Zygmunt Stojowski was a Polish pianist, composer, born near Kielce in 1870. His musical training began with his mother, and he left Poland at age 18 to study music and composition in Paris. One year before his departure, he had performed as a concert pianist, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. In 1901, his work was deemed worthy of being featured in a concert at the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Stojowski also gave a few interviews in local Warsaw papers; his career had started. His Symphony in D minor, Op. 21, had won first prize in the Paderewski Music Competition in Leipzig during the summer of 1898. 

In the fall of 1905, he sailed on the SS Moltke to New York and took up the head-of-the-piano department position at the newly founded Institute of Musical Art. New York City became his home, and he stayed there for the rest of his life. He was met with remarkable success in New York as a composer, pianist and teacher, and became the first Polish composer to have a full concert performed by the New York Philharmonic. 
 
Due to his success as a teacher, he opened his own music school in Manhattan in a four-story building. He and his Peruvian-born wife Luisa Morales-Macedo raised three sons, which he called his “best compositions.” 

He became a US citizen in 1938 and died in 1946 in New York. He leaves behind a vast catalog of 43 opuses, composed of many piano pieces, two sonatas for violin and piano, some pieces for cello, one symphony, two concertos for piano, as well as a few cantatas and melodies.