It's said that ragtime composer Scott Joplin was born on today's date in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas.* His family played the banjo, violin, and guitar, but little Scott was fascinated by the piano in a neighbor's house.

Joplin's father bought an upright for his son, and some German musicians in Texas taught him the European classics. By age 17, Joplin was proficient enough to play piano on the road and ended up performing in the honky-tonks of St. Louis. In 1894, Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, where he began to write original music while performing at a place called the Maple Leaf Club, which was to lend its name to his most famous piece, the "Maple Leaf Rag."

Scott Kirby, a contemporary composer of ragtime music, shares Joplin's first name. Born in Urbana, Ohio, Scott Kirby lived and worked for a time in New Orleans. In addition to performing the classic rags of Joplin and the New Orleans romantic composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Kirby composes brand-new rags in a style he calls "Terra Verde."

"Terre Verde," says Kirby, "is a contemporary cousin of New Ragtime with roots in a wide variety of American ethnic music, as well as strong ties to European Romantics of the 19th century, such as Chopin and Schumann."

* Although for many years Joplin's birth date was accepted as November 24, 1868, more recent research has revealed that this is almost certainly inaccurate – the most likely approximate date being the second half of 1867. And it's also uncertain exactly where he was born!

Do you see colors when you hear music? No, we're not going psychedelic on you and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today's edition of COMPOSERS DATEBOOK.

It's just that many composers do—see colors, that is.

For example, the late Romantic Russian composer Alexander Scriabin would describe the key of F-sharp Major as very definitely being "bright blue." His colleague Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, however, thought F-sharp Major more a greyish-green hue. While many composers confess to seeing certain musical keys as certain colors, the fact is they don't always agree on WHICH color matches which key.

Which brings us to the American composer Michael Torke, who gave the title "Bright Blue Music" to an orchestral piece that premiered on today's date at Carnegie Hall. This was at a concert of the New York Youth Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller.

In 1985, when this music premiered, Torke was just 24 years old, but had already been composing music for most of his young life. In addition to a string of other "colorful" scores, with titles like "The Yellow Pages" and "Ecstatic Orange," Torke has gone on to also write a number of ballet scores and vocal works, including a TV opera and, in 1999, a big choral symphony for the Disney Corporation to celebrate the Millennium.

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten. The British composer was born in Suffolk in 1913, the son of a dentist. In the Anglican Church, November 22nd is celebrated as St. Cecilia's Day, in honor of the patron saint of music, and young Edward Benjamin Britten showed a very early and very deep talent for music. He studied at the Royal College in London, and privately with the British composer Frank Bridge, and by the time of Britten's death in 1976, was rated as arguably the finest British composer of the 20th century.

Regarding his craft, Britten remarked, "Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house—the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house." And, on still another occasion, "The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping."

In a feature celebrating Britten's 50th birthday that appeared in a 1963 issue of TIME magazine, the composer's lifetime partner, the tenor Peter Pears, said, "Britten has never claimed to be an innovator. There blows though his vocal music, at least, a strong, revitalizing southeast wind which has rid English song of much accumulated dust and cobwebs. If Britten is no innovator, he is most certainly a renovator."

Today we have a letter penned on this day in 1615 by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi to a friend at the court of the Duke of Mantua.

The letter accompanied a vocal score that Monteverdi hoped would induce the Duke to commission a much larger work. After detailed instructions regarding the positioning of the singers and the instruments Monteverdi adds—almost as an afterthought—this line: "If you could let the singers and players see it for an hour before His Highness hears it, it would be a very good thing indeed." Hmmm... Talk about "authentic performance practice!"

More than an hour's rehearsal was probably necessary for the U.S. premiere of American composer Steve Reich's intricate setting of four Hebrew psalm fragments—titled "Tehillim"—which took place in Houston, Texas, on today's date in 1981. Back then, Reich was already famous as one of America's leading "minimalist" composers, but a search for fresh directions coincided with Reich's rediscovery of his Jewish heritage, and "Tehillim" was the result.

"For me," says Reich, "the most important aspect of a piece of music, mine or someone else's, is its emotional and intellectual effect on performers and audiences—I find it basically impossible to separate the emotional and intellectual aspects of a piece of music."

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1 was first heard on this day in Budapest in 1889, with the 29-year-old composer conducting.

Originally billed as a "symphonic poem," a newspaper in Budapest even printed a detailed program, obviously supplied by Mahler himself. For subsequent performance in Europe, Mahler quickly withdrew these "Cliff's Notes" to his First Symphony.

Twenty years later, in December of 1909, Mahler conducted its American premiere at Carnegie Hall, during his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic. The symphony drew mixed reviews.

Some New York critics said it was impossible to fathom without knowing the original program: "There are matters in it, that as absolute music, have no evident significance, and that serve merely to puzzle and perplex," wrote the Times. The critic for the Sun took a dislike to the symphony's finale, suggesting "when the weather is bad in Tyrol, it is beyond the power of language to characterize."

Mahler's own reactions are recorded in a letter he sent to Bruno Walter: "The day before yesterday I did my First here, apparently without getting much reaction. However, I myself was pretty pleased with that youthful effort… The audiences here are very lovable and relatively better mannered than in Vienna. They listen attentively and very sympathetically. The critics are the same as anywhere else. I don't read any of them."

The modern Hungarian city we know as Budapest is really three older settlements merged into one: Buda, on the right bank of the Danube, was the royal seat of the medieval Hungarian kings; Obuda, just to the north, was an ancient Roman provincial capital; and Pest, is a newer city situated on the left bank of the Danube. These three became the modern-day city Budapest in 1873. In 1923, to celebrate modern Budapest's 50th anniversary, the Hungarian government commissioned two of its greatest composers, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, to compose orchestral pieces which both premiered on today's date that year. Bartok's contribution was a lively orchestra "Dance Suite," with themes reminiscent of Hungarian folk melodies, although no actual folksongs are quoted. It's one of his most genial and upbeat orchestral scores. Kodaly's contribution was his "Psalmus Hungaricus" for tenor, chorus and orchestra, a free setting a 16th century Hungarian translation of Psalm 55, in which the Psalmist pleads for deliverance from his persecutors. In the 16th century, Hungary was under Turkish rule, and the Psalm had a special political resonance for Kodaly, who had fallen out of favor with the right-wing Hungarian regime then in power. Despite its melancholy tone, "Psalmus Hungaricus" was an instant hit in Hungary and elsewhere, and helped established Kodaly's international reputation as one of his country's greatest composers.

Today's date marks the official birthday of a quintessential American form of 20th century music—cartoons.

It was on November 18, 1928, that the first-ever animated cartoon with its own synchronized soundtrack debuted at the Colony Theater in New York City. This was Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" starring Mickey Mouse, who amazed audiences when he spoke up in a squeaky, falsetto voice provided by none other than Disney himself. Mickey pulled the whistle on his steamboat—a startling sonic effect in those days—and, oblivious of the impending animal rights movement, coaxed music from various squeezed and plucked barnyard colleagues.

That music was actually provided by a quiet, unassuming theater organist out of Kansas City named Carl Stalling, who was soon lured to Hollywood by Disney to work on subsequent Mickey Mouse and "Silly Symphony" cartoons. In 1936, Stalling joined the Warner Brothers studios, and for the next 22 years was the music director for virtually all the classic Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Stalling's wonderfully wacky and endlessly inventive music was usually ignored by "serious" music critics as beneath notice. Ironically, his scores feature the same dizzying shifts of mood, tempo and instrumentation as the most complex avant-garde scores of the post-war period: Stockhausen and Boulez meet Tweety and Sylvester?

Now THERE'S a thought…

On today's date in 2005, the chancel of the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis was transformed into a performance stage for vocal soloists, choirs, and the Minnesota Orchestra led by Osmo Vänksä.

The occasion was the world premiere performance of a new oratorio entitled "To Be Certain of the Dawn," featuring music by the American composer Stephen Paulus and a text by the British-born poet Michael Dennis Browne. The Basilica had commissioned the oratorio as a gift to Temple Israel in Minneapolis in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945.

As Paulus explained, the idea for the oratorio began with a former rector of the Catholic basilica, who felt that Christians should acknowledge and teach about the Holocaust as much—or more so—than Jews. "It was he," wrote Paulus, "who decided that an oratorio would be a powerful vehicle for communicating… [and] that children are key to the prevention of genocide, both today and in the future."

To telling effect, actual informal photographs of Jewish children taken in European ghettos during the 1930s and 40s were projected on the screens during the performance. As poet Michael Dennis Browne wrote, "The faces of children are the sun, moon, and stars of this work."

On today's date in 1777, the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck was "singing the blues" in Paris, when he wrote these lines to a friend:

"I am so much disgusted with music that at present that I would not write one single note for any amount of money… Never has a more terrible and keenly-contested battle been waged than the one I began with my new opera, 'Armide.' The intrigues against my previous operas were no more than little skirmishes in comparison. Enthusiasts tell me, 'Sir, you are fortunate to be enjoying the honor of persecution' and 'every great genius has had the same experience'—I wish them to the devil with their fine speeches!

"Still, the fact is that Yesterday, at the 8th performance of 'Armide,' the hall was so tightly packed that when a man was asked to take off his hat, he replied, 'Come and take it off yourself, I can't move my arms!'—which caused laughter. I have seen people coming out with their hair bedraggled and their clothes drenched as though they had fallen into a stream. Only Frenchman would pay so dearly for such a pleasure."

The German composer Gluck would ultimately triumph in Paris, and could count among his most ardent supporters none other than the French queen, Marie Antoinette—who presumably had a much cooler and certainly less crowded box at the opera.

Today's date marks the anniversary of the first performance of Jerome Kern's "Show Boat," produced in 1927 at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. by Florenz Ziegfeld.

Show Boat's book and lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein II, adapted from Edna Ferber's novel, which had been published only the year before. It was a most unusual story for a musical, and dealt frankly with alcoholism and interracial marriage. Mixing tragic and comic elements was something simply unheard of in American musical theater of that time.

Ziegfeld's secretary recalled that before the Washington premiere the great producer fretted that audiences would be disappointed that the girls on stage were wearing much too much clothing for a typical Ziegfeld show. There was little or no applause following the November 15th premiere, and Ziegfeld assumed that "Show Boat" was a flop. But the Washington audiences were simply too stunned to react.

When Ziegfeld's secretary called to tell his boss that there were long lines waiting to buy tickets for subsequent performances, at first Ziegfeld didn't believe him. But by the time "Show Boat" opened on Broadway the following month, even the Great Ziegfeld knew he had a hit on his hands—and one based on great music and a powerful book, with nary a scantily-glad show girl in sight!

After "Show Boat," the American musical theater would never be the same…