1717 Georg Matthias Monn – Austrian composer, organist and music teacher (d.1750); important figure in the transition from the Baroque to Classical period in music.
1846 Sir Paolo Tosti – Italian-born British composer and vocal teacher (d.1916); remembered for his light, expressive songs.
1887 Florence Price – African American composer (d.1953); first black woman in the United States to be recognized as a symphonic composer.
1916 premiere of Manuel de Falla's work for piano and orchestra Nights in the Gardens of Spain in Madrid's Teatro Real.
1906 Antal Dorati – Hungarian-born American composer and conductor (d.1988); with the Philharmonia Hungarica, was the second conductor to record the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn (after Ernst Märzendorfer).
1935 Aulis Sallinen – Finnish composer (89 years old); his Symphony No. 7 'Dreams of Gandalf’ (1996) is based on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
1936 Jerzy Maksymiuk – Polish composer, pianist and conductor (88 years old).
1939 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sponsors an Easter Sunday concert by Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial to protest racial discrimination after the singer is denied use of Washington's Constitution Hall (owned and administered by the Daughters of the American Revolution); some 75,000 people attended this open-air event.
1948 first performance of Samuel Barber's song-cycle Knoxville: Summer of 1915 by the Boston Symphony with Serge Koussevitzky conducting and soprano Eleanor Steber.