Meditation in B flat

Louis Adolphe Coerne (February 27, 1870 – September 11, 1922) was an American composer and music educator.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and at the Stuttgart Conservatory, Germany where he studied organ and composition with Rheinberger in Munich in the early 1890s.

Coerne earned the first Ph.D. in music ever awarded by a U.S. university from Harvard, where he studied under John Knowles Paine.

Coerne was notable as the first American composer to have an opera, Zenobia, staged in Germany (in Bremen, 1905.

Coerne wrote a number of pedagogical pieces for piano, and also composed a number of orchestral works, one of which, the tone poem Excalibur, Op. 180, was recorded by Karl Krueger with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1960s, and reissued on CD in 2006 by Bridge Records.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt44WZUaDCQ
His cantata, Hiawatha, Op. 18 was premiered in Munich in 1893 and performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1894.

Coerne's opera Zenobia, Op. 66, premiered in Bremen, Germany, in 1905, was the first opera by an American composer to be performed in Germany. Earlier that year, Harvard had conferred on Coerne the degree of Ph.D., with the score of Zenobia and his book, The Evolution of Modern Orchestration (published in 1908), serving as his thesis.