Like Charles Ives, the Chicago-based composer John Alden Carpenter was fairly sensible about earning a living, as opposed to starving in a garret.

Carpenter studied music at Harvard with John Knowles Paine, then set out for London to meet Sir Edward Elgar. He finally caught up with Elgar in Rome, then returned home to finish up his formal education with Bernhard Ziehn in Chicago.

Understanding the improbability of sustaining himself as a composer, Carpenter became vice president of the family business, a shipping supply company, where he did quite well. He composed during his time off, and especially after his retirement.

His music is amiable, often jazzy and just a touch modernistic, though not to an extent that would have frightened the horses. His strongest piece appears to have been his construction worker ballet “Skyscrapers,” which was given its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1926.

His 1914 “Adventures in a Perambulator,” evocative of a day in the life of an infant in charming, impressionistic terms, was preserved by Howard Hanson, as part of his landmark Mercury Living Presence series of recordings of mostly lesser-known American music.

In my opinion, Carpenter’s language is a mite too tame to tackle George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat,” but he did just that, composing a ballet after the popular comic strip, featuring Krazy, Ignaz Mouse and Offissa Pup. Ignaz even gets to hurl a brick or two.

Sergei Prokofiev, in Chicago for the 1921 premiere of “The Love for Three Oranges,” was present for the first performance and expressed guarded admiration. In private, I seem to remember, he thought the orchestration lacking.

Here’s music from the ballet “Krazy Kat.” I may be one of the few people alive to have actually heard this work in concert twice, performed by two totally different groups. I keep wishing it were more of a piece with the strip that inspired it.

Happy birthday, John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951).