For decades many of the 20th century’s greatest composers routinely visited Venice’s famous canals and churches during a biennial music festival that showcased brand-new works by the likes of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Britten, and others.

The French composer Darius Milhaud describes sharing space with several of his composer-colleagues in a cramped Festival “green room.” “It was a normal sight to see Stravinsky’s rain-coat and Constant Lambert’s tweed overcoat hanging near my two walking sticks,” writes Milhaud. “Meanwhile, the Italian composer Hildebrando Pizetti would be putting up a mirror, opening a silver toilet-case, and arranging flowers, his wife’s photograph and a sheaf of telegrams.”

On today’s date in 1937, Milhaud conducted the first performance of his “Suite Provencale” at the Venice Festival. This jaunty score proved to be one of his most popular orchestral works. In 1954, it was Leonard Bernstein’s turn. On today’s date that year, he conducted in Venice the premiere performance of his “Serenade” for violin and orchestra, with Isaac Stern the featured soloist.

Despite its admirable track record for picking winners, the Venice Festival shut down operations in 1973, although its impact lives on in the number of modern masterworks it helped launch in its day.

In 1886, a Czech patron of the arts named Josef Hlavka had a chapel built at his summer residence at Lužany in Bohemia and asked his composer friend Antonin Dvorak to write a mass to dedicate it.

As a devout Catholic, Dvorak was happy to oblige. Since the chapel was quite small, Dvorak wrote his “Mass in D Major” for just a quartet of soloists, a small choir, and organ, and led the premiere performance there on today’s date in 1887, with his wife Anna singing one of the solo roles.

Dvorak told Hlavka he was grateful for the chance to write so intimate a piece. “Until now,” wrote Dvorak, “I had only written sacred works of larger proportions with considerable vocal and instrumental means at my disposal.”

Ironically, Dvorak’s intimate “Lužany Mass” became popular as just such a large-scale work. At the request of his publisher, Dvorak orchestrated his “Mass,” and in that form it received its international premiere in 1893 at the immense Crystal Palace in London, performed by a huge chorus and a large symphony orchestra.

The published orchestrated version became extremely popular during Dvorak’s lifetime, but his small-scale original version was not even published until 1963.

The American composer Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965 and wrote thousands of musical works in a wide variety of styles. As a young boy, Cowell lived near San Francisco’s Chinatown, so Asian influences are as likely to crop up in his music as European models. And among Cowell’s aggressively experimental works are piano pieces that employ what he called “tone clusters”—chords played with a fist or forearm. Those pieces piqued the interest of European composers like Bartók and Janáček, but in addition to avant-garde scores, Cowell wrote dozens of conventionally tonal works, often hauntingly beautiful.

In 1941, Cowell discovered a collection of evocative 19th century American hymns titled “Southern Harmony.” These reminded him of even earlier works by the 18th century American composer William Billings, who liked to write what he called “Fuguing Tunes.” Combining these two influences, Cowell came up with his own series of “Hymns AND Fuguing Tunes” for various combinations of instruments.

Cowell’s “Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10” for oboe and strings, for example, was premiered on today’s date in 1955, in Santa Barbara, California, by oboist Bert Gassman and the Pacific Coast Music Festival orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

On today’s date in 1971, the Concert Hall at the newly opened Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., was inaugurated with a gala performance by the National Symphony Orchestra led by Antal Dorati, its Music Director back then. The National Symphony Orchestra, or NSO, was founded in 1931, and until the opening of the Kennedy Center, had used Constitution Hall as its home base.

Not surprisingly, considering its location in our nation's capital, the NSO has had a long tradition of performing, commissioning, and premiering works by American composers. Through the Hechinger Commissioning Fund, the NSO has commissioned more than 50 works, including “Fanfare for the Kennedy Center,” written by American composer Ron Nelson in honor of the Center’s 25th anniversary in 1996.

Leonard Slatkin, the NSO’s Music Director that year, had this to say about the composer: “Nelson is the quintessential American composer. He has the ability to move between conservative and newer styles with ease. The fact that he's a little hard to categorize is what makes him interesting.”

For his part, about his “Fanfare for the Kennedy Center,” Ron Nelson said: “It’s a musical epiphany that moves from darkness to light… from idea (French horns) to fruition (full brass).”

Today's date in 1934 marked the birthday of the late British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Now, his name is spelled D-A-V-I-E-S, so most Americans tend to pronounce it “Day-VEES,” even though “Davis” is the common British pronunciation.

Once, when Sir Peter was in the U.S., a British journalist called a Las Vegas hotel where the composer was staying and asked to speak to Peter Maxwell DAVIS. The receptionist said there was no one there by that name. Asked to spell the name, the British journalist did. “Oh, Day-VEES!” said the receptionist. “Sorry, there is no one registered by THAT name either.” It turned out the hotel computer had compressed Maxwell Davis into “Mavis” and THAT was how Sir Peter was registered. He found the whole incident so amusing that he wrote an orchestral tone-poem entitled “Mavis in Las Vegas,” fantasizing that somehow he had a female alter-ego in that city, perhaps earning her living as a high-kicking Vegas showgirl.

In addition to the whimsical “Mavis in Las Vegas,” Maxwell Davies often composed music often inspired by the bleak Northern land- and seascape of the Orkney Islands—an atmosphere as far removed from the Vegas Strip as you can imagine.

On today’s date in 1573, Queen Elizabeth the First celebrated her 40th birthday.

According to SOME musicologists, the music-loving monarch received as a birthday gift a Latin motet for 40 voices by Thomas Tallis titled “Spem in alium,” which translates as “Hope in All Things.” Elisabeth was certainly fond of Tallis, awarding him special gifts and privileges—despite his remaining a steadfast Roman Catholic throughout her reign, when being a Catholic in Protestant England was very risky business, indeed!

In fact, other musicologists contend that this famous motet was ACTUALLY written for the coronation of Elizabeth’s predecessor, the CATHOLIC queen Mary Tudor. Still others say: “No, no—the motet was commissioned by a patriotic British nobleman, who challenged Tallis to write a work as good as—or better—than a contemporary Italian composer’s 40-voice motet.”

The truth is we just don’t know for sure why Tallis composed this intricate and glorious music. We do know that in a dangerous time for ANYONE with strong religious convictions, Tallis lived to the ripe old age of 80. His epitaph reads: “As he did live, so he did die—in mild and quiet sort (O happy Man!)”

Consider, if you will, the poor timpanist. At most symphony concerts, they sit quietly—waiting for the moment when a dramatic exclamation point is required from the kettledrums. While the violinists rarely get a break, the timpanist must sit patiently for most of the evening, biding their time, waiting for the precise moments to strike.

On rare occasions, however, the timpanist is the CENTER of attention as soloist in a timpani concerto. One such concerto was written by an American composer, William Kraft, who was born on this day in 1923. Kraft was a timpanist himself. In fact, Kraft served as a percussionist and timpanist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 26 years, from 1955-1981. He was that orchestra’s first composer-in-residence, and founded the LA Philharmonic’s first New Music Group.

William Kraft’s “Timpani Concerto” was written in 1983 for timpanist Thomas Akins of the Indianapolis Symphony, who premiered the work with that orchestra in 1984.

Kraft’s own description of his Timpani Concerto is as follows, "The first movement is very jazzy … the second movement is very beautiful, with two string orchestras and a lot of glissandi, and the third is hell-bent for leather."

In 1941, as the German Army was overrunning Russia, the Soviet government evacuated important artists to remote places of safety. Composer Sergei Prokofiev, for example, found himself in the little town of Nalchik, nestled in the foothills of the northern Caucasus Mountains about 1000 miles away from the front.

Prokofiev was intrigued by the region’s folk music, and, taking a break from a big project to turn Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace into an opera, composed his String Quartet No. 2, based on local tunes. The new work was, as he put it, "a combination of virtually untouched folk material and the most classical of classical forms, the string quartet."

Its three movements are all based on local songs and dances, and Prokofiev took care not to smooth out any roughness in the original material.

Prokofiev’s new string quartet received its premiere performance back in Moscow in April of 1942, at a concert given by The Beethoven Quartet. A later performance on today’s date that same year was delayed due to a German air raid. The new music was well-received, and Prokofiev, perhaps with the air raid in mind, supposedly called the premiere "an extremely turbulent success."

For ballet lovers, the opening of Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan Lake” conjures up tutus, but for old-time movie buffs, this same music triggers memories of many black-and-white films of the 1930s. Back then, the eerie opening measures of “Swan Lake” served as the “main title” music for dozens of old Universal Studios thrillers, including the famous 1931 film of Bram Stoker’s novel, “Dracula,” starring Bela Lugosi.

“Ah, the children of the night—what music THEY make…”

But on today’s date in 1999 at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, Tchaikovsky got some competition from Philip Glass. For a special showing of the Bela Lugosi “Dracula,” Glass wrote a brand-new score. Now, beyond the opening Tchaikovsky, the original 1931 soundtrack had included very little music, and, despite the creepy charisma of Bela Lugosi, the film moved at a ponderous pace. The new Philip Glass score, performed live by the Kronos Quartet, added fresh atmosphere to the familiar old film. In fact, it proved so effective that Glass and the Kronos Quartet took it on a tour, accompanying live showings of the old film in Europe and the U.S.

On today’s date in 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven offered his publisher Breitkopf and Härtel three new string quartets—works we know today as the three “Razumovsky” Quartets, that were eventually issued as Beethoven’s Opus 59.

In Beethoven’s day, Vienna was swarming with Russian, Polish, and Hungarian aristocrats with a taste for music. Among them was Count Andreas Kyrilovich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. The count was an amateur violinist who occasionally played in a string quartet he maintained at his own expense.

The count commissioned Beethoven to write three string quartets, stipulating that they should incorporate Russian melodies, real or imitated. The most recognizable of the Russian tunes, Beethoven employed occurs in the scherzo of the second quartet: It’s the same theme that was later quoted by Mussorgsky in the coronation scene of his opera “Boris Godunov.”

When these “Razumovsky” Quartets were premiered in Vienna in 1807, one contemporary review noted, “These very long and difficult quartets… are profoundly thought-through and composed with enormous skill, but will not be intelligible to everyone.”

When one Italian violinist confessed to Beethoven that he found them incomprehensible, Beethoven retorted: ‘Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age.’