It might seem odd that during his long career, Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodály wrote only nine works for orchestra. When someone asked him about this, he replied: “I was busy with more important work: I had to educate a public.”

Kodály and his countryman Béla Bartók were pioneers in the collection and study of Hungarian folk music, and, on top of that, Kodály’s lifelong concern was to instill this rich heritage into the Hungarian people through an extensive and innovative program of musical education.

So successful was Kodály that even outside Hungary the so-called “Kodály method” has been adapted for music education worldwide.

Given Kodály’s tireless educational efforts, it’s surprising he had any time or energy left for composing at all. For example, Kodaly started writing a symphony in the 1930s at the request of the great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.

The Symphony finally received its premiere decades later at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland on today’s date in 1961, and by that time Toscanini had been dead for several years. Even so, Kodály did not forget the original request for the work, and dedicated his only Symphony to the memory of the great conductor.

In fact, Toscanini was also responsible for the creation of one of Kodály’s most popular orchestral works: it was at Toscanini’s prompting that Kodály orchestrated his Marosszék Dances, a set of folk tunes he had originally arranged for solo piano.

In the 1930s, the American composer Ferde Grofe was on a roll. During the previous decade, as staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman orchestra, Grofe had orchestrated all the music that popular ensemble had premiered, including George Gershwin’s 1924 jazz classic “Rhapsody in Blue”. By the late 1920s, Grofe was composing his own original scores, and in 1931 finished his famous “Grand Canyon” Suite.

Around that time, Ferde Grofe left the Whiteman band, and signed on as staff conductor of the NBC Radio Network, and soon became a familiar figure on the American music scene from coast to coast.

On today’s date in 1935, for example, a new ballet score by Grofe premiered at the Hollywood Bowl. It took as its story line a familiar Hollywood theme: the exploited “double” who stands in for a starlet during the making of a film. The double is the anonymous actor who does all the hard work, but gets none of the recognition—or close-ups—when the film is released.

Grofe later arranged his ballet score into a “Hollywood Suite,” adding another musical picture postcard to works with titles like: “Kentucky Derby Suite” or “Niagara Falls Suite.” In the 1960s, looking back on his long career in music, Grofe said: "Many of my compositions, I believe, were born of sight, sound, and sensations common to all of us. I think I have spoken of America in this music simply because America spoke to me.”

Most young American composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, whether Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?

For the young American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the school of Schoenberg was not all that appealing… He said: “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to, but I said to hell with it.” According to his teacher and mentor, the French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was as “gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in many of his own compositions, including his magnum opus, a three-hour oratorio based on William Blake’s poems entitled “Songs of Innocence and Experience.”

Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow. Take this Bolcom piece for woodwind quintet and piano, for example. It’s entitled “Five Fold Five,” and was premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. “Five Fold Five” starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.

In 1960, the musical world was observing the centenary of the birth of composer Gustav Mahler. A British musicologist named Deryck Cooke hit upon the idea of preparing a performing edition of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, a work left unfinished at the time of Mahler’s death in 1911. This was a daunting task for two reasons.

First, Mahler’s widow, Alma, had resisted efforts for too close an examination of Mahler’s sketches for his 10th Symphony, as these were peppered with emotionally charged comments to her in Mahler’s hand, painful reminders that her husband was working on this symphony at a time when he had just discovered she was having an affair with another man.

The second hurdle was purely musical in nature: even though Mahler had sketched out the symphony in full, he had left most of it unorchestrated. Now, Mahler was a master orchestration, and it was argued that only a similarly gifted composer could flesh out Mahler’s sketches. Schoenberg and Shostakovich were both asked to do so, and both declined.

Deryck Cooke, however, persisted, and completed his version of Mahler’s Tenth in time for some excerpts to be broadcast over BBC radio. Understandably, that broadcast spurred interest in hearing all of Cooke’s realization.

Eventually even Alma relented, dropping her opposition to the project shortly before her death. And so, on today’s date in 1964, Bertold Goldschmidt conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first complete concert performance of Deryck Cooke’s arrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10.

On today's date in 1845, the sleepy little German town of Bonn played host to some 5000 visitors. These ranged from curious natives and opportunistic pickpockets to famous composers, performers, and music lovers from many countries, including their royal highnesses, the British monarch Queen Victoria and her royal consort, Prince Albert.

The occasion was the gala unveiling of a bronze stature of the great German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, who had been born in Bonn 75 years earlier. A Beethoven Festival was in progress, and before the unveiling of the Beethoven statue, the German composer Ludwig Spohr had conducted a performance of Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis” at the Bonn Cathedral.

For almost a decade, the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt had been tireless in fundraising for this event and almost single-handedly saw to it that it even occurred at all. Liszt was the largest contributor the Beethoven statue fund, and for years had been performing benefit recitals to enlist others in supporting the project.

On August 12th the big day had finally arrived. Alas, the Festival planning committee was totally unprepared for the huge crowd that descended on Bonn, and woefully incompetent in managing just about every aspect of the Festival.

How incompetent? Well, consider this: as their majesties Queen Victoria and King Wilhelm the IV of Prussia looked on, with great fanfare the shroud fell from Beethoven’s statue—only to reveal the statue’s BACK facing the vast assembled crowd…

Oops.

The Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was tremendously popular in the early years of the 20th century. The French composer Claude Debussy wrote a successful opera based on Maeterlinck’s play “Pelleas and Melisande,” and the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had his heart set on turning Maeterlinck’s “Monna Vanna” into an opera as well.

Unfortunately, Rachmaninoff began work on “Monna Vanna” in 1906 before he had secured the rights to do so. In fact, Rachmaninoff had already finished one act of his opera by 1907 when he learned that Maeterlinck had already granted the rights to another composer. Rachmaninoff was crushed.

Although he stopped work on his opera, years later when he sat down at the piano to play for friends, he would sometimes include melodies from his abandoned opera.

One of those who heard Rachmaninoff play in this fashion was the much younger Russian conductor Igor Buketoff, who said he was too embarrassed at the time to ask the great Rachmaninoff to identify this unfamiliar music.

Decades later Buketoff was startled to recognize those same tunes as he looked over Rachmaninoff’s unfinished piano score for “Monna Vanna,” which had ended up at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Buketoff orchestrated the surviving portions of Rachmaninoff’s opera for its premiere, which occurred on today’s date in 1984, at annual summertime music festival in Saratoga Springs, New York—some 75 years after the music was composed.

August may seem an unlikely time for Advent music, liturgically speaking, but it was on today’s date in 1992 that a remarkable work entitled “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” received its premiere at Royal Albert Hall in London. This was during the 1992 Proms at a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra showcasing the talents of the virtuoso Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

The music with the Advent title was a concerto for percussion and orchestra by the Scottish composer James MacMillan, who explained that the work was started on the first Sunday of Advent in 1991, and completed on Easter Sunday the following year, and based on the ancient Advent Latin plainsong “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel” or, in its more familiar English translation: “O come, o come Emmanuel.”

Many of the orchestral works of James Macmillan are based on religious or liturgical themes, a reflection of the Scottish composer’s own deep Catholic faith, and his percussion concerto “Veni, Veni Emmanuel” was no exception.

“There's very strong and powerful analogies between religion and music,” says MacMillan. “And between music and spirituality… it's because of those connections that I'm determined to explore what the connections might be and for that reason I'm entirely at ease with giving space in my music for these considerations.”

Apparently percussions, orchestras, and audiences are willing to spend some time with MacMillan’s musical considerations. “Veni, Veni Emmanuel” has been performed well over 300 times since its 1992 premiere.

Today’s we tackle a vexing P.C. issue—not “political correctness,” mind you, but “pronunciation correctness,” a passionate matter for classical radio announcers, of course. Now there was a French composer who lived from 1912 to 1997 whose first name was Jean and whose last name was spelled “F-R-A-N- C cedilla-A-I-X.”

Most people today pronounce his name “Jean Frahn-SAY,” which has come to be the generally accepted and recognized pronunciation. The problem is that the composer’s family and close friends pronounced it “Frahn-SEX.”

Years ago, an announcer at a station in New York wrote the composer himself requesting the definitive P.C. answer, and was told, yes, technically it was “Frahn-SEX,” but that he was used to being called "Frahn-SAY" and had given up correcting people, joking that perhaps “Frahn-SAY” sounded more French, or maybe people just didn’t want to say “SEX” out loud.

This witty French composer grew up in musical family in Les Mans and claimed that by the age of twelve, he knew all the piano music from Scarlatti to Ravel. At eighteen, he won the First Prize in Piano from the Paris Conservatory and studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, the legendary teacher of many American composers ranging from Copland to Philip Glass.

Both Jean Frahn-SEX and Jean Frahn-SAY were very prolific composers of works large and small, including this delightful Symphony in G Major, which premiered on today’s date in 1953 at the summer music festival in La Jolla, California.

On today’s date in 1976, the American composer David Del Tredici conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first performance of a work he called “Illustrated Alice.”

The music was subtitled “Two Scenes from Wonderland.” These two scenes would eventually form bookend movements of a much longer “Alice Symphony,” a work which received its first complete performance 15 years later in August of 1991 at the Tangle wood Festival in Massachusetts.

Back in 1968, Del Tredici had become fascinated with the works of Lewis Carroll, whose “Alice in Wonderland” books have captivated both children and adults for generations. To say that Del Tredici was captivated would be something of an understatement: he devoted 30 years of his career to setting Carroll’s creation to music in a series of increasingly tonal works—something that must have come as a surprise to those familiar with his earlier atonal music.

“I couldn’t imagine setting a Carroll text to dissonant music,” explained Del Tredici. “Dissonant music can’t possibly project the mood that surrounds Carroll’s writings. In order to create that mood I had to rethink everything I had done up to that time. I had to think about tonality again, not because I was trying to bring back the music of an older period, but because my musical imagination had seized upon that language.”

Today’s date marks the birthday anniversary of a 20th century composer who was born in Spain, came of age in Cuba, and, in his later years, was a resident of the United States.

His name was Julián Orbón, who was born in Avilés, Spain, on today’s date in 1925 and died in Miami Beach on May 20, 1991.

Orbón began composing at an early age, came to Cuba with his family when he was 10, and by his twenties was already quite active as a music critic, essayist and pianist at concerts of contemporary Cuban music. He was a member of Grupo de Renovación Musical, or “The Group for Musical Renewal.” In 1946 he studied with Copland at Tanglewood, and returned home to serve as director of the Orbón Conservatory in Havana, a music school founded by his father.

After the Cuban revolution, Orbón taught first at the National Conservatory in Mexico City, and then, after settling in the United States in 1964, at a number of American schools, including Washington University, Barnard College and the Hispanic Institute at Columbia.

Revered as a teacher, Orbón was also a successful and award-winning composer. Many of his works are infused with the rhythms and colors of Cuban music and traditions.