Charles Hommann (1803–ca. 1872) was a Philadelphia-born musician and composer during the years in which instrumental music, especially European classical music, became increasingly prominent in the United States. He was encouraged by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, an organization founded in 1820 to aid its aging musician members and dedicated to “the cultivation of skill and diffusion of taste in music.” Hommann's surviving orchestral compositions—two overtures and a symphony—seem a f...