Last week, I wrote about neglected composers of the past being resurrected on CD. In the wake of that article, I heard from readers -- by e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter -- nominating their own favorite forgotten composers. This was one of the most entertaining and informative sequence of responses I’ve ever gotten; I didn’t have room to reprint them all, but I compiled some of them for the print edition of the Post on Sunday, and am offering a slightly more comprehensive list here. Sorry if your contribution’s not on it.

A note: I edited out the names of the living. Arbitrary, yes, but my article focused specifically on composers of the past, and I had to draw the line somewhere. Also, I tried to keep it to one mention per composer, though a number of them got multiple nods: Charles-Valentin Alkan and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Vagn Holmboe and Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky and Paul Creston, Ingolf Dahl and Irving Fine.

Some questioned the idea of “neglect,” and some possibly stretched the meaning of the term. Is Massenet really “neglected,” because a lot of his work is not better know? What about Telemann, or Delibes -- veritably mainstream names in comparison to, say, Alberic Magnard. Carl Nielsen “is teetering,” one commenter wrote, though his symphonies are certainly heard in the concert hall. “How well known is Gorecki outside the Third [Symphony]?” asked someone else (answer: Not well). And “neglect” varies with geography; some mentioned Artur Honegger, but it was countered that “he gets a pretty fair amount of play here in Europe.”

“The hoot about this is that this is the classical version of hipsterism,” Justin Capps wrote.

Above: Richard Garmise nominated Marie Jaell as a neglected composer worth hearing. “There's just a bit of her on YouTube,” he wrote. “But boy is it weird. Just listen to the early piano four hands work: it starts out deadly simply, like the Diabelli theme, and slowly goes further and further off track harmonically.”

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, I write about yesterday’s delivery to the Kennedy Center of a new organ by Casavant Freres — who happen to be finishing up the installation of another new organ in Washington, at St. John’s Church in Georgetown. You can hear the Kennedy Center organ at its inauguration on November 27th; the St. John’s organ will be dedicated on September 29th, and a new concert series will begin there in October.

It was only a few years ago that the Kennedy Center’s organ situation seemed hopeless, and it’s rather amazing that they were able to resolve it so quickly. For those who question why a Canadian company has built an organ for American’s purportedly national concert hall, here’s one reason why: Casavant had built the organ for another entity that was unable to use it, so the instrument existed, needed a home, and was available faster and cheaper than a newly commissioned one would have been. (The estimate for a brand-new organ in 2009 was between $3 and $5 million; the Rubenstein Organ, however, cost $2 million.)

Both the Kennedy Center organ and the St. John’s organ were given by single private donors — the Kennedy Center organ by the center’s board chairman, David M. Rubenstein; the St. John’s organ by John Van Wagoner, a member of the congregation for 60 years, and father-in-law of the organist J. Reilly Lewis. When the church was thinking about buying a new organ, Lewis made a YouTube video explaining the importance of a pipe organ as opposed to an electronic one, and his father-in-law found it so convincing that he decided to donate the new organ himself. “My wife says she’s so glad her inheritance is going toward a worthy cause,” Lewis jokes.

Above: J. Reilly Lewis mades a case for pipe organs.

Edited to add: In the DC Performing Arts Examiner, Patrick D. McCoy speaks to Casavant Frere’s Jacquelin Rochette about the Kennedy Center organ-- though Rochette appears neither to confirm or deny the rumor that the instrument was originally intended for the Metropolitan Baptist Church.

After an unplanned blog hiatus, what better way to reenter than with the subject of rediscoveries — my story in Sunday’s Washington Post about neglected composers whose work is exhumed on CD, but not necessarily in the concert hall. (Though in fairness, some of the CDs I talked about — notably Kenneth Woods’s recordings of Hans Gal’s symphonies — were live recordings.)

I was struck by how many of the composers I wrote about were active in around the same period — born in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, active until the mid-20th (Alfredo Cassella, Albert Roussel, Hans Gal, George Templeton Strong, Alexander Zemlinsky, and the list goes on). This illustrates, I think, just how far World War II shattered a whole tradition, even for some composers who weren’t direct victims of it.

Above: The conductor Kenneth Woods discusses the neglected Viennese composer Hans Gal.

On a loosely related note (rediscovering old instruments...), Charles T. Downey wrote about the Westfield Harpsichord Competition , which takes place at the Clarice Smith Center this week. If you are suffering withdrawal after the Kapell Competition, here’s your chance to hear yet more keyboards.

Earlier this week, I took part in a lively discussion that’s now available as a podcast in WQXR’s series Conducting Business, in which the violinst Lara St. John, the blogger-critic Pete Matthews (of Feast of Music), and I have our say on the question of whether the Web is making criticism meaner. (The title of the podcast is Music Criticism as Contact Sport.)

This morning, I Tweeted the link to the podcast and the question, Does the Web make criticism meaner? and a couple of artists promptly responded, unequivocally, Yes.

Would-be competitors weren’t the only people in the Kapell competition affected by visa problems. Elisso Virsaladze, scheduled to serve on the international jury, had to withdraw at the last minute due to a visa problem. This necessitated an eleventh-hour replacement: Dr. Stewart Gordon, who founded the competition in 1971 and ran it, as he says, for much of his professional career, flew in from California, where he teaches at USC, landing only a matter of hours before the first round began on Tuesday morning.