Happy birthday, composer Virgil Thompson

It is the birthday of composer and music critic Virgil Thompson (1896), whose score for the documentary Louisiana Story won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, where he knew Aaron Copland, Jean Cocteau, e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, Orson Welles, and Gertrude Stein, who became his mentor. He was music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune for 14 years.

Happy birthday, Johann Leopold Mozart

It is the birthday of Johann Leopold Mozart (1719), father of Wolfgang Amadeus, but also a gifted composer in his own right.