted her Missa Brevis from the taped voice of DeGaetani, multi-tracked into four channels as a kind of one-woman chorus, accompanied by Finckel’s quartet of cellos, whose combined low registers sound rather organ-like.

The blend of taped and live musicians created an effect both ancient and very modern. In addition to the familiar Kyrie and Sanctus movements of the traditional mass, Vivian Fine interpolated sacred texts of her own choosing, making this Missa Brevis her own, intensely personal private spiritual testament.

Vivian Fine (1913-2000): Missa Brevis (JanDeGaetani, ms; Eric Barlett, David Finckel, Michael Finckel, Maurice Neuman, vcl.) CRI 692

On today’s date in 1789, Mozart was in Dresden, performing his brand-new Piano Concerto at the Royal Saxon Court. Mozart was pretty good at documenting his own compositions, and we know from a catalog of his works that he finished this Concerto in late February the previous year.

Unfortunately for posterity, Mozart was less dutiful in copying out all of the solo piano part, which he no doubt just kept in his head. The surviving manuscript score contains just a shorthand version of the solo piano part, with the music for the left-hand hardly there at all.

Modern performers have to rely on their own wit and imagination to fill in the blanks, as it were… and, who knows: maybe Mozart played it differently each time himself, improvising around his own sketchy outline as the mood took him?

In any case, Mozart must have been proud of this Concerto. He played it again at the festivities surrounding the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Frankfurt in October of 1790. Ever since, this Concerto has been known as the Coronation Concerto.

Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791) Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation) Jenö Jandó, piano; Concentus Hungaricus; Mátyás Antál , conductor. Naxos 8.550209

Over the centuries, many composers have set verses from the Bible’s Book of Psalms to music, often in response to times of turmoil and trouble.

One unusual Psalm setting had its premiere performance on today’s date in 2013 at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Entitled Seven Psalms, the new work was scored for a jazz quartet of bass, drums, saxophone and piano accompanying a solo vocalist and 15-member choir, and was created by Minneapolis composer Jeremy Walker, who confesses the music was motivated by his own personal struggle.

Walker’s burgeoning career as a jazz saxophonist was sidetracked by an illness which stymied doctors for 12 years until finally diagnosed as Lyme Disease. Unable to continue as a saxophonist, Walker turned to the piano and composition, and found himself drawn to the Book of Psalms, where he heard echoes of African-American spirituals and the blues.

"The book is just dripping with human hope and suffering all intertwined so it seemed like blues material to me," he said. "It occurred to me to blend the jazz vernacular harmonic universe with the psalms. And right away the call and response between solo voice, or between the band and the choir, were sounds I could hear," he said.

Jeremey Walker (b. 1972) Psalm 130, from Seven Psalms Jason Harms, vocalist; 7 Psalms Chamber Choir Jeremy Walker Quartet CD Baby/iTunes/Amazon release

On today’s date in 1892, the Adamowski Quartet gave a concert in Boston that included two movements from a String Quartet by a 32-year old composer named Charles Martin Loeffler.

For the past 10 years, Loeffler had been the associate concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and just the previous year they had premiered his first orchestral piece.

Loeffler told people he was born in the Alsace region of France in 1861, which would account for his French manners and the French titles he gave some of his pieces. In fact, Loeffler was born in Berlin, but he never forgave the Prussians for the political persecution and imprisonment of his father, and left Berlin for Paris as soon as he could.

In 1881, at the age of 20, Loeffler came to the United States, where, as he put it, he found Americans “quick to reward genuine musical merit and to reward it far more generously than Europe.” In 1887, he became an American citizen, and in short order established himself as one of our leading composers.

After his death in 1935, Loeffler’s music fell into neglect for many decades, but his elegant and well-crafted music is attracting renewed interest—and recordings—today.

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861 – 1935) String Quartet in a DaVinci Quartet Naxos 8.559077

In the 18th century, just like today, tourists gravitate toward the Vatican in Rome to view the famous Sistine Chapel and its ceiling by Michelangelo. But during Holy Week in the 18th century, there was an added attraction: performances by the Sistine Chapel Choir of a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, the a cappella setting of the Latin Miserere by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri.

The Vatican jealously guarded Allegri’s work as its exclusive property. Rumor had it—under threat of excommunication—that the choir was forbidden to let the score be taken out of the Chapel, copied, or even seen by any outsider.

On today’s date in 1770, Wolfgang Mozart, age 14, was visiting Rome with his father. The Mozarts attended an evening service at the Vatican and heard Allegri’s Miserere. That same night—after just one hearing—young Wolfgang transcribed the piece from memory, and the Mozarts returned three days later to check Wolfgang’s transcription against a repeat performance of Allegri’s music. The elder Mozart thought that letting people know about this feat might be “good PR” for young Wolfgang.

In any case, the Mozarts were NOT excommunicated, and Roman society WAS suitably impressed when they learned of the teenager’s remarkable musical talent.

Gregorio Allegri (1582 - 1652) Miserere The Tallis Scholars Gimell 454 990

On today’s date in 1959, the Duke University Band under Paul Bryan gave the premiere performance of a new work they had commissioned: the Symphony No. 3 for concert band by the American composer, Vittorio Giannini.

With the growth of concert bands in the 1950s, and success of high-profile performing ensembles like Frederick Fennell’s Eastman Wind Ensemble, composers like Giannini started getting commissions to write new works for these ensembles. In all, Giannini wrote five pieces for concert band, with his Symphony No. 3 the biggest and best known of the lot.

Paul Bryan and Duke University were certainly pleased with the new work. Its resounding success encouraged other band directors to commission new concert works for wind band–and, in one fell swoop, the Duke Band achieved national recognition for its initiative.

As for Giannini, in his later years he taught a younger generation of composers, first in New York City at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, then in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute, and finally at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he served as that institution’s first president. Giannini students included a number of successful composers, including David Amram, John Corigliano, Nicolas Flagello, Adolphus Hailstork, and Alfred Reed.

Vittorio Giannini (1903 - 1966) Symphony No. 3 University of Houston Wind Ensemble; Tom Bennett, conductor. Naxos 8.570130

On today’s date in 1887, Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She would grow up to be the first African-American woman to win widespread recognition as a symphonic composer. All that happened under her married name: Florence Price.

Price studied at the New England Conservatory, with the noted American composers Frederick Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick, but settled in Chicago. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony. In 1940, her Third Symphony premiered in Detroit, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Detroit that week, was so impressed by a rehearsal of Price’s symphony that she altered her schedule to stay for that evening’s performance, and even wrote about it in her newspaper column, “My Day.”

And speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, on today’s date in 1939, which fell on Easter Sunday that year, the First Lady and then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes arranged for the famous African-American contralto, Marion Anderson, to perform a free, open-air recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 75,000 people attended. Marion Anderson admired Florence Price’s work, and sang some of Florence Price’s songs, including Songs to the Dark Virgin, a setting of a text by Langston Hughes.

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) Symphony No. 3 The Women's Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor. Koch 7518

It’s usually NEW music that gets terrible reviews, but scanning old newspapers, you’ll find that occasionally OLD music gets panned with equal venom.

On today’s date in 1865, a concert by the Theodore Thomas Orchestra at Irving Hall opened with an orchestral arrangement of a Bach Passacaglia, followed by Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola.

The New York Times reviewer was not thrilled with either selection:

“The Bach,” he wrote, “is a fair representation of the treadmill. A culprit may travel on it for a day without advancing a step. It simply goes ‘round and ‘round in the most obvious style, and is generally DULL – like a superannuated church warden… The symphony for violin and viola by Mozart is a work generally avoided in Europe. The wearisome scale passages on the little fiddle repeated ad nauseam on the bigger one are simply maddening. On the whole, one would prefer death to a repetition of this production.”

Thus spake The Times in April of 1865. We should note in its defense that Americans had other matters on their minds that week. The day the review appeared the paper’s headline read: “Union Victory! Peace! Lee Surrenders His Whole Army!”

J.S .Bach (arr. Respighi) Passacaglia in c BBC Philharmonic; Leonard Slatkin, conductor. Chandos 9835

Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791) Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364/320d Midori, violin; Nobuko Imai, viola; NDR Symphony; Christoph Eschenbach, conductor Sony 89488