Perhaps the fanfare is the most optimistic and hopeful of all musical forms, since it signals the start of something new and worth noting.

The American composer Adam Schoenberg* was feeling optimistic and hopeful when he wrote the fanfare that opens his “American Symphony,” a work premiered on this date in 2011 by the Kansas City Symphony led by Michael Stern.

“’American Symphony’ was inspired by the 2008 presidential election,” says Schoenberg, “when both parties asked the people to embrace change and make a difference. I was both excited and honored about ushering in this new era in our nation’s history.”

Schoenberg celebrated his 28th birthday a few weeks after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, and says that just a few days after the election got the idea for his new Symphony after hearing what he calls “the quintessential American symphony,” namely Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, composed in 1946, just after the end of World War II. Not coincidentally, Copland’s Symphony includes his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a key thematic statement

“I believe Copland wanted to bring beauty and peace into the world during a time of great turmoil,” says Schoenberg “and seeing that our country and world had needs similar to those of Copland’s time, I set out to write a modern American symphony that paid homage to our past and looked forward to a brighter future.”

I believe Oscar Wilde gets credit for the line, "But enough about me — what do YOU think about me?" Roughly a century ago, this portrait of the self-absorbed ego not only got laughs on the London stage, it also hit home with German concertgoers after a series of frankly autobiographical tone poems and operas by Richard Strauss had their premieres.

Take today's date in 1899, for example. Strauss's tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life), received its premiere in Frankfurt, with the composer himself conducting. Strauss quoted themes from his own works in the section of the new score marked, "The hero's works of peace," leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that the hero in question was Strauss himself. Depicted in carping and crabbed musical terms were "the hero's critics," meant to be taken as Strauss's real-life music critics. Understandably, THEY were not amused, and attacked Strauss for his inflated ego AND music.

Strauss, as usual, was totally unflappable and offered his own somewhat self-deprecating description of the origins of his heroic piece as follows:

"Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is so little beloved of our conductors these days that to fulfill this need I am composing a largish tone-poem entitled A Hero's Life, admittedly without a funeral march, yet in E-flat, and with lots of horns, which are the yardstick of heroism."

26 miles 385 yards is the length you’ll need to run to complete a Marathon.

Well, the Russian cellist Mstsilav Rostropovich did something even more daunting in 1967, when in the space of two weeks he performed 26 works for cello and orchestra at 8 concerts with the London Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City -- including some world premieres!

Oh, and just to make it easier, he performed everything from memory.

We should also mention, I suppose, that, during those weeks in New York, Rostropovich was asked to leave his hotel because other guests there complained about his practicing all night!

On today’s date in 1967, New England composer Walter Piston’s “Variations for Cello and Orchestra” was one of the new works premiered during Rostropovich’s concerto marathon.

After appearing with the Boston Symphony the previous year, Rostropovich had asked Piston to write something for him, suggesting only, "Please don't write for the player--write for the instrument." Piston took that to mean Rostropovich didn’t want flash, but substance.

After receiving the score, Rostropovich was astonished to learn that Piston himself did not play the cello, so idiomatically had the composer written for the instrument.

For his part, Piston considered the new work for Rostropovich among the best he ever wrote. "I put everything I had into that piece,” he said. “It takes a lifetime of knowledge to write for a man like that."

Composer Serge Prokofiev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich first met in 1947 when Prokofiev was 56 and already ailing, and Rostropovich, a fresh, skinny 20-year-old, was just at the start of his career. Rostropovich had played Prokofiev's long-neglected First Cello Concerto and, after the performance, the grateful composer said he would write something new for the talented young cellist.

Prokofiev completed a Cello Sonata, and in the summer of 1949 invited Rostropovich to his country dacha to play through the new piece. When Rostropovich arrived, he found Prokofiev dressed in a bathrobe with a towel on his head like a turban, surrounded by chickens and roosters. "Forgive my rustic appearance," said Prokofiev to the obviously embarrassed young cellist, and they promptly set to work.

The first public performance of the new Sonata took place on today's date in 1950, at the Moscow Conservatory, with Rostropovich joined by pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Ill health prevented Prokofiev from attending—but, fortunately, we can listen in via a recording that was made at that very performance.

Prokofiev rarely added epigraphs to his scores, but at the top of the score for his Cello Sonata he added some words of Maxim Gorky, "Man — that has a proud sound." Commentators have suggested the broad, sweeping warmth of Prokofiev's Sonata expresses a similar sentiment. In any case, the new work was an instant hit and rapidly became a staple in the cello repertory.

Maurice Ravel’s orchestral suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin" was premiered in Paris this day in 1920. It had started out as a suite of solo piano pieces, intended as a tribute to the great French Baroque composer François Couperin—or, as Ravel wrote, “not so much to Couperin himself, as to 18th-century French music in general.” Although the French word “tombeau” translates literally as “tomb,” it also signifies a musical piece paying tribute to a past master, in the English sense of “in memoriam.”

As it turned out, Ravel’s piece would become a memorial not only to Couperin, but to seven of his friends killed during World War I. His original work on the piece began in 1914, but was interrupted by his service as an ambulance driver during the war. He returned to it after being discharged in 1917. Each movement was dedicated to a friend or two killed in battle.

Although the “tombeau” as a musical form has been associated almost exclusively with French composers, a contemporary American composer has used the idea as well, albeit with a more lighthearted spirit. His “Tombeau de Liberace” makes reference to the late pianist and showman, a kitschy icon of 20th century American pop culture.

Michael Daugherty says, “Starting from the vernacular idiom, I have composed ‘Le Tombeau de Liberace’ as a meditation on the American sublime: a lexicon of forbidden music. It is a piano concertino in four movements, each creating a distinct Liberace atmosphere.”

On this date in 1814, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 8 in F Major. As the scherzo movement of his new symphony, Beethoven recycled a tune he originally used as a musical salute to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome. For a time, Maelzel was Beethoven's friend and sometimes collaborator on concerts and various mechanical projects.

Beethoven used Maelzel's metronomes to add precise, if sometimes debatable, tempo markings to some of his earlier works. Some conductors choose to ignore these metronome markings, since they came after the fact of composition and at a time when Beethoven was increasingly deaf. In fact, in addition to metronomes, the versatile Maelzel also supplied the Beethoven with ear trumpets—the 19th-century version of hearing aids.

Perhaps Beethoven was using one of those ear trumpets when someone asked him why his Seventh Symphony was more popular in Vienna than his Eighth. "Because the Eighth is so much better," he growled in reply.

Closer to our own time, the American composer Leroy Anderson, who lived from 1908 to 1975, immortalized the tick-tock of a mechanical timekeeper in his piece entitled "The Syncopated Clock." Leroy Anderson was a master of the musical miniature, creating dozens of witty pieces with titled like "Plink, Plank, Plunk," "Bugler's Holiday," and "Fiddle Faddle."

Two interesting symphonies had their premieres on today's date just eight years apart. Oddly enough, they were composed nearly ninety years apart.

The first was the Symphony in C by George Bizet, written in 1855 when the composer was only 17. It was mislaid in his papers, ignored by Bizet himself as a naive youthful exercise, and not revived until 1935. It was performed for the first time on the 26th of February that year in Basel, Switzerland under the baton of Felix Weingartner, who found a copy of the score that had been kept in the Paris Conservatory.

The other work that premiered today was the Fifth Symphony of the American composer Roy Harris. It was written in 1942, during the Second World War, and was reportedly inspired by reports of heroic resistance by the Soviet Union to the Nazi invasion. Harris dedicated this symphony to the Red Army in honor of its 25th anniversary.

The first performance—given by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on February 26th, 1943—was broadcast via short wave to the Soviet Union. Ironically, despite Harris's unquestionable credentials as a loyal American and enthusiastic patriot, his pro-Soviet Symphony No. 5 was to become something of an embarrassment when our one-time Soviet allies became Public Enemy No. 1 during the long Cold War period that followed the end of the Second World War.

The double bass is the largest and certainly the most-unwieldy of all stringed instruments, designed to provide the lowest notes of any ensemble. Even so, occasionally the double bass gets a chance to shine as a solo instrument.

On today's date in 1905, a double-bass Concerto received its premiere performance in Moscow, with its composer Serge Kousevitzky as the soloist. Truth be told, Kousevitzky is much more famous as a conductor and musical patron than as a composer, and Kousevitzky's compatriot, the Russian composer Reinhold Gliere, helped arrange and score Kouzevitzky's Concerto, which many suggest sounds suspiciously like concertos for other instruments by Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. Be that as it may, Koussevitzky's concerto remains the most famous of all double-bass concertos, but that situation may change...

The American composer and double-bassist Edgar Meyer has already composed several concertos and chamber works for his instrument. In 1993, Meyer premiered his Bass Concerto in 1993 with Edo de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra, and in 1995 he gave the first performance of this music, his Quintet for Bass and String Quartet, with the Emerson String Quartet.

The work of composer AND performer Edgar Meyer can also be sampled on the best-selling Sony Classical disc titled "Appalachian Waltz," a collaboration with fiddler Mark O'Connor and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

It's quite possible that you or someone you know is the caregiver for an ill or aging relative or friend. If so, you know the emotional rewards—and heavy emotional toll—that caretaking involves.

On today's date in 1989, the American composer John Adams led the Saint Paul Chamber orchestra and baritone Sanford Sylvan in the premiere performance of a powerful new chamber work he had composed inspired by—and in honor of—caretakers everywhere.

In 1988, John Adams's father had died after years of struggling with Alzheimer's, and Adams was haunted by images of his mother caring for her husband as the illness progressed. Living in San Francisco, Adams was also moved by Bay Area friends who nursed loved ones during those helpless early years of the AIDS epidemic.

Adams found that these 20th century experiences resonated in certain poems by the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, who had served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, initially to care for his own wounded brother, but subsequently to tend other wounded soldiers in those traumatic years.

Adams chose one Whitman poem, entitled "The Wound Dresser," as text and title for his new work. "The Wound-Dresser," said Adams, is about the power of "human compassion that is acted out on a daily basis." This work has become one of the most-performed and most-admired of all the compositions of John Adams.

In February of 1919, members of the New York Chamber Music Society gave the premiere performance of this music—an instrumental suite by the American composer Deems Taylor, titled "Through the Looking Glass." A few years later, Deems Taylor landed a job as music critic for the New York World, and following that, became known coast-to-coast as the radio commentator for New York Philharmonic broadcasts, and as the host of a popular quiz-show titled "Information, Please." His voice was also heard as the commentator for the 1940 Disney film, "Fantasia."

On today's date in 1980, another American composer premiered a musical work inspired by "Alice in Wonderland." This was David Del Tredici's "In Memory of a Summer's Day," first presented by the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin. By 1980, Del Tredici had already composed several successful works inspired by the Lewis Carroll books, but "In Memory of Summer's Day" capped the lot, and won that year's Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Del Tredici was a protégé of Aaron Copland, and recalled how Copland would react to Del Tredici's compositions. "He'd say something noncommittal at first, such as 'It's very nice.' Then maybe an hour or so later, at dinner, he would turn to me, apropos of nothing, and say, 'I think the bass line is too regular, and the percussion should not always underline the main beat and would you please pass the butter.'"