Today, some “off-the-cuff” remarks about the role of shirt cuffs in music history.

Starched, button-on, detachable cuffs for men’s shirts were very popular from the early 19th through the early 20th centuries, and could serve as a sort of white linen Post-It note if a melody suddenly popped into the head of a composer. Like Dvořák, say, out for a walk along the Turkey River in Spillville, Iowa — he could scribble the tune down on his shirt cuff, assuming he carried a pencil, that is, since writing it in ink before the era of ballpoint pens would not be very practical and certainly not be very popular with whoever did the composer’s laundry!

Years after Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 3 had its premiere — on today’s date in 1912 — the Danish composer still recalled the moment when a theme in its third movement came to him.

“I was standing on the back of a tram. And [the theme] came with such urgency that I had to quickly jot it down, partly on a scrap of paper I had in my pocket, and partly on one of my shirt cuffs,” Nielsen said.

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931): Symphony No. 3 (Sinfonia Espansiva); New York Philharmonic; Alan Gilbert, conductor; Dacapo 220623

In London on today’s date in 1871 an audience gathered in the newly-finished Royal Albert Hall to attend the first-ever concert to be performed there. This occurred a month before the official opening of this famous Victorian edifice as a special thank-you for the workers who constructed the building.

The orchestra that played that concert was famous in its day — though now totally forgotten. It was called The Wandering Minstrels and its players were all British aristocrats — Lords, Right Honourables, and senior military — who from 1861 to 1896 played exclusively for charity events. One strict rule of membership was that only amateur musicians were allowed. If you earned even one penny as a professional, you were out.

That happened to one member, composer Frederick Clay, who had to leave The Wandering Minstrels when music he wrote for the stage started to pull in a few pennies. Clay even collaborated with W.S. Gilbert, the famous librettist for Arthur Sullivan, who occasionally performed as a guest with The Wandering Minstrels.

And yes, it’s likely that the Gilbert & Sullivan song “A Wandering Minstrel I” from The Mikado was an in-joke reference to the aristocratic orchestra, especially since Nanki-Poo, who sings it, was (after all) a nobleman in disguise.

W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) & Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900): ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel I,’ from The Mikado; D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Royston Nash, conductor; London/Decca 425190

It’s quite possible that you or someone you know is the caregiver for an ill or aging relative or friend. If so, you know the emotional rewards — and heavy emotional toll — that caretaking involves.

On today’s date in 1989, American composer John Adams led the Saint Paul Chamber orchestra and baritone Sanford Sylvan in the premiere performance of a powerful new chamber work he had composed inspired by — and in honor of — caretakers everywhere.

In 1988, his father had died after years of struggling with Alzheimer’s, and Adams was haunted by images of his mother caring for her husband as the illness progressed. Living in San Francisco, he was also moved by Bay Area friends who nursed loved ones during those helpless early years of the AIDS epidemic.

He found that these 20th century experiences resonated in certain poems by 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, who had served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, initially to care for his own wounded brother, but subsequently to tend other wounded soldiers in those traumatic years.

Adams chose one Whitman poem, “The Wound Dresser,” as text and title for his new work. “The Wound Dresser is about the power of human compassion that is acted out on a daily basis,” he said. This work has become one of the most-performed and most-admired of all the compositions of John Adams.

John Adams (b. 1947): The Wound Dresser; Sanford Sylvan; baritone; Orchestra of St. Luke’s; John Adams, conductor; Nonesuch 79218

On today’s date in 2022, violinist Roger Zahab and the University of Pittsburgh Symphony premiered a Violin Concerto written some 50 years earlier by American composer Julia Perry. In his program notes, Zahab tells the story this way:

“One afternoon near the end of my undergraduate studies — around 1978–my violin teacher stepped out of his office and handed me a score by Julia Perry. She had sent … her Violin Concerto to him in the hope that he might know of someone who would play it, and he handed it to me. I called her phone number and spoke with her mother, who said that Julia was right next to her but unable to talk.”

Perry was unable to talk because she had suffered a debilitating stroke seven years earlier at 46, derailing her career as a composer. Cared for and nursed by her mother, Perry persisted in working on the concerto that would be her final work, as she died shortly after making contact with Zahab. For his part, the violinist made it his mission to create a full orchestral performance score of the concerto from Perry’s surviving sketches, a daunting project that took him decades to complete.

Julia Perry (1924-1979): Violin Concerto; Curtis J. Stewart, violin; Experiential Orchestra; James Blachly, conductor; Bright Shiny Things 200

On today’s date in 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2. Ives was then 76 and living in Connecticut. Heart disease and diabetes left him far too weak to attend the Carnegie Hall premiere. Nicholas Slonimsky recalls once asking the thin and pale Ives how he was feeling, to which Ives replied he felt so weak that he said, “I can’t even spit into the fireplace.”

Ives didn’t own a radio, so he visited his neighbors, the Ryders, to hear Bernstein conduct the Sunday afternoon broadcast performance of music he had composed some 50 years earlier.

“There’s not much to say about the Symphony. I express the musical feelings of the Connecticut country in the 1890s. It’s full of the tunes they sang and played then, and I thought it would be a sort of a joke to have some of these tunes in counterpoint with some Bach-like tunes,” he said at the time.

His neighbor, Mrs. Ryder, recalled how he reacted to the radio broadcast: “Mr. Ives sat in the front room and listened as quietly as could be, and I sat way back behind him, because I didn’t want him to think I was looking at him. After it was over, I’m sure he was very much moved. He stood up, walked over the fireplace, and spat! And then he walked out into the kitchen and said not a word.”

Charles Ives (1874-1954): Symphony No. 2 New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 429 220

In 1996, American composer John Harbison received an unusual commission — a ballet for dancers and symphonic winds. The commission came from a consortium of 14 wind ensembles, all members of the College Band Directors National Association.

Maybe the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta had something to do with it, but his imagination turned in that direction: he titled the resulting work Olympic Dances, and Atlanta also happened to be the venue for the work’s premiere performance on today’s date in 1997, with the Pilobus Dance Theatre and the University of North Texas Wind Symphony performing.

“When asked to do a piece for dancers and winds, it immediately suggested something ‘classical,’ not our musical 18th century, but an imaginative vision of ancient worlds … I thought of an imagined harmony between dance, sport and sound that we can imagine from serene oranges and blacks on Greek vases, the celebration of bodies in motion that we see in the matchless sculpture of ancient times, and perhaps most important to this piece, the celebration of the ideal tableau, the moment frozen in time, that is present still in the friezes that adorn the temples and in the architecture of the temples themselves,” he said.

Harbison’s ballet is an austere, rather than flashy score, reminiscent of Stravinsky’s austere, neo-classical scores like Agon and Apollo, which — like our modern Olympics — were also inspired by ancient Greek ideals.

John Harbison (b. 1938): Olympic Dances; New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble; Dr. Frank Battisti, conductor; Albany 340

The British composer Ethel Smyth needed both talent and fierce determination to succeed in a professional musical career in her day. Born in 1858, she defied her father to study music in Leipzig. She became friends with Clara Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák. In 1903, her opera Der Wald was performed at the Metropolitan Opera. She also became a high-profile figure in the women’s suffrage movement, for which she was jailed briefly in 1912.

The premiere of her 64-minute vocal symphony, The Prison, took place at Usher Hall in Scotland on today’s date in 1931, when she was 73, and increasingly deaf. The text was by H.B. Brewster, who had been Smyth’s close friend and, perhaps, her lover, and is a dialogue between an innocent prisoner awaiting execution and his soul in search of spiritual peace.

In a New York Times interview, James Blachly, the conductor of the first recording of The Prison, suggests, “It’s a summary of her entire career. It’s a farewell. There’s a real sense of making peace with that, and also reconciling herself to the death of [Brewster,] her closest creative companion. It’s about love and life and loss and self-worth.”

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): The Prison; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone; Experimental Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor; Chandos 5279