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 years in obscurity before his or her music is appreciated by performers and audiences.

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

Consider, for example, the American composer Lowell Liebermann, who was born in New York on today’s date in 1961. At the age of sixteen, the premiere performance of his Piano Sonata No. 1 at Carnegie Hall resulted in a number of prizes and awards. By the time he reached his thirties, Liebermann’s work was being commissioned and championed by some of the leading performers of our time, and the young composer was producing on average about six major works a year.

For James Galway, Liebermann composed a Flute Concerto in 1992, and the success of that work prompted another concerto for Flute and Harp in 1995. Liebermann’s two-act opera “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was the first work that 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 of the year 2000, and, in a symbolic Millennium gesture, simulcast their performance on the World Wide Web.