William Grant Still was inspired by the poems of Joseph Mitchell Pilcher for his five-movement Wood Notes. He said that the work “has a social significance because it is a collaboration between a Southern white man and Southern-born Negro composer, in which both of the participants were enthused over the project.”

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is a transitional composition that he worked on for several years. The piece bridges his early Classical style, in this instance emulating Mozart, to his mature middle period and the “heroic” struggles associated with a work like the “Eroica” Symphony, written around the same time.

Brahms was undoubtedly the most historically aware of the leading 19th-century composers. This is reflected in older pieces that he collected, edited, or transformed into new music. For the last movement of his final Fourth Symphony, he used the Baroque procedure of the passacaglia in which a musical pattern is constantly repeated, in this instance transforming a brief passage from J. S. Bach’s Cantata No. 150.