If, on today’s date in the year 1930, you happened to be flipping through the pages of the New York Times, you would have seen several ads for radios, including one that argued that purchasing a radio was a good investment.

Just one year after the infamous 1929 stock market crash, New Yorkers might have been a little leery of investing in anything, and disposable income for most Americans was severely limited during the Great Depression that followed.

Still, that same October 5th edition of the Times announced that the New York Philharmonic would commence live nation-wide broadcasts of its Sunday afternoon concerts that very day. Music by Weber, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky would be featured, with the visiting German conducting Erich Kleiber leading the orchestra.

And that wasn’t all: the rest of the Philharmonic’s 1930-31 season, led by the orchestra’s new music director, Arturo Toscanini, would also be broadcast live on subsequent Sunday afternoons.

For music lovers, that radio purchase started to look like a pretty good investment after all.

And so, thanks to the Philharmonic broadcasts, in addition to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, radio audiences coast-to-coast were introduced as well to some of the new works of young American composers like Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

In recent years, archive recordings of many of those famous New York Philharmonic broadcasts have even been released as compact disc sets sold to benefit the Philharmonic’s current activities and programs.

On today’s date in 1910, a young Austrian composer had his first major work staged as a ballet-pantomime at the Vienna Court Opera. It was quite a prestigious affair, all in all, with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit and none other than Franz Josef, the Austrian Emperor, in the audience.

All that was enough to go to any young composer’s head—and the composer in question, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, was very young indeed. He was just 13 when his ballet-pantomime entitled “The Snowman” premiered in Vienna.

Actually, he had written the piano version of “The Snowman” back in 1908, when he was all of 11. Korngold’s teacher, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, orchestrated the piece for the Vienna Court Opera performance, but it wasn’t very long before little Erich was preparing his own orchestrations, thank you very much.

By his 20s, Korngold was a celebrated through Europe as composer of operas and concert hall works. Korngold settled in Hollywood in the 1930s, as his Jewish heritage made a career in Nazi Europe impossible. His film scores for classic Errol Flynn adventure movies—“SVASH-booo-klers” as Korngold called them in his thick Viennese accent—made him famous in America.

During the final decade of his life, Korngold again devoted his attention to concert works, such as this Violin Concerto from 1947, composed for Jascha Heifetz, which recycled some his movie themes into a popular showpiece for a virtuoso performer.

Korngold died in Hollywood in 1957.

One of the last chamber works of the American composer Aaron Copland received its first performance on today’s date in 1971.

This took place in Philadelphia as a benefit for that city’s Settlement Music School, with Copland himself present for the premiere of his “Duo” for flute and piano. The work was commissioned by friends and students of the late William Kincaid, for many years the principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

By 1971, thorny, complex, and atonal music was the fashion in both Europe and America. Copland, for his part, had composed some challenging orchestral works along these lines as well. His “Duo,” however was unashamedly lyrical.

As Copland put it: “What can you do with a flute in an extended form that would not emphasize its songful nature? Lyricism seems to be built into the flute. Some expressed surprise at the tonal nature of my Duo, considering that my recent works had been in a more severe idiom; however, the style was naturally influenced by the fact that I was composing for Kincaid’s students, not for future generations (although I hoped younger flutists would play my Duo eventually).”

Copland needn’t have worried. As music critic Michael Steinberg put it, reviewing its first performance in Boston: “Copland’s Duo is a lightweight work of a masterful craftsman. It is going to give pleasure to flutists and their audiences for a long time.”

Today we celebrate the birthday of an American composer whose name might not ring a bell, but whose music you might instantly recognize—and with a smile.

Leroy Shield’s name rarely appeared on the credits for the classic “Our Gang” and “Laurel & Hardy” comedies from the 1930s, but his music was used in most of them.

Leroy Shield was born in Waseca, Minnesota, on today’s date in 1893. At five he was already an accomplished pianist and organist, and by 15 a professional arranger, composer, and concert pianist. After completing musical studies in Chicago, he accompanied opera singer Eva Gauthier on American concert tours and pioneered works by then-modernist composers like Ravel, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

In 1923, he joined the staff of the Victor Talking Machine Company, supervising their East Coast recording sessions. Then in 1930, he was appointed as Victor’s "Musical Director in charge of Hollywood, California, Activities," and it was in this capacity that he wrote and oversaw the recording of music for the famous comedies produced by the Hal Roach Studios.

In 1945, he moved back to New York and became the orchestral contractor for the NBC radio network. He worked closely with conductor Arturo Toscanini, and even traveled with the famous Italian conductor when Toscanini’s NBC Symphony made its cross-country tour in 1950. Leroy Shield retired in 1955, moved to Florida, and died in Fort Lauderdale in 1962.

One of the finest music schools in the world opened its doors in Philadelphia on today’s date in 1924.

The Curtis Institute of Music was founded with a $12 million dollar grant from Mary Louise Curtis Bok. For many decades that initial grant provided full scholarships for all Curtis students. According to Mrs. Bok, “The aim is for quality of work rather than quick, showy results."

From the start, Mrs. Bok assembled a stellar faculty for the new school, including the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who predicted that Curtis "will become the most important musical institution of our country, perhaps of the world."

Distinguished Curtis alumni have included performers like Peter Serkin, Richard Goode, and Hilary Hahn. And here’s an impressive statistic: today Curtis alumni occupy nearly 25% of the principal desk positions in the top five American symphony orchestras.

Curtis also graduated many famous composers as well, including Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Ned Rorem.

To help celebrate its 75th anniversary in 1999, the Curtis Institute commissioned a new orchestral work from the American composer Jennifer Higdon, who had joined the school’s faculty. Her “Blue Cathedral” was premiered by the Curtis Symphony in the spring of 2000. Higdon says her music is like “a story that commemorates living and passing through places of knowledge and of sharing—and of that song called life.”

That description seems to fit the Curtis Institute as well.

In operatic history, one of the great examples of the old adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” is the career of the French composer Georges Bizet. Bizet died at the age of 36 in 1875, the same year his opera “Carmen” premiered. Now, “Carmen” eventually proved a lasting success and now ranks as one of the great masterworks of French opera—but poor Monsieur Bizet wasn’t around to experience any of that.

Moreover, “Carmen” was preceded by Bizet’s no less than 30 attempts writing a hit opera. Most of these never made it to the stage, and the few that did achieved only a modest success.

The most famous of the “pre-Carmen” operas Bizet penned premiered on today’s date in 1863. It was a Romantic tale set in exotic Ceylon, entitled “Les pêcheurs de perles,” or “The Pearl Fishers.” This was a commission from the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris, and a prestigious opportunity for the 20-something composer to showcase his talents.

“The Pearl Fishers” ran for 18 performances in 1863, and, although applauded by its initial audiences, was roundly panned by the press. Only one music critic saw any merit in Bizet’s music, and that critic just happened to be the great French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz.

Even so, Bizet’s “Pearl Fishers” wasn’t revived until long after Bizet’s death, and some 30 years after its premiere. Today, after “Carmen” of course, it’s Bizet’s SECOND most popular opera.

Yes, Juliet, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a catchy title alone can’t help a piece of music that’s uninspired or just plain boring. An intriguing title, however can sometimes help put audiences into a more receptive frame of mind—or at least pique their curiosity.

From the very beginning of his career in the 1980s, the young American composer Michael Torke had the knack of coming up with quite evocative titles. His early works had titles like “Ecstatic Orange” and “Bright Blue Music.” A piece composed for the 1994 Olympic Games in Atlanta was titled “Javelin,” and this music, an orchestral suite that premiered in Amsterdam on today’s date in 1997, was titled “Overnight Mail.”

And each of the three movements of his orchestral suite had an additional title, as Torke explains:

“The titles of the suite’s three movements, ‘Priority,’ ‘Standard,’ and ‘Saturday Delivery,’ present the options for expediency when sending things, but musically, they represent different reactions to an abstract compositional problem I set up for myself: resolve dissonant notes (non chord tones) by leaps rather than steps. For me this was important, because I want to write music that follows all the old rules of voice leading and counterpoint, but sounds fresh.”

Today we celebrate the birthday of American composer Vivian Fine, who was born in Chicago on this date in 1913.

Already, at the age of five, she was a scholarship piano student at the Chicago Musical College. As she grew up she became enthralled with the great composers and performers she heard at her regular visits to the Chicago Symphony. Vivian Fine initially intended to be a concert pianist, but theory studies with American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger inclined her more and more towards composition.

She also became an avid follower of the emerging “Ultra-Modern” school of composers, including Henry Cowell, who later proved to be one of her early mentors. Fine’s debut as a composer came in Chicago when she was 16, and at 17 she went to New York City, where she studied composition with Roger Sessions, and orchestration with George Szell.

Fine wrote this “Concertante for Piano and Orchestra” in 1944, initially without any specific commission or likelihood of performance. When her teacher Roger Sessions saw her sketches for this music, he commented: “Now we are colleagues.” For his part, George Szell, a musician notoriously hard to please, complimented her on its orchestration.

Teaching also became an important part of Fine's professional life, first at New York University and Juilliard, and ultimately at Bennington College. Vivian Fine died in March of 2000, at the age of 86, following a traffic accident in Vermont.

On today’s date in 1956, the English composer Gerald Finzi died in Oxford. He was just 55 years old. Finzi suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, and three weeks before his death had caught chickenpox from some children he had visited, and the infection proved fatal.

Finzi was born into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His mother was musical, and an amateur composer. Even with talent, wealth, support from the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Bernard Herrmann, and several golden opportunities for career advancement, Finzi proved to be a rather diffident soul who seemed to prefer to work in seclusion and relative obscurity.

He collected rare books and scores by 18th century English composers, but is most famous for his settings of poems by Thomas Hardy, a contemporary of his parent’s generation.

Himself an agnostic, Finzi produced a small body of sacred choral works, and two instrumental pieces that have endeared him to clarinetists: a set of clarinet “Bagatelles” from 1943 and his Clarinet Concerto from 1949.

Although never completely forgotten, a serious revival of interest in Finzi’s music had to wait for several decades after his death. The British critic Norman Lebrecht offers this assessment of Finzi’s appeal: “a confluence of Elgar without bluffness and Vaughan Williams at his most delicate. His concerto for clarinet and strings is a light and lovely lament for lost times.”

On today’s date in 1991, Herbert Blomstedt led the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus in the premiere of a cantata entitled “Genesis,” by the American composer Charles Wuorinen. This cantata was the culminating work of Wuorinen’s four-year association with the San Francisco Symphony as its composer-in-residence.

The most famous setting of the Biblical Genesis story is Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation” from 1798. But early on, Wuorinen decided his cantata would be a non-narrative, non-programmatic treatment of the subject, incorporating both a Latin version of the Genesis text and musical themes from Gregorian chant masses on the subject of the creation.

As the critic Michael Steinberg has noted, Wuorinen’s music fuses the physicality and punch of Stravinsky with Schoenberg’s struc¬tural principles. The resulting style, which some have dubbed “maximalist” is complex and demanding—just as its composer intended.

Wuorinen writes, “In any medium, entertainment is that which we can receive and enjoy passively, without effort, without our putting anything into the experience. Art is that which requires some initial effort from the receiver, after which the experience received may indeed be entertaining, but also transcending as well. Art is like nuclear fusion: you have to put something into it to get it started, but you get more out of it in the end than what you put in. Entertainment is its own reward, and generally doesn’t last.”