For most of the 20th century, women’s history was almost totally ignored in American schools. To address this situation, an education task force in Sonoma County, California, initiated a women’s history celebration in March 1978. What began as an annual Women’s History Week grew over the years into a national celebration, and in 1987, Congress declared the whole of March to be Women's History Month.

Appropriately enough, 1987 also saw the premiere performance of Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman — music written for the same instrumentation as Aaron Copland’s famous Fanfare for the Common Man.

Originally, Tower chose to let the title of her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman serve as a generic, built-in dedication to all the unsung heroes of women’s struggles past and present. But eventually, Tower added a specific dedication to conductor Marin Alsop, a champion of new music.

“I don’t think you can play a piece of music and say whether it’s written by a man or a woman,” Tower says. “I think music is genderless.”

But festivals and celebrations of women in music remain important, in Tower’s view, in helping to get the word out about their accomplishments.

Joan Tower (b. 1938): ‘Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman’; Colorado Symphony; Marin Alsop, cond. Koch International 7469

Happy Leap Year!

Once every four years, we have the opportunity to wish the great Italian opera composer Giacomo Rossini a happy birthday — he was born on Feb. 29 in 1792 — and to note some other musical events that occurred on this unusual but recurring calendar date.

The American Bicentennial Year 1976, for example, also was a leap year, and 12 months were cram-packed with specially commissioned works written on a grand scale to celebrate that major anniversary of our nation. But at Alice Tully Hall on Feb. 29, 1976, a more modest celebration was in progress: an afternoon of new chamber works for flute and harp, including the premiere performance of a piece by American composer Ned Rorem.

This piece was titled Book of Hours, referring to the prayers that the clergy read at various times of the day. In 1976, when avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez was the music director of the New York Philharmonic and dense, complicated music was considered fashionable by the critics, and the reviewer for the New York Times was struck by Rorem’s deceptive simplicity: “Many contemporary composers flaunt their abilities to make music complex,” he wrote, “but Rorem waves an altogether different flag. His Book of Hours seemed determined to be uneventful. Its calculated simplicities and unassertive manner recalled the bare-walls asceticism of Erik Satie, though Mr. Rorem’s phrases and colors are more sensuous and do not quite evoke Satie’s mood of monastic rigor.”

Ned Rorem (1923-2022): Book of Hours; Fibonacci Sequence; Naxos 8.559128

For most music lovers, the phrase “Italian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries” means, first and foremost, opera composers.

But during the 1920s and 1930s, when great Italian opera conductor Arturo Toscanini was music director of the New York Philharmonic, American audiences heard many nonoperatic, symphonic works by modern Italian composers.

On today’s date in 1929, for example, Toscanini led the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere performance of Concerto dell ‘Estate (Summer Concerto), by contemporary Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti.

In addition to premieres by Pizzetti, New York audiences heard recent Italian symphonic works by Respighi, Tommasini, Martucci, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Wolf-Ferrari and others.

Absent from Toscanini’s New York programs were new works by the rising American composers of the day. There were no Toscanini premieres — or even performances — of works by Copland, Harris or Piston. Those composers had to look to the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky if they wanted a hearing.

American composer Daniel Gregory Mason complained in 1931 that the Philharmonic was run by “fashion-enslaved, prestige-hypnotized minds ... totally devoid of any American loyalty to match the Italian loyalty” that was, as Mason admitted, “rather likeable” in the charismatic Italian maestro.

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968): Rondo Veneziano; BBC Scottish Symphony; Osmo Vänskä, cond. Hyperion 67084

Today’s date marks the birthday of a 20th-century Czech composer you perhaps have never heard of. Viktor Kalabis was born in 1923 and by 6 was giving public piano performances. All signs pointed to a brilliant career. But first, Kalabis had to face — and surmount — two major political hurdles.

First, his formal musical studies were delayed by the Nazi occupation of his country in 1938, when he was forced into factory work; then, after the war, Kalabis met and married young harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova, who was a concentration camp survivor. Kalabis was a gentile, but in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, anti-Semitism was rampant and marrying a Jew was frowned upon. To make matters worse, they refused to join the Communist Party, hardly what one would call a smart career move in those years.

Even so, Kalabis began to attract commissions and performances of his music at home and abroad, and following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, he assumed a more prominent position in his country’s musical life.

His symphonies, concertos and chamber works are now regarded as some of the most important contributions to Czech music in the late 20th century.

Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006): Piano Concerto No. 1; Zuzana Ruzickova, p; Czech Philharmonic; Karel Sejna, cond. MRS Classics MS-1350

On today’s date in 1832, Polish pianist and composer Frederic Chopin made his concert debut in Paris at the Salle Pleyel. Among the enthusiastic audience members was another composer-pianist by the name of Franz Liszt, who would rapidly become Chopin’s close friend and advocate.

Chopin dedicated his recently completed Piano Etudes to Liszt, and Chopin once wrote to a friend, “I am writing without knowing what my pen is scribbling, because at this moment Liszt is playing my etudes and putting honest thoughts out of my head. I should like to rob him of the way he plays them!”

The failure of the Polish Insurrection of 1831 had driven a large number of Polish refugees to Paris, where they joined émigré groups of Italians and Austrians who had also fled political repression at home for the more liberal, welcoming atmosphere of the French capitol.

Increasing ill health and crippling stage fright made Chopin’s public concert appearances in Paris rare events. When Chopin did perform in public, he liked to share the stage with a sympathetic singer like Pauline Viardot-Garcia, or a fellow pianist like Liszt. Despite his fame, Chopin’s concert appearances in Paris numbered less than a dozen.

Frederic Chopin (1810-1949): Etude No. 10; Maurizio Pollini, piano DG 413 794

“Pssst. Hey, buddy – wanna buy a bridge? No? Well, how about a clarinet concerto, then?”

As most of us know, the Brooklyn Bridge is not for sale, but this New York icon has reputedly been sold to many unsuspecting visitors. After its opening in 1883, Harper's Monthly wrote, “The wise man will not cross the bridge in five minutes, nor in 20, [but] will linger to get the good of the splendid view about him.”

American composer Michael Daugherty did just that and came up with a concerto for clarinet and wind ensemble that premiered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then, on today’s date, in 2005 was performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

“Like the four cables of webs of wire and steel that hold the Brooklyn Bridge together,” Daugherty says, “my ode to this cultural icon [in] four movements: East (Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights); South (Statue of Liberty); West (Wall Street and the lower Manhattan skyline); and North (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center). In the final movement, I imagine Artie Shaw, the great jazz swing clarinetist of the 1940s, performing in the once glorious Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of the Rockefeller Center.”

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Brooklyn Bridge; Maureen Hurd, clarinet; Rutgers Wind Ensemble; William Berz, cond. Naxos 8.57252999

It’s a play both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein wanted to make into an opera, but the playwright always said, “No.”

We’re talking about Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, a nostalgic but bittersweet look at life, love and death in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, set in the early 1900s, complete with white picket fences, boy meets girl, and a drugstore soda counter.

It wasn’t until decades after Wilder’s death in 1975 that the executor of the Wilder estate, after a long search for just the right composer for an Our Town opera, settled on Ned Rorem, and a libretto crafted by poet J.D. McClatchy, who also happened to be an authority on Wilder’s works.

Rorem was in his 80s when the opera premiered on today’s date in 2006 at the Opera Theater at the Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana.

The New York Times thought the resulting opera was a success, writing, “Our Town opens with a hymn, and Rorem retained and refracted the familiar melody, turning pat modulations slightly bitter, as if the music were heard through a lens of nostalgia that turned it sepia. This nostalgia proved a hallmark of the score.”

Ned Rorem (b. 1923): Opening, from Our Town; Monadnock Music; Gil Rose, cond. New World 80790

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of 48 preludes and fugues for solo keyboard in two sets, each covering all 24 major and minor keys. This music has become a bible for pianists, as well as a challenge for subsequent composers to try to imitate. In the early 1990s, American composer and pianist Henry Martin tossed his hat into the ring with the completion of his first set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and soon after published a second set of 24.

On today’s date in 1992, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., pianist Sara Davis Buechner performed three of Martin’s Preludes and Fugues for broadcast on NPR and later made recordings of all of Martin’s “48.”

One enthusiastic reviewer of those recordings, Michael Barone, host of American Public Media’s Pipedreams organ program, wrote of Martin’s music, “We get shades of Debussy's impressionism, the vibrant jazzy riffs of Art Tatum, the spacey harmonies of John Coltrane, and the sophisticated improvisations of Bill Evans … but Martin's own individual genius shines brightly.”

Barone’s enthusiasm resulted in his commissioning Martin to compose another set of 24 preludes and fugues — this time for organ! We think Bach would have approved.

Henry Martin (b. 1950): Prelude & Fugue No. 1; (Ken Cowan, organ) Pipedreams 1004

In recounting the life story of many composers, it’s a familiar and perhaps romantic cliché that their work will be — as a matter of course — not appreciated by their contemporaries, and that the composer in question will have to toil for years in obscurity before his or her music is appreciated by performers and audiences.

In reality, we’re happy to report, that isn’t always the case.

Consider, for example, American composer Lowell Liebermann, who was born in New York on today’s date in 1961. When he was 16, his Piano Sonata No. 1 premiered at Carnegie Hall, resulting in a number of prizes and awards. By his 30s, Liebermann was being commissioned and championed by some of the leading performers of our time.

For James Galway, Liebermann composed a flute concerto, and Liebermann’s two-act opera The Picture of Dorian Gray was the first work the Monte Carlo Opera commissioned from an American composer. In 1998, Liebermann was appointed composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, and that orchestra premiered his Symphony No. 2 in February 2000, and, in a symbolic millennium gesture, simulcast their performance on the new-fangled worldwide web.

Lowell Liebermann (b. 1961) Flute Concerto; James Galway, flute; London Mozart Players; Lowell Liebermann, cond. BMG 63235

Symphony No. 2; Dallas Symphony and Chorus; Andrew Litton, cond. Delos 3256

Henry Cowell was one of the most prolific of all 20th-century American composers. Some of his works are aggressively experimental in nature, while others tap into folk traditions and world music. The range and variety are quite remarkable. Cowell wrote so many works, in fact, that even the composer himself often had trouble keeping track of all he had written.

Take today’s genial little Woodwind Quintet, for example. It was written in the early 1930s for the great French flute virtuoso Georges Barrère, who commissioned and premiered many new works involving his instrument. In 1934, Barrère even made a recording of the suite for New Music Quarterly, a publishing venture bankrolled by none other than the retired insurance executive and part-time composer Charles Ives.

After that recording, Cowell went on producing new works, and the manuscript of his Woodwind Quintet remained with Barrère, who apparently just filed it away. The music didn’t surface again until 1947, when it was discovered among the late flutist’s collection of scores.

On today’s date in 1948, Cowell’s Woodwind Suite received its first concert performance at Columbia University in New York City and quickly established itself as one of Cowell’s most popular compositions.

Henry Cowell (1897-1965): Suite for Woodwind Quintet; Solaris Capstone 8677