E pluribus unum, it says on the back of all minted United States coins: “Out of many, one.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better musical depiction of that motto than Ives’ Second.

Coincident Dances is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood. The work is a fusion of several different sound-worlds: English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, and techno.

- Jessie Montgomery

The way that depression sometimes makes every single minute detail, choice, and experience feel huge, almost melodramatic in scope; the way it simultaneously renders all those hyper-saturated details, choices, and experiences numbing; the harrowing, contradictory space between numbness and nigh-operatic feeling.

Tchaikovsky was one of the most personal and emotionally direct of composers, and so his difficult inner life is indeed pretty directly relevant to his music; you can’t exactly blame the fifth edition’s editors for wanting the composer’s demise to equal his music in drama

Pärt is a citizen and the best-known export of Estonia, the tiny country on the Baltic Sea that between 1940 and 1991 was subsumed by the USSR. He spent much of the 1960’s battling Soviet censors because he insisted on using a Serialist approach to composition, turning out music in the hyper-mathematical, dissonant style introduced by Arnold Schoenberg.

Schumann was as well known in his lifetime for his articulate and even poetic writing, for his one great love affair, and for his moods and melancholy and eventual madness as he was for his powerfully emotional music.

The Cello Concerto is undoubtedly Elgar’s last great work, and it’s hard not to think that Elgar may have known that as he wrote it.

Surprising though it might be to read, the art of composing is thriving in America today. In recent years a wide and diverse array of compositional voices has bridged the gap that had developed between living composers and concertgoing audiences. There can be no doubt that Jennifer Higdon has been driving that trend for some years now.

On May 28, 1910, Stravinsky supplied Diaghilev with almost 60 minutes’ worth of ballet music, and on June 25 The Firebird premiered in Paris and was a sensational success.

In life, Bizet’s career was a curious one. Admitted to the Paris Conservatory at the ripe old age of nine, Bizet shot like a comet through the halls of that institution, winning more accolades as a student than almost anyone before or since.

For Vaughan Williams was the most English of composers. Son of a prosperous clergyman, great-nephew of Charles Darwin, family friend of Lord Bernard Russell, Vaughan Williams possessed in full the British love of nature and propensity for long rambles from village to village.

Walton spent the WWII years working for the British War Office, writing music for patriotic-themed films. The greatest of these was Olivier’s 1944 Henry V.

John Powell’s score for “How to Train Your Dragon” has been among the most-programmed of the last decade, and has been arranged for almost every imaginable combination of instruments. The London-born-and-bred Powell was for some years Hans Zimmer’s assistant, and it was Zimmer who helped to set up Powell with the film’s producers.

Dvorak sent in a pile of unpublished and unperformed manuscripts to a composition contest, not knowing when he did so who its judges were and hoping vaguely for a financial prize. Well, the judges were Johannes Brahms and his friend, the eminent music critic Eduard Hanslick, and Brahms recognized Dvorak’s genius at once.

Starting in the Black Sea, 18-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov sailed through the Mediterranean to England, where he picked up an American bunkmate named Thompson. Those experiences – seeing the countries of the world and meeting them through music – were inspiration enough to drive Rimsky to become a self-taught master of composition and orchestration (his textbook on the latter subject is still in print).

In 2016, BBC Music magazine polled 151 conductors to determine, as the headline put it, “the 10 Greatest Symphonies of All Time!” Three of the top 10 were by Gustav Mahler, and Mahler’s nine entries in the symphonic canon are often seen as the apotheosis of the huge late-Romantic symphony.

The Philharmonic begins this season of adventure and discovery with a new work, Anna Clyne’s propulsive and appealing “This Midnight Hour.”