Claudette Sorel was a pianist, educator and passionate advocate for equal rights for women in music, especially composers and performers. In 1996, she founded the Sorel Organization to expand opportunities and stretch the boundaries for promising emerging female musicians through a variety of collaborations and scholarships, and to acknowledge notable masters in the field.

On today’s date in 2022, for example, Cuban-born American composer Tania J. León was awarded the Organization’s Sorel Legacy Medallion for her life and work in music.

While still in her 20s, León became a founding member and the first musical director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, establishing its music department, school, and orchestra. She has composed a number of both large scale and chamber works that have been performed here and abroad. In February 2020, the New York Philharmonic premiered her orchestral piece Stride and in 2021 that work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

León said, “Stride was inspired by women’s rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony. She kept pushing and pushing and moving forward, walking with firm steps until she got [it] done. That is what Stride means. Something that is moving forward.”

Tania León (b. 1943): Batá; Louisville Orchestra; Lawrence Leighton Smith, conductor; Soundmark CD 48027

On today’s date in 1931, Russian-born American conductor and composer Nicolas Slonimsky was in Paris conducting the first of two concerts of ultra-modern music from the New World. These were presented under the auspices of the Pan American Association of Composers, and funded by an anonymous philanthropist Slonimsky later identified as retired insurance executive and fellow composer Charles Ives.

Slonimsky had approached Ives early in 1931 with the idea of presenting a series of new music concerts in New York. When that proved too costly, they suggested mounting the same concerts in Paris.

“In 1931, the dollar was still almighty among world currencies,” Slonimsky recalled. “Ives gave me a letter of credit to the Paris branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in the amount of $1500, an enormous sum of money in French francs at the time. The prestigious Orchestra Straram was engaged for my first Paris concert. I had a brilliant audience: composers, journalists, painters, Italian futurists. There was applause, but also puzzled responses.”

One French music critic even titled his review “The Discovery of America,” writing, “We have, (without joking), just discovered America, thanks to a Christopher Columbus called Slonimsky.” As for Ives, he was very pleased with the success of the concerts, and for a time jokingly addressed Slonimsky as either “Columbus et Vespuccius.”

Henry Cowell (1897-1965): Synchrony; Polish National Radio Orchestra; William Strickland, cond.) Citadel 88122

Merriam-Webster’s defines a gazebo as “a freestanding roofed structure usually open on the sides.”

To most Americans, however, “gazebo” conjures up warm, summer days spent out-of-doors: If you imagine yourself inside a gazebo, you’re probably enjoying a cool beverage while gazing out at the greenery — or, if you fancy yourself outside one, you’re probably seated in a lawn chair, gazing at a group of gazebo-sheltered band musicians playing a pops concert for your entertainment.

In the early 1970s, American composer John Corigliano wrote a series of whimsical four-hand piano dances he dedicated to certain of his pianist friends, and then later arranged these pieces for concert band, titling the resulting suite Gazebo Dances.

“The title was suggested by the pavilions often seen on village greens in towns throughout the countryside, where public band concerts are given in the summer,” Corigliano explained. “The delights of that sort of entertainment are portrayed in this set of dances, which begins with a Rossini-like overture, followed by a rather peg-legged waltz, a long-lined adagio, and a bouncy tarantella.”

The concert band version of Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances was first performed in Indiana on today’s date in 1973, by the University of Evansville Wind Ensemble, with Robert Bailey conducting.

John Corigliano (b. 1938): Gazebo Dances; University of Texas Wind Ensemble; Jerry Junkin, conductor; Naxos 8.559601

In the summer of 1853 Johannes Brahms had just turned twenty and was touring as the piano accompanist of the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. On today’s date, they arrived in Gottingen, where they were hosted by Arnold Wehner, the Music Director of that city’s University.

Wehner kept a guest book for visitors, and over time accumulated signatures from the most famous composers of his day, including Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Liszt. Now, in 1853, Brahms was not yet as famous as he would later become, but as a thank-you to his host, he filled a page of Wehner’s album with a short, original composition for piano.

Fast forward over 150 years to 2011, when Herr Wehner’s guest book fetched over $158,000 at an auction house in New York City, and this previously unknown piano score by Brahms attracted attention for many reasons.

First, few early Brahms manuscripts have survived. Brahms was notorious for burning his drafts and sketches, and second, the melody Brahms jotted down in 1853 showed up again in the second movement of his Horn Trio, published 12 years later.

Finally, there’s a still-unresolved controversy about who had rediscovered the long-lost score: the auction house had the manuscript authenticated in 2011, but in 2012 British conductor Christopher Hogwood claimed he had stumbled across it while doing other research.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Albumblatt (1853); Sophie-Mayuko Vetter, piano; Hännsler 98048

In the late 19th Century, there were two rival musical camps: one favored “absolute music” like the symphonies, concertos, and chamber music of Brahms; the other the “music of the future,” namely the operas of Wagner and the tone poems of Liszt, works that told dramatic stories in music.

Now, Dvořák’s mentor was Brahms, and Dvořák was famous for his symphonies, concertos and chamber music. But on today’s date in 1896, at a concert of the Prague Conservatory Orchestra, three tone poems by Dvořák premiered: The Water Goblin, The Noonday Witch, and The Golden Spinning Wheel, all three based on Czech folk legends — and rather lurid, even gruesome ones at that.

Not surprisingly, the “absolute music” camp was shocked. Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick lamented: “It is strange that Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural, and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is. In The Water Goblin we are treated to a fiend who cuts off his own child’s head!”

But another Czech composer, Leos Janacek, heard something quite different: “In all the orchestral tone poems that I have known, the ‘direct speech’ of the instruments, if I might describe it thus, has never sounded with such certainty, clarity and truthfulness within the wave of melodies, as it does in The Water Goblin.”

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): The Water Goblin; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor; Teldec 25254

On today’s date in 1953, thousands crowded the route to and from London’s Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and, at the Queen’s own request, the event was televised live by the BBC.

British composer William Walton was asked to write two new pieces. The first was Coronation Te Deum, a work that he had begun almost a decade earlier for a quite different occasion, namely the opening night of the 1944 London Proms. The piece got shifted to a back-burner when Walton was asked to work on Lawrence Olivier’s wartime film of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

For the new Queen’s Coronation, Walton returned to his abandoned score, writing to friends, “I’ve got cracking on the Te Deum. Lots of counter-tenors and little boys Holy-holy-ing, not to mention all the Queen’s Trumpeters and a side drum. You will like it, I think, and I hope He will too.” “He” was capitalized, so presumably Walton was referring to either the Deity — or Winston Churchill, perhaps.

Walton was also asked to compose a Coronation March, which he called Orb and Scepter after a line, coincidentally, from Shakespeare’s Henry V. His march may have seemed a bit jazzy to the more conservative audiences of the day, but one critic, slipping into Cockney slang, gushed, “It sounds like a right royal knees-up!”

William Walton (1902-1983): Coronation Te Deum; Andrew Lumsden, organ; Finzi Singers; Paul Spicer, conductor; Chandos 9222

William Walton (1902-1983): Orb And Sceptre March; English Northern Philharmonia; Paul Daniel, conductor; Naxos 8.553981

When most people hit 65, they’re anticipating their first social security check, but on today’s date in 1750, when George Frederick Handel turned 65, he was making out his will.

To John Christopher Smith, Handel left, “my large harpsichord, my little house organ, my music books and 500 pounds sterling.” John Christopher Smith, born Johann Christoph Schmidt, was an old friend of Handel’s from his university days in Germany. Handel persuaded Herr Schmidt to give up the wool trade and come to England. As Mr. Smith, he established a famous copyists’ shop in London, became Handel’s business partner.

Seven years later, Handel modified his will, leaving his larger theater organ to John Rich, whose Covent Garden Theater had staged Handel’s most recent operas and oratorios. To Charles Jennens, who had arranged the Biblical verses for Handel’s Messiah, the composer bequeathed some paintings.

To the Foundling Hospital, a charitable institute that had performed Messiah as a successful fundraiser, Handel left “a fair copy of the score and all parts” for that famous oratorio. Shortly before his death, Handel bequeathed 1000 pounds to the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians, a charity in aid of musicians’ widows and orphans, and directed that 600 pounds be used to erect his own monument in Westminster Abbey.

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759): Air, from Water Music; St. Martin’s Academy; Neville Marriner, conductor; EMI 66646

For fans of British comedy, the name Peter Sellars conjures up an actor famous for his iconic role as the bumbling Chief Inspector Clouseau in Pink Panther movies. But for opera fans, the name refers to a completely different fellow: an American theater director born in 1957.

The American Peter Sellars is notorious for staging classic operas as if they were set in present-day America. For example: Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a dangerous, drug-dealing neighborhood in New York City’s Spanish Harlem, or The Marriage of Figaro in a luxury penthouse in Trump Tower.

Sellars is also the frequent partner of American composer John Adams in brand-new operas and concert projects. On today’s date 2012, a new oratorio by Adams and Sellars, The Gospel According to the Other Mary received its world premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

The new work’s libretto, crafted by Sellars, tells the Biblical story of the passion and death of Jesus from the point of view of “the other Mary,” Mary Magdalene, alongside texts and scenes from contemporary American life, including a women’s shelter, labor and social justice protests, and the opioid crisis. If Jesus were alive today, Sellars and Adams seem to be saying, He would be ministering to the suffering margins of American society, not to the rich and powerful.

John Adams (b. 1949): Chorus, from The Gospel According to the Other Mary; Los Angeles Master Chorale & Los Angeles Philharmonic; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; DG 0289 479 2243 8