1685 was a good year for composers: Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel were all born in 1685, as was, on today’s date, an Italian composer named Lodovico Giustini.

Like Bach, Giustini came from a family of musicians, and Lodovico began his career by succeeding his father as church organist, eventually landing the prize organ post at his hometown cathedral, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Giustini also took up a new-fangled keyboard instrument known as the forte-piano, which, unlike the harpsichord, struck the instrument’s strings with small hammers rather than plucking them like a harp. This new technology allowed music to be played loud and soft (piano and forte), with a more nuanced range of dynamics and phrasing.

Giustini’s claim to fame is that in 1732 he published the very first collection of sonatas written specifically for the instrument we now call the piano. Although Giustini’s sonatas attracted little attention when they were first published, since only a few wealthy royals could afford to own these new and very expensive instruments, over the next two centuries thousands of pianos–and piano sonatas–began appearing in even the most modest of musical households.

On today’s date in 1918, the celebratory “American Fantasy” of the Dublin-born American composer Victor Herbert opened the first program of the newly-formed Cleveland Orchestra.

Cleveland had reason to celebrate. World War I had ended one month earlier, and, for some time, city organizers had been trying to build a hometown orchestra. In December of 1918, Father John Powers of St. Ann’s Church wanted to give a concert to raise some money for his parish, and, as Father Powers also happened to be a fine Irish tenor, offered to perform on the same bill as the new orchestra, just in case the untried ensemble of 54 didn’t prove to be a sufficient box-office attraction.

So, along with Father Power’s songs and Herbert’s “American Fantasy,” conductor Nikolai Sokoloff lead the Orchestra in Bizet’s “Carmen” Suite, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, Liadov’s tone poem “The Enchanted Lake,” and, for a rousing closer, Liszt’s tone poem “Les Preludes.”

Over the next 100 years, especially during the period when George Szell was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, the ensemble came to be regarded as one of the best in the world.

Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5th, 1791, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, a 28-year-old Austrian nobleman who had the ignoble habit of passing off works he commissioned as his own. The Requiem was intended to be a memorial to the Count’s 20-year-old wife, Anna, who had died earlier that year.

Mozart’s wife Constanza arranged for some of Mozart’s pupils to complete the unfinished Requiem, and eventually delivered it to Count Walsegg in order to receive the full commission fee promised her husband.

But just five days after Mozart’s death in 1791, the portions of the Requiem that Mozart himself had completed were sung at a memorial service organized by his friend and collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder.

Schikaneder was the librettist for Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” and ran his own opera house at the Theater auf der Wieden in a Viennese suburb. It was there that Mozart’s “Magic Flute” had premiered, and it was Schikaneder’s musicians who performed parts of Mozart’s Requiem for the first time on today’s date in 1791, at St. Michael’s Church in the center of Vienna.

What’s your favorite season? And how would you describe it in words? And if you’re a composer, how would you describe it in music?

The most famous musical depiction of “The Four Seasons” is a set four violin concertos by the Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi, but other composers have evoked the mood and sounds of the seasons. On today’s date in 2009, the American composer Philip Glass tossed his hat into the ring with the Toronto Symphony premiere of a new work entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Glass’s seasonal tone painting, like Vivaldi, is a set of four concertos, written for violinist Robert McDuffie, who also performed the premiere. But when McDuffie finally saw the finished score, he felt Glass’s view of some of the seasons did not quite match his own, so they came up with an unusual solution: in the published score, Glass did not provide titles for any of the four concertos, letting each listener (or performer) decide for him- or herself which concerto matched which season.

So, in this case of THIS “Four Seasons,” it’s all up to you.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1908, Gustav Mahler conducted the New York Symphony, the 200-voice Oratorio Society chorus, and two vocal soloists in the American premiere of his Symphony No. 2, his “Resurrection Symphony.”

These days, Mahler’s Second ranks among his most popular works. But how was this new music received by New Yorkers back in 1908? An unsigned review in the New York Daily Tribune noted:

“It was by demonstrations of far more than mere politeness that the large audience found vent for its feelings of interest and pleasure in this new music ... After the Schubertian second movement there was long continued applause, and at the close of the composition… there was cheering and waving of handkerchiefs until Mr. Mahler was compelled to appear several times to bow his thanks and appreciation.”

As for the music itself, the review opined: “… of the beauty and insight of certain episodes there can be no doubt… there seems, however, a lack of significant and commanding originality. It is more cerebral than passionate, more intellectual than compellingly emotional.”

On today’s date in 1975, the Oakland, California, Youth Orchestra gave the first performance of a symphony by a Bay area resident, American composer Lou Harrison. Harrison began sketches for this symphonic score back in 1942 and tinkered with it off and off until the day of its premiere performance, even stapling in 15 additional measures to the young players’ parts at their final dress rehearsal.

The commission for Harrison’s Fourth Symphony, subtitled “The Elegiac,” came from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and in part was written as a tribute to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, two of the 20th century’s greatest new music patrons. But the intensely personal tone of this elegiac symphony was prompted by the death of Harrison’s mother, which was followed by the death of his close friend, the iconoclastic American composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch.

The symphony’s first movement is titled “Tears of the Angel Israfel”—the angel of music in Islamic lore—and the score also bears two inscriptions: The first reads “Epicurus said of death: where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not; therefore, death is nothing to us.” The second inscription is a quote from Horace: “Bitter sorrows will grow milder with music.”

On today’s date in 1998, two brand-new Christmas carols debuted in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the “Welcome Christmas” choral concert of VocalEssence conducted by Philip Brunelle.

The two carols, “Sweet Noel” by Joan Griffith and “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn” by Richard Voorhaar, were the prize-winning submissions entered in a contest arranged by the Plymouth Music Series and the American Composers Forum. The idea was to inspire contemporary composers to create new carols that—who knows?—might turn out to be classics over time.

As Brunelle put it, “The Christmas carols that we love to sing and hear have a timelessness about them wrapped in their music and words. Out of submissions from all across the USA, [we] selected two that we felt captured this feeling.”

Since 1998, the “Welcome Christmas” Carol Contest has continued as an annual tradition, and hundreds of worthy carols have been submitted. Each year, two are selected and premiered in December by Brunelle’s choral ensemble. These “Welcome Christmas” concerts are recorded by American Public Media for both regional broadcast and national distribution.

On today’s date in 1998, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Orchestra, led by Eiji Oue, premiered a new symphony by the American composer Libby Larsen. This was her Symphony No. 4, a work scored for strings alone.

Larsen explained her decision to do without winds, brass, and percussion as follows: “This Symphony is both homage to strings and an essay about them. Strings, the core of the symphony orchestra, are supremely lyrical and supremely emotional. Yet, throughout the 20th century, perhaps marked by the performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, orchestral compositions have tended to become more and more rhythmic and percussive and less lyrical.”

Larsen goes on to make this interesting observation: “In each century since the 1600s, the orchestra has added a new choir of sound to its ensemble: the Baroque orchestra consisted chiefly of strings; woodwinds were added during the 1700s; brass during the 1800s. The 20th century has added the percussion section.”

Larsen said her new symphony was an attempt to capture something of the melody and inflections of 20th century American English, as it is spoken and sung, through orchestral strings alone.

On today’s date in 1693, a new opera based on an old legend had its premiere performance at the Académie de la Musique in Paris. The new opera was by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The old legend was that of Medea, the sorceress who murdered her own children to avenge her abandonment by their father, the Greek hero, Jason.

Charpentier’s “Médée” (to give his opera its French title) was well received by its first audiences. The most celebrated French soprano of her day sang the title role, but one contemporary critic, impressed by Charpentier’s achievement, wrote, “The emotions are so vivid, that even if the role were only spoken, the opera would not fail to make a great impression.”

In the three centuries following Charpentier’s opera, many other musicians have taken up the Medea legend as well. In 1980, the American composer Jacob Druckman took themes from three famous Medea operas and worked these into a three-movement orchestral suite entitled “Prisms,” with Charpentier’s version of “Medea” having pride of place and quoted in the first movement of Druckman’s score.

Parents are not supposed to have favorite children. By analogy, maybe composers aren’t supposed to love some of their pieces more than others—but they often do.

In the case of the Czech composer, Antonín Dvořák, his little Sonatina for Violin and Piano was one of his proudest creations. He wrote it for two of his older children, 15-year-old Otilie and her ten-year-old brother Antonin Junior.

The Sonatina was composed in 1893, while Dvořák and his family were living in America. In the fall of that year, Dvořák had paid a visit to the Czech community in St. Paul, Minnesota, and while there had visited Minnehaha Falls, a local tourist attraction. After viewing the picturesque little waterfall, Dvořák jotted down a musical idea, a bit of rippling water music that found its way into the Sonatina’s slow movement.

The Sonatina was finished in New York City on today’s date in 1893—less than two weeks before the premiere of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Despite the tremendous success of that symphony, Dvořák liked to say his proudest premiere was when his children played the Sonatina for him in the family parlor.