On today’s date in 2010, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, the ALIAS ensemble gave the premiere performance of a new chamber world by the American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Her new work was entitled “Hilos,” the Spanish word for “threads,” and was an eight-movement quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet.

Now, it’s not unusual for composer to be inspired by or to tap into traditions inspired by their particular cultural background, but Gabriela Lena Frank has a pretty wide variety of options in that regard: Her father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s, and Franck herself grew up in Berkeley, California.

"There's usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character," says Frank. In comments for the premiere performance of “Hilos,” Frank noted, “There are similarities to [Mussorgsky’s] ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ in that each movement tells a different story … Hilos refers to the ‘threads’ that make up Andean textiles and how these threads weave together to portray tantalizing pictures.”

Each of the short movements of “Hilos” has an evocative title, such “Canto del Altiplano” (Song of the Highlands), “Zumballyu” (Spinning Top), or “Juegos de los Niños” (Games of the Children).

"This highway leads to the shadowy tip of reality: you're on a through-route to the land of the different, the bizarre, the unexplainable... Go as far as you like on this road. Its limits are only those of mind itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, you're entering the wondrous dimension of imagination…"

Next stop The DATEBOOK Zone.

OK, all kidding aside, but "submitted for your approval" as Rod Serling used to say, this is the COMPOSERS DATEBOOK for September 30th. I'm John Zech.

On today's date in 1960, the opening installment of the second season of "The Twilight Zone," — the legendary sci-fi/fantasy TV series created by Mr. Serling — aired on CBS. For their second season, the producers added a new signature theme, the now-familiar one with bongo drums. It was written by Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French composer and conductor. In Paris, Constant had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger, and Nadia Boulanger. Constant had a very respectable career as a composer and teacher, but today he's best known for his brief but iconic "Twilight Zone" theme.

During its five-season run, that show also employed the talents of some other famous composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman, Fred Steiner, and Franz Waxman.

And just in case you're wondering who wrote the theme for the FIRST season of "The Twilight Zone" when the show debuted in 1959, well, that was another famous Hollywood composer by the name of Bernard Herrmann.

On today's date in 2000, a new cello concerto with an unusual title received its premiere performance at the Barbican Center in London. Billed as the "Crouching Tiger" Concerto, this score was by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, and was derived from Tan's film score for Ang Lee's mystical and magical martial arts film titled "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Tan Dun said he spent a whole year thinking about what sort of music the film demanded before he set one note to paper. In the end, the score featured a prominent cello part, tailor-made for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a variety of traditional Chinese instruments and a percussion battery that included a North African frame drum. The haunting score matched the film so effectively that it was nominated for—and won—an Academy Award.

It was director Ang Lee who suggested that Tan Dun rework his film score into a cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, and even offered to put together a special film to accompany the concerto. In effect, the director was saying, "Turnabout is fair play—you composed music to fit my film, now I'll compose a film to fit your concerto!" Ang Lee and his cinematic collaborators pulled together outtakes and production shots from the original film and mixed in real and imaginary scenes from New York's Chinatown and 19th century Beijing for the new film designed to accompany performances of the new concerto.

On today's date in 1951, the classic science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was playing in theaters across America. The film's opening sequence depicted a UFO hovering over Washington, D.C. In the early 1950s, flying saucer sightings were increasingly common, perhaps a result of mass hysteria spawned by cold war tensions and the potential threat of atomic bombs dropping from the skies. Or maybe we WERE being visited by other planets?

In any case, the movie made a big impression at the time, reinforced by a memorable film score composed by Bernard Herrmann. And countless kids—and probably a few adults as well—memorized the magic words "Gort: Klaatu barada nikto" which, in the film, prevented Washington DC's destruction by death-ray robots from outer space.

Fast forward some 50 years to 1999, when Washington DC's National Symphony premiered a concerto for percussion and orchestra, a work composed for percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie by the American composer Michael Daugherty.

Inspired by the outer-space look of Glennie's percussion gear, Daugherty titled his piece "UFO" and asked that the soloist arrive unexpectedly and dressed as a space alien! In performance, Glennie moves through the audience and around the stage while performing sleight-of-hand improvisations on a variety of flying saucer-like percussive instruments.

In September of 2001, the American composer Elliott Carter was just a few months shy of his 93rd birthday, but still busy composing new works for both large and small ensembles.

On today’s date that year, Carter’s Cello Concerto received its premiered performance in Chicago with virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony -- the orchestra that had commissioned the work.

Now, Elliott Carter’s music is technically challenging for performers, and its complexity can make it equally challenging for audiences, especially at first hearing. Despite all that, Carter’s comments on his music are often quite straightforward:

“In this score I have tried to find meaningful, personal ways of revealing the cello's vast array of wonderful possibilities,” he wrote. “My Cello Concerto is introduced by the soloist alone, playing a frequently interrupted cantilena that presents ideas later to be expanded into movements.”

A month after its premiere, Ma, Barenboim, and the Chicago Symphony brought the new work to Carnegie Hall, and The New York Times reviewer Anthony Tommasini wrote:

“For all its complexities (leaping double stops, metric modulations, rhythmic dislocations, long spans of sustained lyricism that get rashly interrupted by skittish figurations), the cello part has a rhapsodic, improvisatory quality …. At its conclusion, when Mr. Carter, who is 92, climbed the steps to the stage with a cane to steady him, he received a prolonged standing ovation.”

On today's date in 2000, King's Chapel in Boston arranged for a daylong festival of music by the early American composer William Billings in honor of the 200th anniversary of his death in 1800. At a pay of twelve shillings per session, Billings had taught singing at King's Chapel "to such persons of both sexes as incline to sing psalm-tunes" (as the Chapel's records of 1786 stated). They must have liked him, since in 1790, when Billings was in financial trouble, the Chapel held a benefit concert for him with tickets selling at two shillings a head.

When Billings was born in 1746, America was still a British colony. The last record we have of him as a composer dates from 1799, when he wrote music for a memorial concert for George Washington, the first president of the United States, who died in December of that year.

Today Billings is regarded as America's first truly original native composer. His contemporaries agreed. The Reverend William Bentley of Salem was moved to write these lines in his diary: "Many who have imitated him have excelled him, but none of them had better original powers… He was a singular man, of moderate size, short of one leg, with one eye, without any address, and with an uncommon negligence of person. Still, he spake and sung and thought as a man above the common abilities."

"Spaghetti Western" is a nickname given a genre of Italian films from the mid-1960s, most famously directed by Sergio Leone, and often starring Clint Eastwood as the taciturn, gun-toting anti-hero. "Spaghetti Western" is also the title of a 20-minute Concerto for English horn and Orchestra written by the American composer Michael Daugherty, a work that received its premiere performance on today's date in 1998 at a Pittsburgh Symphony concert conducted by Mariss Jansons. "Just as Leone's films redefined the Western genre from an Italian perspective," writes Michael Daugherty, "I redefine the European concerto by placing it within an American context. In my 'Spaghetti Western,' the English horn soloist is the 'Man with no Name,' moving through a series of musical landscapes. I create imaginary scenarios that evoke the sun-drenched panoramas, the barren deserts, and desolate towns of the Wild West, as well as the gun-slinging characters who haunt the landscape. The three movements of the concerto are my own original music compositions, without alluding to particular film scenes or following their plot." And, for the record, the three movements Daugherty refers to are titled, "Strade Vuote" (Empty Streets), "Assalto all'oro" (Gold Rush), and "Mezzogiorno di fuoco" (Noon of Fire). And since Clint Eastwood was not in a position to play the English horn for the Pittsburgh Symphony premiere, Harold Smoliar removed the cigar from his parched, suntanned lips, adjusted his poncho, and took up his English horn for the performance.

On today’s date in 2011, the Saint Louis Symphony under David Robertson premiered a new piano concerto by the American composer Steve Mackey. The soloist was Orli Shaham, Robertson’s wife, to whom the new work was dedicated.

The new concerto had an odd title, “Stumble to Grace,” which Mackey explained:

“There is a narrative running through the piece … the piano is all thumbs … as it stumbles in its first entrance, playing naïve and awkward plinks and plunks. By [the end], the piano plays sophisticated, virtuosic and, at times, graceful contrapuntal music—a fugue, in fact …

“The inspiration … came from observing my now two-and-a-half year old toddler learning to become human … when he was first experimenting with perambulation, and now a year later there is a confident lilt to his step … I wanted to open my compositional process to incorporate some of the whimsy and exuberance that he brings to his exploration of the world. Among his first phrases was ‘this, there’ spoken as he tried to insert a square peg into a round hole.”

Mackey concludes, “A preoccupation with one’s children is common among most new parents but this seemed a particularly appropriate … for a piece written for Orli Shaham. She and her conductor husband, David Robertson, have twins less than a year older than my son and we’ve had play dates and shared narrations about new parenthood.”

Now, it's something of a parlor game for historians of the American presidency to constantly reappraise and re-evaluate the status of past occupants of the Oval Office. For example, some recent historians have given President Dwight D. Eisenhower higher marks than others for his political accomplishments in the White House. But even Eisenhower's most vocal admirers would not credit his administration with a particularly ardent passion for the fine arts.

In the spring of 1960, conductor Leonard Bernstein performed a concert in Washington DC attended by President Eisenhower, who thanked Bernstein with these words, "I liked that last piece you played; it's got a tune. I like music with a tune, not all of them arias and barcarolles and things."

Bernstein never forgot the phrase. In fact, he even titled one of HIS last pieces "Arias and Barcarolles." Originally written in 1988 for vocal soloists and piano four-hands, one of Bernstein's protégés, the Chinese-born composer Bright Sheng, orchestrated the work with Bernstein's approval. The orchestral version of "Arias and Barcarolles" premiered on today's date in 1989, with the New York Chamber Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz and featuring vocalists Susan Graham and Kurt Ollmann. "Arias and Barcarolles" is a semi-autobiographical song-cycle dedicated to Bernstein's friends and family members, a sometimes humorous, sometimes touching summing-up of Bernstein's life and career.

On today's date in 1874, the English composer Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham. He was christened "Gustavus Theodore von Holst," and his early works were published under that name, but he removed the Germanic "von" after World War I broke out in 1914. At the Royal College of Music, Holst studied composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and became the close friend of his fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams. For a time, Holst earned his living by playing trombone in theater and light music ensembles, and later played with a British opera company and toured with the Scottish Orchestra. In 1905, he took on a teaching post at the St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, a post he kept until the end of his life. He took his teaching duties seriously, and only composed on weekends or during his summer vacations. It took him two years to write his most popular work, the orchestra suite "The Planets," whose success baffled and dismayed Holst. "If nobody likes your work," he argued, "you have to go on just for the sake of the work, and you are in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself." True to his word, Holst disappointed many of his most ardent admirers, who kept hoping he'd write another big orchestral showpiece like "The Planets." He died in London in 1934.