In the 1930s and 40s, radio’s so-called “Golden Age,” Deems Taylor was the dominant “voice” of classical radio. Taylor was both the broadcast announcer of the New York Philharmonic on the CBS Network, and the opera commentator for NBC. He was also the voice-over narrator in the famous Disney animated film “Fantasia”.

In his day, Deems Taylor was also a very successful composer, producing a wide variety of works ranging from this 1922 orchestral suite entitled “Through the Looking Glass,” to grand operas, including two that were commissioned by and staged at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York: “The King’s Henchman,” composed to a libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay premiered there in 1927, and “Peter Ibbetson,” based on a novel by George du Maurier, in 1931.

Deems Taylor was also a very fine writer and critic on musical topics, and the author of several books.

He was born in New York City on today’s date in 1885, and died there in 1966. The year after his death, ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, established the annual Deems Taylor Awards to acknowledge outstanding print, broadcast, and new media coverage of music topics.

And, we’re proud to say, in December of 2000, this program, Composers Datebook was one of the recipients of that award.

Today in 1864, the attention of most newspaper readers in New York was probably focused on the trauma of the American Civil War. So even though the once controversial American composer and music critic William Henry Fry had died in Santa Cruz on December 21st, the news didn’t reach New Yorkers until late in January the following year.

Fry was only 50 when he died of consumption, an illness he had tried to fight by moving to the warmer climate of the Virgin Islands. He was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family and was a teenager when he started composing. Fry was the first American composer to tackle grand opera, modeling his works on Bellini and Meyerbeer. He also wrote orchestral pieces, like this one called “The Breaking Heart,” which was performed to great acclaim in New York in December of 1853 by the a virtuoso symphonic orchestra assembled by a flashy conductor/showman Jullien, who, like Prince or Sting or Madonna, felt one name was better than two.

As a newspaper critic, Fry railed against the neglect of American composers by American orchestras—a common complaint in this country still today. And long before Dvorak’s similar suggestion, Fry called for the development of a uniquely American school of symphonic music. Like many early prophets of new causes, he was largely ignored for his efforts, and died decades before others fulfilled many of his predictions and dreams.

For a lad who grew up in Orange, New Jersey, listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, American composer John Harbison celebrated his 61st birthday in a big way: On today’s date in 1999, Harbison’s opera “The Great Gatsby” premiered at the Met, with its composer on hand to take a curtain call with its cast.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, a devastating evocation of America’s “Roaring 20s,” is a regular contender for the title of the “Great American Novel,” but Harbison says when he told his mother he was thinking of writing an opera based on “Gatsby,” she wasn’t very enthusiastic, arguing, in effect, that the characters in the opera were a totally unsympathetic bunch. Gatsby, the novel’s anti-hero is a both a fraud and a crook. Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love and the object of his obsessive desire, is selfish, spoiled and shallow.

But Harbison saw it differently: “Yearning and despair are very big operatic themes,” he said. “As for the character of Jay Gatsby, I like that he takes a lot of risks and is steadfast and loyal to some vision that is not realistically possible. The opera provides many opportunities to look at both sides of that, to understand to what degree he's an impostor, and to what degree his story is real, which is a big American theme in general.”

Time will tell if Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” will prove a strong contender for the title of “The Great American Opera.”

On today’s date in 1930, Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” received its American premiere by the Boston Symphony. The Russian-born conductor and new music impresario Serge Koussevitzky had commissioned the work to celebrate the Boston Symphony’s 50th anniversary.

Stravinsky later said that for some time he had been carrying around in his head the idea for a choral symphony based on psalm texts. Since Koussevitzky’s commission was for “anything Stravinsky had on his mind” that is exactly what emerged. The dedication on the finished score read: “This symphony, composed to the glory of God, is dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” The phrasing might seem a little odd, but apparently it was quite sincere.

Even though Stravinsky is on record stating that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” in his “Symphony of Psalms,” Stravinsky gave powerful expression to his own very deep religious convictions. Koussevitzky’s performance was supposed to be the world premiere of the new work, but the conductor took ill, forcing the originally scheduled December 12th world premiere in Boston to be postponed until the 19th, by which time a European performance of Stravinsky’s new score conducted by Ernest Ansermet had already occurred.

No matter. Koussevitzky had the satisfaction of knowing that he had commissioned a masterpiece. Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” has come to be regarded as one of the great sacred works of the entire 20th century.

On today’s date in 1999, in Quebec, soprano Renee Fleming and pianist Richard Bado gave the premiere of a new song cycle by Andre Previn, his settings of three poems by the great 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson. Shortly after their premiere, Fleming made this recording of the new Dickinson songs with their composer at the piano.

The three poems were: “As imperceptibly as grief,” “Will there really be a morning,” and “Good morning, midnight.” By 1999, all these poems had been set to music dozens of times by dozens of composers. In fact, along with her great 19th century colleague, Walt Whitman, Dickinson reigns as an almost irresistible choice for settings by American composers.

In 1992, Dickinson scholar Carlton Lowenberg published a book entitled “Musicians Wrestle Everywhere” (after the title of another famous Dickinson poem). This book catalogued no less than 1615 Dickinson song settings: the earliest, by a composer named Etta Parker, were published in 1896, eleven years after Emily’s death.

Not all Dickinson settings are small scale, intimate affairs for voice and piano, either. About 100 years after Ms. Parker’s first setting, the American composer John Adams set two Dickinson poems to music as part of his super-sized piece for chorus and orchestra entitled “Harmonium.”

On today’s date in 1853, expectations both on stage and off must have been pretty high when a 20-year-old German pianist and composer named Johannes Brahms made his public debut in Leipzig. Just two months earlier, the older composer Robert Schumann had published a glowing prediction that young Mr. Brahms was going to turn out to be the bright hope for the future of German music.

Brahms played his big Piano Sonata in C, his Opus 1, no. 1, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, on a concert program he shared with members of the David String Quartet. Brahms also met the great French composer Hector Berlioz, who wrote: “Brahms has had a great success here and made a deep impression on me... this diffident, audacious young man who has taken into his head to make a new music.”

It was an especially exciting time for Brahms, who looked forward, as a kind of Christmas present, to seeing his music in print for the first time: both his Piano Sonata No. 1 and a set of Songs were due at any moment from Breitkopf & Haertel.

When the music appeared, he immediately sent copies off to Schumann, with this note: “I take the liberty of sending you your first foster children (who owe to you their citizenship of the world). In their new garb they seem to me too prim and embarrassed—I still cannot accustom myself to seeing these guileless children of nature in their smart new clothes!”

In the spring and summer of 1921, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was living the good life in a quiet village on the coast of Brittany. He wrote: “I get up at 8:30, put on a collarless shirt, white pants, and sandals. After drinking hot chocolate, I look to see if the garden is still where it’s supposed to be. Then I sit down to work. I’m writing my Third Piano Concerto.”

On today’s date in 1921, Prokofiev was the soloist in the premiere of the work, which took place in America, with the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock.

In a letter to conductor Serge Koussevitzky just a few days before the premiere, Prokofiev wrote: “My Third Concerto has turned out to be devilishly difficult. I’m nervous and practicing hard three hours a day. But let the maestro be calm. This is not a Stravinsky symphony—there are no complicated meters, no dirty tricks. It can be conducted without special preparation—it is difficult for the orchestra, but not for the conductor.”

Chicago audiences and newspaper critics gave the new Concerto a warm, if not overly enthusiastic, reception at its first performance in America, and in time, the Third—despite its difficulty—became one of Prokofiev’s most popular works with performers as well as audiences around the world.

Most composers, when they write a Violin Concerto, usually consult with a good violinist during the process—unless, that is, they play violin themselves. That was the case with the Swiss-born American composer and violinist Ernest Bloch, who completed his big violin concerto in 1938.

Bloch was born in 1880, and was in his 30s when he came to America, where he achieved remarkable success with both critics and audiences. His most famous work, “Schelomo,” subtitled a “Hebraic Rhapsody” for cello and orchestra, premiered in New York in 1917, when Bloch was 36 years old. Despite his popularity in America, Bloch returned to Europe for most of the 1930s. By the end of that decade, the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany and Italy led the composer, then approaching 60, to reconsider making America his permanent home.

Bloch’s Violin Concerto was premiered in America on today’s date in 1938, a month after he arrived, with violinist Joseph Szigeti and the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. The main theme of Bloch’s Concerto was supposedly based on a Native American theme, but the tone of the whole work echoes the Hebrew themes in his other music.

Bloch wrote: “Art for me is an expression, an experience of life, not a game or an icy demonstration of mathematical principles. In not one of my works have I tried to be "original" or "modern." My sole desire and single effort has been to remain faithful to my vision.”

On today’s date in 1936, just one day after the premiere of his Symphony No. 1, the young American composer Samuel Barber attended the first performance of his String Quartet No. 1. Both premieres took place in Rome, where Barber was enjoying the benefits of the Prix de Rome, which included a two-year residency at the American Academy in the “Eternal City.”

Barber found Europe a congenial place to compose, finding inspiration in both the art and the important musical personalities he encountered there. Even so, he found writing a string quartet hard going: “I have started a new quartet,” he writes in one letter, “but how difficult it is. It seems to me that because we have so assiduously forced our personalities on Music—on Music, who never asked for them!—that we have lost elegance, and if we cannot recapture elegance, the quartet form has escaped us forever.”

It’s perhaps debatable whether Barber recaptured “elegance” in his new quartet, but “eloquence” is another matter: The new quartet’s slow “adagio” was described as being “deeply felt and written with economy, resourcefulness and distinction” by one critic after a New York performance the following year. Barber later recast this movement for full string orchestra, and, as Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” it’s become one of the best-loved pieces of modern American music. During the Second World War, it was adopted as a kind of unofficial anthem of mourning, and was played for the funeral of America’s great wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1935, when he was 25 years old, the American composer Samuel Barber was selected as “the most talented and deserving student of music in America” and awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome. This meant that Barber could study at the American Academy in Rome for two years, with free lodgings, a music studio and an annual stipend of $1,400—a considerable sum of money in the 1930s! Barber found his Italian studio, a little yellow house approached through a garden, to be a good place to work. He wasn’t very thrilled by his sleeping quarters at the Academy, however, and reportedly never completely unpacked his bags.

While in Europe, Barber finished his Symphony No. 1. The premiere took place in Rome on today’s date in 1936, with the Italian conductor Bernardino Molinari leading Rome’s Augusteo Orchestra. Years later, Barber recalled that the orchestra played well, but also that the Italians in the audience were “not shy about expressing their feelings... 50% applauded and 50% were hissing.” In Barber’s opinion, the Italians found the new work “too dark-toned, too Nordic.”

The Cleveland Orchestra gave the Symphony’s American premiere early the next year, followed by a New York performance under the direction of Arthur Rodzinski, who was so impressed he conducted the work with the Vienna Philharmonic at the opening concert of the 1937 Salzburg Music Festival in Austria. That performance was more warmly received, and Barber was called back to the stage three times.