The great American poet Emily Dickinson was born on today’s date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death in 1886. The seemingly confined and rather mundane chronicle of her life stands in stark contrast to the breathtaking scope of her imagination, as expressed in the 1,147 poems her sister Lavinia discovered in a cherry-wood cabinet after her death.

Dickinson’s poetry has provided the inspiration for many American composers, and hundreds of them have been set to music, but her works have also inspired a number of purely instrumental pieces as well.

This music, for example, entitled “Three Pieces for String Quartet after Emily Dickinson,” was written in 1941 by the American composer Mary Howe. Each movement is coupled with a line from a Dickinson poem, but Howe was quick to explain her music was not a setting of them. “For some reason unknown to me,” explained Howe, “the last line in each poem called upon in my mind not a musical theme but the sort of music I wanted to write.”

Mary Howe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1882, and studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. She was by nature a conservative composer, but not rigidly so. As she herself put it, "my back foot is in the garden gate of the Romantics, but I feel no hesitation in thumbing the passing modern idiom for a hitch-hike to where I want to go." Mary Howe died in Washington, DC, in 1964.