For the past five years the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) has put on a free concert in conjunction with the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC). The idea is to make the music of the historical periods catalogued by the HNOC come to life and give meaning to them in a way that books, maps and historic documents can never do. The LPO for its part gets to play some very rare music and to be more informative to its concert goers in the meantime.

Maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto will conduct tonight at St. Louis Cathedral.

Also of interest is to promote Louisiana’s current support of the arts and its past commitment to other artists.

Tonight’s concert is titled “Becoming American: The Musical Journey” and will pay homage to the well-known many-cultured sensibilities of the city of New Orleans. Among those composers being presented tonight in a live concert being broadcast over WWNO-FM are Beethoven and Mendelssohn from Germany, Bellini from Italy, Buck, Gretry from France, Martin y Soler from Spain, Rosas from Mexico, and New Orleans’s own jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton.

The LPO also distributes over 2,000 educational packets for this series to students all across the state of Louisiana in conjunction with these concerts. Teachers are encouraged to make lesson plans that will incorporate the music being brought into question by the LPO.