On today’s date in 1981, at a house concert in St. Paul, Minnesota, a chamber work by the American composer Stephen Paulus received its premiere. The piece was entitled “Courtship Songs,” and was commissioned to celebrate the 15th wedding anniversary of a St. Paul couple, Jack and Linda Hoeschler. The piece was scored for the four instruments the Hoeschler family played: flute, oboe, cello and piano. The commissioning bug apparently caught on, and anniversary commissions became a family tradition.

Eventually the Hoeschlers and some of their friends in the Twin Cities started up a Commissioning Club, modeled along the lines of an investment club. The idea was to pool their resources, and commission new works by American composers whose works they admired, including Paulus, Paul Schoenfield, Steve Heitzeg, and Augusta Read Thomas. Performing groups who have premiered Commissioning Club projects have included New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Washington D.C.’s 20th Century Consort, as well as the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras.

In 1996, 15 years after “Courtship Songs” premiered, one Commissioning Club project reached a worldwide audience of millions… Stephen Paulus’s setting of “Pilgrim Jesus,” by the English poet Kevin Crossley-Holland, was one of the carols performed at King’s College, Cambridge, as part of the “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” broadcast live on both the BBC’s World Service and public radio stations across America.

All in all, not a bad return on the Commissioning Club’s investment.