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American music didn’t get much respect in the Old World in the19th century. This would all change later on with the coming of the Jazz Age, but in the meantime there were a few composers who didn’t fit the traditional mold. We’ll look at two of them on this Sunday’s program.

We have no long ballet tradition in this country: the first professional companies didn’t set up shop until well into the 20th century. American composers soon proved themselves up to the task of writing music for the dance. We’ll look at the work of three of them and the music they created.

This Sunday’s program will be the 500th Mozart’s Attic, an opportunity to look back at some of the music that you listeners have said you liked over the nearly-ten-years of this endeavor. Some of the choices might be as expected, but there have been a couple of surprises too.

As a protégé of Brahms, Antonin Dvorak had a noteworthy resume in Europe when he was tapped to run a philanthropic conservatory in New York in 1892. What Dvorak heard in the New World represented a wholly new direction for American composers, and gave us a couple of timeless masterpieces to boot.

We’re going to look at some Scottish, or at least Scottish-inspired, music this week. We’ll start with the fruits of Felix Mendelssohn’s famous hike to the Hebrides, and then we’ll hear some music with genuine Caledonian roots.

We’re going to hear everybody’s favorite battle piece, the 1812 Overture, this Sunday, but then we’re going to follow it with another musical account of battle: Sergei Prokofiev’s movie score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, Alexander Nevsky.

In his 31 years, Franz Schubert managed to write some 1500 pieces of music, which tends to indicate that he must have gotten an early start. We’ll look at some music from Schubert’s salad days on this Sunday’s program.

There is a bit of skulduggery involved in the story of Mozart’s Requiem, but it has little in common with the high drama of the movie Amadeus. If the real story isn’t worthy of an Oscar, the Requiem remains one of Mozart’s greatest works.

Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons has become among the best-loved and most-recorded works of the 18th century, and we’ll hear it this Sunday, along with some more of the music of the Red Priest of Venice.

Jean-Philipe Rameau was a contemporary of Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti, but a distinctive ornate French flair sets his orchestral music apart from the others.