On today's date in 1910, Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 8 — a mammoth work that called for a huge orchestra, eight vocal soloists, and massed choirs of adult and children's voices. The concert's promoter did a quick count of all the performers involved and dubbed Mahler's work "The Symphony of a Thousand" — a nickname that has stuck to this day.

In the audience for the 1910 premiere was a young conductor named Leopold Stokowski, who would lead the first American performance of Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" in Philadelphia six years later.

Thirty years after the Mahler premiere in Munich, Stokowski would be seen by millions worldwide as he shook hands with Mickey Mouse in the famous animated film "Fantasia" that the Disney studios released in 1940.

By an odd twist of fate, some 50 years after "Fantasia," one of the current heads of the Disney empire, Michael Eisner, was so moved by the experience of attending a performance of Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" that he convinced the Disney Corporation to commission not one but two large-scaled works for massed choirs and orchestra from a pair of young American composers: Michael Torke and Aaron Jay Kernis. Their brand-new Mahler-sized works were premiered by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic during that orchestra's Millennium concert season.

How's that for "Six Degrees of Separation" — Mahler to Mickey to Masur!