Each summer the BBC organizes the biggest classical music festival in the world, namely the BBC Proms, which stretches from mid-July to early September, offering dozens of orchestral concerts, chamber and solo recitals, choral performances, and both early and brand-new music, including specially-commissioned new works.

At the 2004 Proms, on today’s date, a new piece by the British composer Judith Bingham was premiered by the BBC Chorus. Entitled “The Secret Garden,” it was inspired by several events: a conversation about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, a BBC TV series entitled “The Private World of Plants,” some rather racy descriptions of the sex life of plants by the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and a disturbing news story about the bombing of the so-called “Adam Tree” in Iraq at a site that locals believe was where the Garden of Eden once stood.

Bingham wrote her own text, which includes many Latin names of plants, which led to “The Secret Garden’s” subtitle: “Botanical Fantasy.”

“This is meant to be a magical piece,” says Bingham. “It has a Christian framework with opening and closing quotations from Genesis and Matthew … but the piece also seems to wonder whether the world is better off without humans, and that, should humans cease to exist, Paradise would very soon re-establish itself …”

If pressed to name a famous 20th century Danish composer, most concert-goers would say, “Carl Nielsen” – after all, he wrote five symphonies that get performed every now and then. But if pressed to name a 20th century Danish composer who wrote thirteen symphonies, not many would be able to say, “Vagn Holmboe, of course – and he also wrote 20 string quartets!”

To be fair, the works of Vagn Holmboe, a Dane who lived from 1909 to 1996, don’t show up on the programs of American orchestras or string quartets very often these days, which is a shame, since his music is quite intriguing. The prolific Mr. Holmboe wrote as many string quartets as Bartok and Shostakovich’s combined, and both those composers influenced his style. Holmboe’s String Quartet No. 13, for examples, is in 5 movements, like some of Bartok’s, and premiered in Copenhagen on today’s date in 1976.

In addition to being a prolific composer and respected composition teacher, Holmboe was a nature lover: in 1939 he settled in the idyllic Danish countryside of Zealand, where he personally planted 3000 trees on his land by Lake Arreso.

When asked about his own music, Holmboe once said, "For a modern composer … music cannot describe emotion and its manner, or in other words: emotion is not the purpose. One can, however, say that emotion is the driving force, the reason why composers express themselves in the material with which they feel at home: music."

In the 19th century, anybody who had the means would flee the stifling heat of the cities and head for someplace green and shady and cool: a country house, a spa perhaps, or maybe just a cabin in the woods. Of course, these days you just crank up the air-conditioning. THAT wasn't an option until fairly recently, however. In the 19th century, it was Johannes Brahms who set the fashion for composers to spend their summer holiday months in the countryside working on their music. His Violin Concerto and Second Symphony were the products of leisurely weeks spent in the lake district of Austria's Carinthian Alps. The American composer Edward Collins, who lived from 1889-1951, followed Brahms' example. For Collins, the city to be escaped was Chicago, and his country refuge was Cedar Lake, Wisconsin. In the summer of 1913, Collins composed a Concert Piece for Piano and Orchestra. Like much of Collins' music, it was premiered by the Chicago Symphony under conductor Frederick Stock, who encouraged young American talent, especially a talented local boy like Collins, a native of Joliet, Illinois. Collins is just one of dozens of American composers whose works were once popular, but have now all but disappeared from view. In the case of Edward Collins, that may change, as conductor Marin Alsop and the Concordia Orchestra have plans to record all his major orchestral works.

The month of August in 1613 proved to be an especially eventful one in the life and career of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. The previous summer, his old employer, Duke Vincenzo of Mantua, had died, and Monteverdi was laid off by the Duke's successor. The composer cooled his heels in Cremona for a year or so with little to do.

Then, in the summer of 1613, the position of Master of Music for the Republic of Venice opened up, and, on today's date that year, Monteverdi was in all probability busily rehearsing musicians for a trial concert of his music at St. Mark's Cathedral scheduled for the 19th. The concert was a success. Monteverdi got the job, a generous salary, and even a cash advance to cover his move from Cremona.

So much for the good news—on his trip back to Cremona, Monteverdi was robbed by highwaymen armed with muskets. In a surviving letter, Monteverdi described the incident in some detail, noting that the muskets were very long and of the flint-wheel variety, and that he lost more than a hundred Venetian ducats.

Despite the trauma—and the humiliation of being strip-searched for valuables by one of the robbers—Monteverdi recovered his fortunes in Venice. In addition to his duties at St. Mark's, he became famous writing a newfangled sort of commercial entertainment called opera, and lived to the ripe old age of 77.

In 1980, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, his wife, and his two sons emigrated from his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Austria. Since the 1960's, Pärt's increasingly spiritual and overtly religious music, imbued with mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, did not sit well with the communist authorities, and Pärt found it increasing hard to live and work in Estonia.

On today's date in 1980, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, another Baltic artist, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, gave the premiere performance of a new violin-piano arrangement of Part's "Fratres," or "Brothers"—an instrumental work from 1977 that Pärt subsequently rescored for a variety of ensembles.

In most of arrangements of "Fratres," the music remains essentially unchanged, but in the version commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, the original harmonic material resides in the piano part, while the violin plays virtuosic variations above it. The challenge for the violinist is to simultaneously convey both virtuosity in his part AND the serenity "in the Pärt!"

That serenity is the result of Pärt's effort to—as he put it— "learn to walk again as a composer." He came up with a term, tintinnabulation, for the simplicity and directness of expression he sought.

"Tintinnabulation is like this," writes Pärt. "I am alone with silence. I work with very few elements… The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation."

In the 1950s, if you said the words "Cuban music," perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing "Babaloo" might come to mind. These days, it's more likely the Buena Vista Social Club.

On today's date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his "Cuban Overture" under its original title "Rumba." Cuban dances and dance music have always proved appealing to North Americans, and composers are no exception. Long before George Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works.

In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty, little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song "America" in Bernstein's hit musical, "West Side Story."

And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line entitled "Desi"—a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of, who else, Ricky Ricardo.

When spaceman Michael Rennie's flying saucer circled over Washington, DC, in the 1951 sci-fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," it did so to the accompaniment of an electronic instrument known as the Theremin. Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today's date in 1896. Theremin studied astronomy, physics, and cello, and in 1927 he traveled to the West, where he quickly obtained a patent for an electronic instrument he called the Thereminovox. In the 1930s, Theremin arranged concerts for his creation at New York's Carnegie Hall. Then, in 1938, without explanation, Theremin disappeared. Some said it was because his American business ventures didn't pan out; others said that Theremin was married to two women at the same time and things had started to get tricky for him stateside. The truth was even stranger. Theremin was a spy, and had been passing on American technical information to the Soviets. Ironically, when he did return home, Theremin was immediately thrown into a Soviet Prison camp for seven years. While incarcerated, he developed miniature electronic eavesdropping devices for the Soviet government, one of which was successfully installed in the American Embassy, another, for good measure, in Stalin's own apartment. After decades of top secret espionage work, in 1989, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the 92-year old Theremin again showed up in New York to be honored at a festival of electronic music, amazed that his name and instrument were even remembered.

There was a time when German opera houses would have fought over the chance to premiere a brand-new opera by Richard Strauss. But by 1940, when Strauss finished a mythological opera entitled "The Love of Danae," there was a war on, and, on top of that, Strauss had fallen out of favor with Germany's Nazi rulers. A scheduled premiere in Dresden had to be cancelled. In Leipzig, the orchestral parts for the new opera were lost in a fire, and in Munich an Allied air raid damaged the opera's sets and scenery. By the summer of 1944, when conductor Clemens Krauss was rehearsing handpicked vocal soloists and the Vienna Philharmonic for the opera's belated premiere at the Salzburg Festival, the collapse of the Third Reich was imminent. On August 1st, an order was issued from Berlin canceling all music festivals and closing all theaters. Somehow Salzburg managed to get a dispensation, and rehearsals for Strauss's opera were allowed to continue. A private dress rehearsal of "The Love of Danae" took place in Salzburg on August 16, 1944. The 80-year old composer attended, and, with tears in his eyes, thanked the performers with these words: "Perhaps we shall meet again in a better world." Strauss died in 1949, and it wasn't until today's date three years later that the first public performance of "The Love of Danae" occurred at the 1952 Salzburg Festival.

It's said that Nature abhors a vacuum—and so, apparently, did Richard Wagner, who devised a brass instrument to bridge a gap he perceived between the horns and the trombones in the orchestra of his day. And so the "Wagner tuba" was born, a brass instrument Wagner designed for the 1876 premiere of his cycle of four "Ring" operas in Bayreuth, Germany, which began on today's date that year with "Das Rheingold"—the first opera in the "Ring" cycle.

Other composers have also scored for Wagner tubas, including Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss, both ardent Wagner fans, and also Igor Stravinsky, who, though certainly not a Wagnerite, did include Wagner tubas in some of the early versions of his famous ballet scores.

Some contemporary composers include parts for the Wagner tuba in their works as well, and a quartet of these instruments appears in the score of "Stele" by the contemporary Hungarian composer, György Kurtág. Kurtág wrote "Stele" in 1994 for the Berlin Philharmonic and its then music director, Claudio Abbado, after a year spent attending performances and rehearsals by that virtuoso orchestra.

"Stele" is the Greek word for a carved or inscribed stone slab that commemorates a person or event. Kurtág is noted for his short, epigrammatic and very introspective chamber works, and "Stele" is his first major work for a large, conventional, arranged symphony orchestra.

Some have claimed that it was on today's date in 1877 that the American inventor Thomas Edison recorded his own voice reciting, "Mary had a little lamb" on a tin-foil cylinder of his own design. Now, other historians date the precise birth of the phonograph a bit earlier, others months later. In any case, the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company wasn't established until January of 1878.

Initially, recording music wasn't Edison's top priority for his invention: He thought his phonograph might be profitable as an aid to stenographers, or for families who wanted to record the last words of beloved relatives.

It took a little over a decade for classical music and the phonograph to seriously interact. In London in 1888, a bit of a Crystal Palace performance of Handel's oratorio "Israel in Egypt" was captured on an Edison cylinder. In Vienna, Johannes Brahms, seated at the piano, recorded a snippet of his famous Hungarian Dance No. 3, prefaced by a few words that for years people assumed were uttered by the composer himself—although the latest research says somebody else provided the spoken intro.

The voice of British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan was captured, however, commenting (and we quote): "I am astonished—and terrified—at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever!"

Well, Sir Arthur, I'm afraid there's no going back now…