medieval (400 - 1450)
Hildegard Of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen, considered a prophet by her contemporaries, was a Benedictine abbess, writer, and composer. Her accomplishments and her standing are extraordinary, particularly as she remains virtually the only known female figure of her time who achieved such intellectual stature and whose contributions have had lasting impact.
Guillaume Du Fay
Guillaume Du Fay was a well-connected and influential composer who served as a bridge between the Medieval and the Renaissance periods. He is closely associated with one of history’s most influential melodies, L’homme armé, which refers to the need for every man to arm himself against some (unnamed) threat. The melody was used as one voice of the chanson Il sera pour vous/L’homme armé. Some scholars have concluded that Du Fay wrote the song, but other candidates are Robert Morton and Antoine Busnoys. In any case, Du Fay and many other composers of the day wrote masses based on the song, and it continued to be popular for the next two hundred and fifty years. In fact, the most recent mass based on L’homme armé was written in 1999.
John Dunstable
John Dunstable (or Dunstaple) is widely given credit for changing the face of music between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by introducing new, “sweeter” harmonies. In addition, he was probably the first English composer to have a substantial influence upon continental European music.
Magister Leoninus
During his lifetime, Leoninus wrote both poetry and music. Among his accomplishments as a poet was the setting of the first eight books of the Old Testament as hexametric verse. However, today he is chiefly remembered for his contributions as a composer of polyphonic liturgical music. While most composers of this genre were anonymous, Leoninus is credited with having written the Magnus liber organi (The Great Book of Organum), a work that notated Leoninus’s sacred polyphonic compositions and which greatly influenced western musical practices for the next several hundred years.
Guillaume de Machaut
The status Machaut achieved in the fourteenth century was relatively unprecedented and comparable only to that of the older composer Philippe de Vitry. Most other musical works of the time were transmitted anonymously, and we know little or nothing about their composers today. In contrast, Machaut and his works were famous. Both his poems and his musical compositions were known throughout Europe during his lifetime, their style and technique remaining models for at least forty years after his death. In addition, he occupies a special place in music history as being the first composer to write a complete, unified musical setting of the Mass Ordinary.
Philippe de Vitry
Philippe de Vitry was a composer and theorist whose work influenced the compositional practices of many subsequent generations. Perhaps most well known for a treatise on the “New Art” of his time, his motets also exhibit the earliest known use of isorhythm in the motet tenor.
renaissance (1450 - 1600)
William Byrd
Living in an age of conflict between Catholics and Protestants in England, William Byrd’s loyalties were divided between the two religions. He and his wife were devout Catholics, as were most of Byrd’s patrons. At the same time, he held positions in Anglican churches and wrote music for their services. After the sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Byrd even set a poem by Queen Elizabeth I thanking God for defeating the Catholic Spaniards. Ironically, it is in the Anglican rather than the Catholic Church that Byrd’s music is most often heard today.
Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini was a singer, composer, and theorist active in Florence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Today he is known mainly for a single song, “Amarilli, mia bella,” often sung by beginning voice students. The Florentine musician’s significance goes far beyond “Amarilli,” however. In fact, Caccini helped create a new style of solo singing and a new type of musical drama – one that we now call opera.
Josquin Desprez
In an era when music was generally performed a few times before being replaced by something newer, Josquin des Prez was a rarity: a composer who was remembered and honored long after his death. Throughout the sixteenth century, his works were cited in theoretical treatises and extensively quoted in the music of other composers. In 1538, seventeen years after Josquin died, Martin Luther extolled him as “the master of the notes, which must do as he wishes, while other composers must follow what the notes dictate.” Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Josquin’s music was not entirely forgotten, while the nineteenth century saw him acclaimed (alongside Palestrina) as one of the two greatest composers of the Renaissance.
Clément Janequin
Along with Claudin de Sermisy, Clément Janequin was one of the two great masters of the sixteenth-century French chanson. His most famous chansons evoke phenomena such as bird calls (Le chant des oiseaux), street noises (Les cris de Paris), or the sounds of battle (La bataille). Although these works were popular during his lifetime, Janequin never achieved much professional or financial success.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Although he wrote a considerable number of secular madrigals, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was primarily a composer of sacred music. He was extraordinarily prolific, writing at least 104 masses, over 300 motets, and many other religious works. Unlike almost any other composer, Palestrina has enjoyed steadfast respect. Writing in 1607, Agostino Agazzari called him “the savior of church music.” Almost 100 years after his death, Angelo Berardi described him as “the prince and father of music.” And after the publication of Johann Joseph Fux’s enormously influential textbook Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), Palestrina’s music became the primary model for composition students in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even today, composition students are almost always taught how to write in the style of Palestrina.
Salamone Rossi
Very little is known about the life of composer Salamone Rossi, nor is his music often heard today. Nevertheless, he is an extremely interesting figure, primarily because he was one of only a handful of Jewish musicians contributing to the tradition of European art music before the nineteenth century.
baroque (1600 - 1750)
Johann Sebastian Bach
No other composer in the history of Western music quite compares to Johann Sebastian Bach. With the sole exception of opera, he mastered every existing genre of music and helped create several new ones, such as the keyboard concerto. It is no wonder that contemporaries held him in such high esteem. Soon after his death, however, he was all but forgotten, regarded only as a writer of impenetrably difficult keyboard music and some useful exercises for students. It was left to later musicians, notably Mozart and Mendelssohn, to rediscover Bach.
Francesca Caccini
Francesca Caccini was one of the best-known female composers and performers of the Baroque era. Moreover, she is the first woman known to have written an opera. Unfortunately only one of her operas, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina, survives.
George Frideric Handel
Unlike most composers of the Baroque era, George Frideric Handel has never fallen out of fashion. In the late eighteenth century, his admirers included Mozart, who arranged four of Handel’s oratorios, and Haydn, whose own oratorio The Creation pays homage to the earlier master. Nevertheless, Handel’s works in genres other than oratorio were largely forgotten. Particularly neglected were Handel’s operas, even though Handel spent much of his time and energy as an operatic composer. Since the 1950s, however, such operas as Giulio Cesare and Alcina have joined Messiah among Handel’s most beloved works.
Johann Hasse
The music historian François-Joseph Fétis once observed that few composers were more famous than Johann Adolf Hasse – or more quickly forgotten. In the mid-eighteenth century, Hasse was the preeminent specialist in opera seria, or serious opera. In addition, he was married to one of the day’s foremost singers, Faustina Bordoni. This “power couple” ruled the opera stages of Germany and Italy for decades. As opera seria went out of fashion, however, so did Hasse’s music. Only recently has it begun to be recorded and performed again.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Although he lived only a short time, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi composed some of the eighteenth century’s most beloved works, among them the sacred duet Stabat Mater and the comic intermezzo La serva padrona. In fact, Pergolesi was so much admired that after his death, unscrupulous musicians saw his name as a ticket to success, forging Pergolesi’s name to hundreds of works that the composer never touched. As a result, scholars are still trying to decide what Pergolesi actually wrote.
Henry Purcell
Like other English composers of the early Baroque period, Henry Purcell was not well-known outside his native country. For non-British audiences, Purcell’s main claim to fame is his Dido and Aeneas, until recently considered the first English opera (meaning a fully sung work with no dialogue). Scholars now recognize that John Blow’s Venus and Adonis deserves that title, but Purcell’s work is still one of the few seventeenth-century operas to receive regular performances. In addition, Purcell’s anthems and odes have always remained a vital part of the English choral repertoire.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
In 1722 Jean-Philippe Rameau published the Traité de l'harmonie (Treatise on Harmony), a tome that brought renown to Rameau as a leading music theorist. He also aspired to be a composer of dramatic music, and despite his peers’ initial doubts that a “theorist” could produce worthwhile operas, his numerous works went on to become well-respected and oft-performed during his lifetime. After his death, however, it was the music theory treatise that remained his most influential contribution. For the next two hundred years this document directly shaped music theory in the Western tradition.
Luigi Rossi
One of the most respected opera and cantata composers of the seventeenth century, Luigi Rossi is best-known for his opera Orfeo, which premiered in France in 1647. This work, one of six Italian operas presented at the French court between 1645 and 1662, was part of an attempt by Cardinal Jules Mazarin, chief minister of France but a native Italian, to introduce Italian culture to France. Partly because of the unpopularity of Mazarin himself, French audiences did not take to Orfeo or to Italian opera in general. Today, however, Orfeo is one of the most popular and frequently performed operas of the early Baroque period.
Alessandro Scarlatti
One of the best-known musicians of his day, Alessandro Scarlatti would have been all but forgotten after his death had he not fathered one of the most famous keyboard composers of the eighteenth century, Domenico Scarlatti. Nevertheless, the elder Scarlatti deserves to be appreciated for his own contributions. These include some of the most popular operas of his day, among them Gli equivoci nel sembiante (1679) and La Griselda (1721). Scarlatti’s secular cantatas also merit recognition, as they are often considered the final flowering of the genre.
Domenico Scarlatti
We may owe our knowledge of Domenico Scarlatti, one of the greatest keyboard composers of the Baroque era, to a gambling problem. One story has it that Scarlatti needed help from his patroness, the Queen of Spain, to pay off his gambling debts. In return, she asked the composer to write down his improvised keyboard music. The manuscripts containing the keyboard sonatas were given first to the queen and then, when the queen died in 1758, to the great singer Farinelli. Soon thereafter, Scarlatti’s sonatas became known and loved across Europe.
Barbara Strozzi
What little is known about Barbara Strozzi (also known as Barbara Valle) suffices to make her an extremely intriguing figure. Perhaps the most outstanding female composer of the seventeenth century, Strozzi studied under respected musicians and published eight collections of her music. Music, however, was possibly not her only means of support as several sources indicate she may have been a courtesan as well.
classical (1750 - 1810)
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Of all the Bach children, C. P. E. Bach came closest to escaping the shadow of his father, the incomparable J. S. Bach. In fact, during the late eighteenth century, the younger Bach was actually better known than the elder. This situation was not to last, however; the revival of J. S. Bach’s music was in full swing by the early 1800s, while C. P. E. Bach was sinking into obscurity. It was not until very recently that C. P. E. Bach’s music, particularly the highly individual and varied music for keyboard, was rediscovered.
Domenico Cimarosa
Though certainly not as famous today as some of his contemporaries, including W.A. Mozart and Antonio Salieri, in his time Domenico Cimarosa was both celebrated and handsomely rewarded for his works. When he replaced Salieri as kapellmeister at the court of Leopold II, for instance, the emperor bestowed on him today’s equivalent of $450,000. It was shortly thereafter that Cimarosa completed what has become his most famous work, Il matrimonia segreto, at the second performance of which the emperor (who was seeing it for the first time), ordered it repeated in its entirety that same night. In his delight with the new opera, Leopold II also gave the composer what would now be approximately $75,000.
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Christoph Willibald Gluck was an opera composer who tried his hand at almost all of the operatic genres of his day. He is probably most famous for his first two “reform operas” (Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste) and the debate that they engendered. Debate aside, his works, especially his reform operas, continued to influence composers for several generations. His famous student, Antonio Salieri, benefited from Gluck’s teachings in his own well-received operas, and, as Salieri mentored famous composers such as Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt, Gluck’s legacy was indeed substantial.
Franz Joseph Haydn
It is well known that Franz Joseph Haydn’s most famous colleague, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, died in poverty. The exact location of his grave still remains a mystery. Haydn’s case is completely different. When the older composer died in 1809, his fame was so great that phrenologists, seeking to discover the secret of Haydn’s genius, took the composer’s head for study. Haydn’s head traveled around Europe for 145 years until it was reunited with his body in a final interment ceremony in Eisenstadt in 1954.
Niccolò Jommelli
Although little known today, the Italian composer Niccolò Jommelli wrote some of the most remarkable operas of the mid-eighteenth century. They were admired for their blend of Italian, German, and French style, garnering praise even from Mozart.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s death has long been a source of rampant speculation. The most widespread story is that Mozart was poisoned by his rival, composer Antonio Salieri, but there is almost no evidence for this charge. The symptoms of Mozart’s illness do not match those of any known poison, and the relationship between Mozart and Salieri was almost always a friendly one. The main evidence against Salieri is his own testimony when he lay dying in 1825, but he was suffering from senility and bouts of delirium at the time and accused himself of many unlikely crimes. In his lucid moments, Salieri vehemently denied harming Mozart.
Antonio Salieri
Much has been made of the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, particularly since the production of Peter Shaffer’s stage play Amadeus and the subsequent Academy Award winning film. However, if such an intense rivalry did indeed exist it probably only served to drive a healthy output of compositions from the two men. There is no evidence, for instance, that Salieri poisoned Mozart or that he regularly tried to sabotage his career. Salieri was in fact a respected and successful composer in his own right. It is interesting to note that during his tenure as Hofkapellmeister at the Hapsburg court, Salieri regularly programmed masses that were written by Mozart. He also served as a pallbearer at Mozart’s funeral.
late classical (1800 - 1820)
Ludwig van Beethoven
There is perhaps no composer who is better known and respected by musicians and audiences alike than Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven can be seen as the pinnacle of compositional excellence, and his legacy – his symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and piano sonatas in particular – has both inspired and daunted every subsequent composer. His influence will almost certainly be felt for centuries to come.
Gioachino Rossini
Since their inception in the early and mid-nineteenth century, Gioachino Rossini’s operas have been performed time and again and are a staple of the operatic canon. Undoubtedly his most famous work is Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), closely followed by La Cenerentola (Cinderella) and L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). However, Rossini was a speedy and prolific composer and his legacy includes nearly forty operas. Moreover, his impact as a composer goes beyond the great number of works he wrote. In particular, the demands of his writing, which calls for great vocal agility, have had a lasting effect on the vocal practices of opera singers, and his innovative style and form have influenced generations of opera composers.
Franz Peter Schubert
An enormously prolific composer despite his tragically short life, Schubert wrote over six hundred songs, nine symphonies, five masses, and numerous piano compositions. Only about twenty-five percent of his compositions had been published at the time of his death, but musicians and audiences nevertheless recognized that Schubert was a remarkable talent. As the poet Franz Grillparzer wrote on the inscription of Schubert’s grave, “The art of music has here entombed a rich treasure but even fairer hopes.”
Carl Maria von Weber
Known for such operas as Die Freischütz and Oberon, Carl Maria von Weber was one of the first composers to create German operas with lasting appeal and influence. Richard Wagner considered Weber’s works an important forebear of his own music dramas. In fact, he once said, “If I had never had the experience of Weber’s things, I believe I should never have become a musician.” Showing his respect for the older composer, Wagner helped arrange for Weber’s remains to be brought from London to Dresden, where Weber was reinterred in 1844.
romantic (1810 - 1850)
Vincenzo Bellini
In a compositional career even shorter than that of Mozart, Vincenzo Bellini gave the world some of its best-loved opera arias. Sopranos from Maria Callas to Joan Sutherland to Renée Fleming have regularly performed such bel canto standards as Norma’s great aria “Casta diva." During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the operas to which these arias belong were neglected. In the 1950s, however, Maria Callas began her meteoric rise to the top. Because she frequently made her debut in a new city with a production of a Bellini opera (Norma was a particular favorite), the fortunes of Bellini’s operas rose with her.
Hector Berlioz
Far more than previous composers, Romantic composers felt that one of the major functions of music was to express their own personalities. This was especially true of Berlioz, who possessed the quintessential Romantic character. He suffered from bouts of depression and he harbored extreme enthusiasms. Berlioz’s romantic life was particularly tempestuous. As a young man, he fell violently in love with a woman whom he had never met, the English actress Harriet Smithson. His masterwork, the Symphonie Fantastique, musically depicts this obsession.
Frédéric Chopin
Written when he was only seventeen years old, Frédéric Chopin’s Variations on “Là ci darem” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Op. 2, for piano and orchestra, is not considered one of his most interesting works. Nevertheless, when Chopin’s eminent contemporary Robert Schumann heard it, he was in no doubt as to Chopin’s talent. In his first published essay of music criticism (1831), Schumann hailed Chopin with the famous remark, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” and Chopin’s career was launched.
Franz Liszt
Although he never played electric guitar or gave an interview to Rolling Stone, virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt has often been called the world’s first rock star. His abilities were such that even those who disliked his compositions, such as Brahms, were dazzled by his performances. Liszt inspired near-fanaticism among his many admirers, who went to great lengths to obtain even the smallest souvenir. At the same time, he caused scandals by entering illicit relationships with two married noblewomen.
Felix Mendelssohn
Nearly as gifted a child prodigy as Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn wrote one of his most brilliant pieces when he was only seventeen years old. The overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inspired by Shakespeare’s play of the same name, was successful enough that Mendelssohn revisited it several years later. In 1843, he wrote incidental music (songs, dances, and choruses) for the same play, including a processional to accompany the wedding of the Athenian ruler Theseus and the Amazon queen Hippolyta. This piece is, of course, Mendelssohn’s famous – and ubiquitous – Wedding March.
Clara Schumann
In an era when women, apart from singers, almost never performed in public or composed, Clara Schumann did both. She distinguished herself as the foremost interpreter of her husband Robert’s work, but she was also a primary force in reintroducing eighteenth-century keyboard music to the public. Unfortunately, her own compositions remained unknown until the second half of the twentieth century. Many are still unpublished and owned by private collectors, so we still cannot appreciate the full extent of her compositional achievements.
late romantic (1850 - 1900)
Georges Bizet
The average concert-goer probably only knows one work by Georges Bizet, but that work is among the best-known of all operas: Carmen. Bizet’s dangerously seductive heroine has made her mark not only on the opera stage but also on Broadway, the big screen, and even MTV. In 1943, Oscar Hammerstein II turned Carmen into a musical about African-American life. This version, entitled Carmen Jones, was adapted as a film in 1954. For her portrayal of Carmen, Dorothy Dandridge earned the first Best Actress Oscar nomination ever awarded to an African-American woman. More recently, the story of Carmen was retold on MTV in 2001 as a “hip-hopera,” featuring Beyoncé Knowles and blending rap with some of Bizet’s original melodies.
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms is usually exalted as one of the “Three Bs” of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This accolade was heard even during Brahms’s lifetime. While Brahms was probably flattered to be placed alongside these greats, there can be no doubt that it also stifled him. This is especially true when it came to Beethoven and Beethoven’s symphonic legacy. In one of the most extreme cases of compositional writer’s block ever recorded, it took almost fifteen years for Brahms to complete his first symphony.
Edvard Grieg
Perhaps most famous for his orchestral Peer Gynt suite, Edvard Grieg was a beloved son of Norway and is today remembered for his nationally inspired compositions. During his lifetime he was a celebrated composer who met with such luminaries as Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Ibsen. He is also credited with inspiring Debussy and Ravel. Grieg was so popular in his day that his funeral was a national, even international, affair, which drew political and musical royalty to pay their respects. At his request, his composition, the Funeral March for Rikard Nordraak, a friend and famous Norwegian nationalist, was played in Grieg’s memory.
Gustav Mahler
Now regarded as the last in a long line of great Austro-German symphony composers, Mahler was primarily known during his lifetime as a conductor and director of operas. His symphonies made little impact until the last ten years of his life, and even then, they were performed mostly in Austria and Germany. With the Nazi rise to power, his music grew even more obscure, suppressed by the Third Reich because of Mahler’s Jewish birth. Not until the 1960s and 1970s, when such conductors as Leonard Bernstein championed his music, did Mahler become a staple of concert halls all over the world.
Modest Musorgsky
In 1874, Modest Musorgsky wrote a piano suite that was inspired by a memorial exhibition of his friend Victor Hartmann’s drawings. This piece, Pictures from an Exhibition, is now one of Musorgsky’s most famous. As with many of Musorgsky’s works, however, Pictures from an Exhibition is most often heard in a form that Musorgsky never created, namely the 1922 orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel. Among the many other composers who took it upon themselves to revise, re-orchestrate, and even “correct” Musorgsky’s oeuvre were Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich. These reworkings could be seen as criticisms of Musorgsky’s style. At the same time, they are tributes to a composer who influenced not only the many great Russian composers to follow but also such European modernists as Debussy and Ravel.
Giacomo Puccini
Though Giacomo Puccini composed in other genres, his name is synonymous with opera. Many singers who helped to define an operatic era appeared and even debuted in Puccini’s operas. Among them were Enrico Caruso, Tito Schipa, and Emmy Destinn. Puccini also helped launch the career of Arturo Toscanini, one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century, when Toscanini made his debut in the premiere of Puccini’s La Bohème. Puccini’s death ended the last major age of Italian opera, but his operas have remained among the best-loved and most performed of the entire canon.
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov
A member of the famous Russian “Mighty Handful,” Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov was a passionate advocate of a Russian national music. With little formal training he rose to become, perhaps, the group’s most esteemed member. In fact, he was so admired that he was offered a professorship at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. This offer was made despite the fact that Rimsky-Korsakov and his colleagues tended to oppose institutionalized music. Nonetheless, with some trepidation, he accepted the position and went on to train the next generation of great Russian composers.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Although Tchaikovsky made outstanding contributions to the symphonic and operatic repertoires, the average music-lover knows Tchaikovsky for his ballets. Foremost among these are Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker, three of the most popular ballets of all time. Both Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, as well as part of The Nutcracker, were choreographed by Marius Petipa, who had studied ballet in his native France before emigrating to Russia. By uniting lyricism with technical difficulty, Tchaikovsky and Petipa transformed the world of classical dance.
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi was not only a great operatic composer but also a symbol of an entire country’s hopes and dreams. During the Risorgimento, or push for Italian unification, Italian patriots seeking independence from Austria used “Verdi” as an acronym for “Vittorio Emanuele, Re d’Italia,” (“Victor Emanuel, King of Italy”). Verdi’s popularity was such that when Italy eventually formed its new parliament in 1860, the composer was voted in. By his own admission, Verdi took little interest in his governmental duties, yet he served in the parliament until 1865.
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner has attracted more than his share of both fervent admirers and equally passionate detractors. Much of the controversy surrounding Wagner relates to his anti-Semitism, as evidenced in his 1850 essay “Judaism in Music.” Long after Wagner’s death, the Nazis found support for their own beliefs in Wagner’s writings, and he became one of the Third Reich’s preferred composers. Such is the association of Wagner with Nazism that none of his works were performed in Israel until 2000.
20th century (1900 - 2000)
Malcolm Arnold
Sir Malcolm Arnold’s long career had been fraught with many difficulties. That he overcame and triumphed over much adversity in his life, made his survival until only a few weeks short of his 85th birthday all the more remarkable. Below is an account of his life and career, adapted with kind permission from an article by Rodney Newton which appeared in British Bandsman magazine.
Samuel Barber
Although Samuel Barber lived to be seventy years old and never stopped composing, he was and is best known for works that he wrote before he reached the age of thirty. Foremost among these is the Adagio for Strings. Completed when Barber was only twenty-six, it has become indelibly associated with mourning. Beginning with the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Adagio has been played at numerous nationally significant funerals in the United States, as well as at similar events in other countries. It has also been used in several cinematic soundtracks, such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).
Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók was without a doubt one of the most original and versatile musicians of the twentieth century. He performed as a pianist and had enormous impact as an educator. In addition, he collected folk music from most of Eastern Europe and beyond, making him one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology even though his methods are now seen as outdated. As a composer, Bartók incorporated distinctively Hungarian traits into his own modernist language. As a result, despite his enduring popularity and great significance for many other composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Benjamin Britten, and Aaron Copland, Bartók’s music remains inimitable.
Alban Berg
Alban Berg, along with his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and fellow pupil Anton Webern, was a principal composer of the Second Viennese School. The Second Viennese School thrived before World War One, and is now best known for breaking with tonality and creating serial composition. The composers of this school theoretically inherited their legacy from a “First Viennese School” (Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven), although these earlier composers were by no means as closely associated with one another as were those of the Second School. Coincidentally, the deaths of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern were all somewhat unusual. In Berg’s case, he was stung by an insect, which led to an abscess and blood poisoning. He died on Christmas Eve, 1935.
Leonard Bernstein
Renowned as both a composer and as a conductor, Leonard Bernstein is probably the best-known of all American classical musicians. He also had an enormous impact upon popular music, producing several hit Broadway musicals. Among these, the ever-popular “West Side Story” perhaps best exemplifies the way in which Bernstein bridged the gap between classical and popular genres.
Benjamin Britten
When Benjamin Britten died on December 4, 1976, apparently he was worried that he would be forgotten. It is clear that this fear was unwarranted: Britten’s compositions in all genres remain in the canon. In particular his operatic legacy is a lasting one. His works in this area have proven to be among the most enduring English-language operas in history, revived time and again worldwide.
John Cage
It is sometimes said that John Cage was not a “real” composer, that he was more a philosopher, provocateur, or conceptual artist of some sort. There is something to be said for these views – certainly his impact on musical life was far more pervasive then actual performances of his music (which tend to be somewhat rare) can explain. The fact is, however, that Cage thought of himself as a musician and dedicated his entire life to the creating and propagating of a body of music. It is difficult to imagine what that makes him if not a composer. At the same time, Cage considered himself at odds, although mostly in a good-natured way, with the vast majority of what goes on in the realm of “classical music.” It is a fine paradox, then, that he has become one of the most influential American composers of his time.
Aaron Copland
More than any other composer, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American musical style in such iconic early works as Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944). His widely spaced chords and vigorous rhythms are often, consciously or unconsciously, incorporated into other composers’ attempts to create an “American” sound. In later years, however, Copland moved away from this musical populism, experimenting with the modernist twelve-tone technique that he had previously rejected. Audiences have yet to embrace Copland’s later works, but his Americanist music remains among the best-loved classical music of the twentieth century.
Victor de Sabata
Victor de Sabata was born in Trieste, Italy in 1892. His father, Amedeo, was an artist (drawer, sculptor, musician); his mother, Rosita Tedeschi, came from a family of Jewish origin and was also from Trieste. The de Sabata family moved to Milan when young Victor was eight years old and there he began his music studies at the city's conservatory; he immediately demonstrated his extraordinary gifts as an artist.
Claude Debussy
Debussy is often categorized as an “Impressionist” composer. This designation, which was first applied to painters of the same era, refers to the evoking of a mood using harmony and tone color. It is this style of composition with which Debussy is most closely associated, despite the fact that he tended to disavow the label.
George Gershwin
George Gershwin is today considered the man who brought “jazz into the concert hall.” On the night of this achievement, the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, this was true of both the score he prepared and of his own solo piano performance. The concert for which Gershwin wrote this piece was put together hastily by Paul Whiteman and with just three weeks to complete the work, Gershwin was unable to finish a large piano solo. So, drawing on his considerable talent as a jazz pianist, he simply improvised it.
Bernard Herrmann
Before there was John Williams there was Bernard Herrmann. Anyone who does not know his name certainly knows his music: Herrmann scored some of the most celebrated films of the twentieth century. He collaborated with the film legends Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, producing scores for classic movies such as Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. The composer also was part of the team that broadcast the infamous radio play The War of the Worlds in 1938. His music for the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster (original title All that Money Can Buy) won an Academy Award, and Citizen Kane, Anna and the King of Siam, Obsession and Taxi Driver, were all nominated.
Arthur Honegger
Honegger’s work is marked by a dramatic sensibility and a keen lyrical impulse. He was a highly skilled craftsman, especially in orchestral works and his widely varied output, including dozens of film scores and other incidental works, is one of the strongest and most expressive of the second-generation modernists.
Charles Ives
The question of Ives’s influence is a vexing issue. He is almost universally acclaimed as America’s first true great composer and widely acknowledged as a leading figure of early modernism (though his work was unknown at the time), alongside other contemporary giants like Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok. At the same time, little of his actual musical practice has found followers in succeeding generations of composers. In that sense Ives remains unique among these other composers. Perhaps his work is simply too idiosyncratic to allow for easy adoption by others; his influence can more easily be felt on an abstract level as a model for a certain kind of “American” sound. Big, rugged, expansive, without the learned polish of European music, this sound has found resonance in the years since. In this elemental “American-ness,” Copland, Bernstein, Carter, Wuorinen, and many others have found a profound and fertile basis for their own music.
Erich Korngold
Today, the soundtrack of a film is often as crucial to the film’s success as the film itself, but this was not always the case. One of the first to exploit the musical potential of film was Erich Korngold. In such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940), the Austrian composer successfully adapted the late-Romantic musical language of his operas and songs to the screen. For a time, the operas and songs themselves seemed to have been forgotten. In the last ten years, however, more and more of Korngold’s vocal works have been recorded and performed, with Die tote Stadt (1920) receiving particular attention.
Ernst Krenek
Krenek’s career can be seen as a virtual template for the wild fluctuations and extreme expressive volatility of music in the twentieth century. Though never as widely known or as frequently played as members of the first generation of modernists, in all of its stylistic divergences, Krenek’s music has an individuality and seriousness of purpose matched by few other artists of his day.
Franz Lehár
Franz Lehár’s most famous work is undoubtedly Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow). This beloved operetta, a worldwide smash success, also provided Lehár’s family with a measure of protection during World War II, when the composer remained in Vienna with his Jewish wife.Because of Hitler’s great admiration for Lehár’s works, particularly Die lustige Witwe, Sophie Lehár was spared deportation to a concentration camp. Despite such official intervention, however, Lehár’s wife was hardly out of danger. At one point, she was nearly taken away by the Gestapo, but the raid was canceled after Lehár pleaded with a higher official to stop it. In case of such a deportation, however, Sophie nonetheless carried a cyanide capsule on her for the war’s duration.
Gian Carlo Menotti
If you were to take a music history course, or to read one of the standard college music history texts, you might never learn who Gian Carlo Menotti was. There is scant, if any, mention of the composer. He seems to have been more or less dismissed as a conservative twentieth-century composer who shunned the avant-garde, a product of his Italian predecessors, Puccini and Mascagni. In fact, he was so disliked by some of the more experimental composers that at one point Luigi Nono refused to appear on the same program as Menotti. Menotti himself did not hesitate to criticize his perceived opponents, once stating, “Atonal music is essentially pessimistic. It is incapable of expressing joy or humor.” Menotti may not have been a great innovator but his contributions to American classical music were nonetheless significant. His operas, in particular, met with acclaim and he received many prestigious commissions. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize on several occasions and also was esteemed as a librettist and stage director.
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Messiaen was a major twentieth-century composer, teacher, and organist, as well as the premier sacred composer of his time. In a skeptical age, he sought to bring a sense of wonder and awe to his works and largely did so without the darker or more anxious expressive strains that dominated twentieth-century music. He was also one of the most important teachers of the post-War period, counting among his students many of the most prominent and original composers of the day.
Darius Milhaud
The composer Darius Milhaud was a very influential figure in twentieth-century music. He came into contact with and mentored hundreds of younger composers, including the likes of Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Dave Brubeck, and Burt Bacharach. Moreover, Milhaud’s enormous output, wide-ranging interests, and experimental openness mark him as a key composer not only in twentieth-century French music, but also in the modern era itself.
Francis Poulenc
Francis Poulenc had little formal training as a composer and once declared proudly: “Mon canon, c’est l’instinct” (My model is my instinct). Whatever the case, he was associated closely with some of the most important composers of pre-World War II Paris, including Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger. Poulenc, who lived in France under the Nazis, resisted the occupation through his music, composing throughout the war, and including patriotic themes in his works. His works are still often performed today, and his opera, Dialogues des Carmelites, in particular is regularly programmed in many opera houses. Poulenc is also famous for his collaborative performances with the renowned baritone Pierre Bernac.
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev spent his last years in Soviet Russia, struggling with strict censorship yet managing to compose some of his greatest works. Among these is the 1938 film score for Alexander Nevsky, directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Commissioned by Stalin himself, the film tells the story of a thirteenth-century warrior who defended Novgorod from Teutonic knights. The German invaders clearly represent the menace of Hitler’s Germany, while the heroic Nevsky was a stand-in for Stalin himself. Suppressed when Stalin and Hitler signed a mutual nonaggression pact, the film was finally released in 1941. Today, Alexander Nevsky is recognized as a cinematic and musical classic as well as a masterful work of propaganda.
Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel once remarked, “A composer who shows no influences should change his profession.” Ravel’s own compositions demonstrate that he was aware of and interested in an enormous variety of music, everything from flamenco to French Baroque, masterworks to jazz. In his youth, Ravel’s eclecticism earned him nothing but disdain from the French musical establishment. After World War I, however, he became the leading representative of French music both at home and abroad.
Erik Satie
Perhaps no other composer is as closely associated with whimsy, a lively sense of humor, and a remorseless eccentricity as Erik Satie is. Among other activities, he collected identical articles of clothing and accessories: at the time of his death, he owned one hundred umbrellas, twelve gray velvet suits, and eighty-four handkerchiefs. This spirit and comedic sensibility live on in his compositions, and not just within the notes or with titles of the works. Often his manuscripts are peppered with commentary directed at the performer alone. One piece, “Vexations” (1893), states that if the performer wishes “to play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious ‘immobilities.’”
Ahmed Saygun
Born in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, Ahmed Adnan Saygun came of age just as the Turkish Republic was being established. Becoming Turkey’s leading composer in the Western classical tradition as well as one of the country’s most important ethnomusicologists, Saygun embodied the cultural values promoted by the republic’s first leader, Ataturk. Saygun’s works combine Western classical techniques with melodic and rhythmic elements from Turkish folk and art music.
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg, along with his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, was a principal composer of the Second Viennese School. The Second Viennese School thrived before World War One, and is now best known for breaking with tonality and creating serial composition. The composers of this school theoretically inherited their legacy from a “First Viennese School” (Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven), although the earlier composers were by no means as closely associated with one another as were those of the Second School. Coincidentally, the deaths of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were all somewhat unusual. In Schoenberg’s case, having been a superstitious man all of his life, he predicted that, as he had been born on the thirteenth day of the month, he would also die on the thirteenth day of the month, a prediction which ultimately proved to be accurate.
Dmitry Shostakovich
During Dmitry Shostakovich’s lifetime, most people in the Soviet Union and abroad regarded the composer as a staunch supporter of communism. This accepted belief was not questioned until after Shostakovich’s death with the publication of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. In the book, Volkov depicts an artist at odds with the Soviet government. Before long, however, Volkov’s authority was undermined by the revelation that many of its passages, supposedly resulting from interviews with Shostakovich, had earlier appeared as speeches or articles by the composer. Nonetheless, many of Shostakovich’s friends and colleagues insisted that the views expressed in Volkov’s book were authentic. However, the debate concerning Shostakovich’s true political beliefs – and how these are embodied in his music – continues to rage.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
By the late 1960s, when he was still relatively young, Karlheinz Stockhausen had become probably the best-known contemporary composer in the world. One measure of Stockhausen’s fame is his inclusion among the gallery of faces on the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (in the back row, between comedians Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields). Other musicians who acknowledge his influence include Frank Zappa and the band Pink Floyd. Stockhausen continues to produce ambitious and innovative music today.
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky was undoubtedly the most versatile composer of the twentieth century, composing in styles ranging from Russian nationalism to neoclassicism to serialism. He was also known for his cutting wit, particularly when the topic was a fellow musician. Of Vivaldi, he remarked that the Venetian had not written hundreds of concertos but rather the same concerto hundreds of times. On another occasion, Stravinsky complained, “Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like it’s always by Villa-Lobos?” At least one composer, however, gave Stravinsky a dose of his own medicine: upon hearing The Rake’s Progress, Benjamin Britten said, “I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.”
Virgil Thomson
Among American composers, Virgil Thomson is one of the most influential. Often inspired by the music of his Missourian childhood, Thomson incorporated popular American tunes and hymns in much of his music – a style that became emblematic of Roosevelt’s New Deal Era. A success not only as a composer of both traditional forms and film, from his longtime platform as music critic at the New York Herald Tribune Thomson played an important role in shaping contemporary American classical music and was a powerful voice in the promotion of new music, particularly that of American composers.
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Heitor Villa-Lobos once described the sheer quantity of his compositional output – nearly one thousand works including operas, orchestral, choral and chamber compositions – as “the fruits of an extensive, generous, and warm land.” This land was Brazil, where Villa-Lobos grew up in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Long stretches of white sandy beaches, the deep blue Atlantic Ocean, flowers of a thousand varieties, the clear bay of Rio de Janeiro, and wide warm streets lined with open-air markets formed the backdrop for Villa-Lobos’s childhood. Villa-Lobos took his inspiration from this land and its diverse cultural and musical influences, created a national style of composition, and went on to become the most celebrated composer in Brazil.
Anton Webern
Anton Webern, along with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, was a principal composer of the Second Viennese School. The Second Viennese School thrived before World War I, and is now best known for breaking with tonality and creating serial composition. The composers of this school theoretically inherited their legacy from a “First Viennese School” (Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven), although the earlier composers were by no means as closely associated with one another as were those of the Second School. Curiously, all three men’s deaths were somewhat unusual. In Webern’s case, just after World War II, he was mistakenly killed by an American sniper as Webern smoked a cigar on his veranda.
the present age (2000 - )
John Adams
One of America’s most famous living composers, John Adams is best known for producing dramatic works with highly topical subjects. A recent example is his Transmigration of Souls for chorus, children’s chorus, orchestra, and pre-recorded soundtrack. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the opening of its 2002 season, the piece commemorated the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Its text consists almost entirely of missing-persons signs and memorials posted after September 11. This work is a testament to the significant place Adams occupies in American musical life.
Lawrence Axelrod
Lawrence Axelrod is a composer, pianist and conductor, whose musical activities have taken him around the United States and Europe.
Milton Babbitt
Building upon the twelve-tone method pioneered by Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt expanded the technique to include not only pitch but also other elements of music such as duration and dynamics. Babbitt was also an innovator in the realm of electronic music, using synthesized sounds and live performance as complements to one other. Although Babbitt’s works are absent from the traditional symphony repertoires and radio play-lists, undoubtedly he should be considered one of the most original and influential composers of the post-war era.
Amin Bhatia
Composer and sound designer Amin Bhatia's fascination with orchestral music and electronics won him international fame in his youth. It led to projects with David Foster, Steve Porcaro and a solo album titled The Interstellar Suite released on the on Capitol Records Cinema label. The realism and expression of his sound won critical acclaim among those in both the electronic and classical music genres. Amin's approach has been likened to the harmonic inventiveness of Jerry Goldsmith and the technical prowess of Hans Zimmer.
Pierre Boulez
For nearly the past sixty years Pierre Boulez has been in the forefront of modern musical life. Initially a leader in Europe’s post-war compositional revolution, Boulez first made an impact on mainstream classical music through his conducting. In fact, his term as co-director of the New York Philharmonic marks the one time a member of the avant-garde has led a major orchestra. He remains active and influential as a composer, conductor, administrator, and writer.
Elliott Carter
Elliott Carter’s earliest works date from the late 1920s, so he is verging on his eightieth year as a composer – surely the longest creative life for a major composer in history. As a result, Carter’s career serves as a guide to the various evolutionary stages in twentieth- (now twenty-first-) century music, as well as an exemplar of the development of a personal style. Among his best-known works are his chamber pieces, which often seek to develop a distinct musical personality for each member of the ensemble.
David Cope
David Cope is a composer/author/computer scientist whose work has been performed throughout the world. His work on algorithmic compositional techniques and procedures, as well as his published works on the subject, are landmarks in the field.
John Corigliano
When John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at the Metropolitan opera in 1991, audiences and critics alike were delighted with the final installment of the Beaumarchais Figaro trilogy. Andrew Porter of The Times wrote, “A triumph with the public, a success with the New York press, and a sell-out at the box office...It is heartening to find a new opera greeted with a standing ovation.” But it is not just this “triumph” that has made Corigliano one of the most celebrated composers of new music. Equally at home with both live concert works and film music, the composer has received one award after the other for his pieces, including an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and several Grammys.
George Crumb
Described by those who know him as quiet, even shy and reticent, George Crumb is an award-winning American composer known for his inventive use of sound. His inspirations have come from as close by as his childhood Appalachian home and as far away as East Asia. His one-time teacher Ross Lee Finney called Crumb an “American tinkerer,” referring to the way in which Crumb experimented with combinations of various instruments and sounds. Crumb also is known for experimenting with the musicians themselves, requiring that they push themselves outside of their traditional comfort zones and enhance the performances with unusual theatrical and sonic elements.
Stefania de Kenessey
Stefania de Kenessey is a leading figure in the revival of neoclassicism; her most recent CD Shades of Light, Shades of Dark received rave reviews as “fully worthy to share a program or disc with the masterpieces by Mozart or Brahms” (Fanfare).
Antonio Giacometti
Born in Brescia (1957), Antonio Giacometti is an active composer. A graduate of the Milan Conservatory, he is currently composing an opera based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
Philip Glass
Although he has never achieved great critical success, Philip Glass has had major influence not only within classical music but also in the fields of popular music and culture. In 1997, the TV show South Park famously featured a “happy, non-offensive, non-denominational Christmas play, with music and lyrics by New York minimalist composer, Philip Glass.” Nor was South Park alone in parodying Glass’s famously repetitive style: part of Glass’s own official website, www.philipglass.com, is devoted to Glass jokes.
William Kraft
As a performer, teacher, conductor, award-winning composer, and Hollywood session player, William Kraft has probably had as
remarkable career as any musician in the twentieth century. A prominent member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for over a quarter of a century, he has also played for films such as North by Northwest, and conducted and/or composed several film scores including Ralph Bakshi's Fire and Ice and the Golden Globe-winning television movie Bill (starring Mickey Rooney). Throughout his long career this distinguished composer and performer has known or worked with nearly every major name in twentieth-century music, premiering works by the likes of Stravinsky and Boulez.
Anthony Lanman
Anthony Lanman's music has been performed all over the United States as well as in Turkey, Cyprus, Italy, Greece, England, Austria and the Czech Republic. In addition, his music has been featured on radio stations throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
Sylvia Pengilly
Born in London, England a few years prior to the onset of WWII, some of Sylvia Pengilly’s earliest memories are of a lullaby of gunfire, and the whine, followed by the terrifying silence, of V-2 rockets, as they homed in on their targets of destruction. When the bombing became too bad, the family, minus her father, who had been “called up” into the army, was evacuated to rural Sussex. It was here that she was first introduced to the wealth of English folk music as part of the weekly music class, which was accompanied by the music teacher playing the rickety school piano.
Tim Risher
Tim Risher is an American composer, trombonist, and pianist. Risher's output is typically tonal, with primary influences being minimal music, American and Brazilian popular musics, Early Music, and American shape note hymnody. Most works feature the use of conventional harmony, with great clarity of individual melodic lines.
Eric Schwartz
Primarily interested in a synthesis of musical archetypes, Schwartz is always at work on a variety of genre bending projects. Formative influences include an amalgamation of the glam metal of the late 80's, and the baroque intellectualism of Arnold Schoenberg.
Alex Shapiro
Alex Shapiro was born in New York City on January 11, 1962, and spent her first 21 years in Manhattan. Her father, Ivan Shapiro, was a well-regarded commercial real estate attorney who devoted a nearly equal amount of his time assisting in matters of social justice. Her mother, Maria, was an amateur flutist who for eight years founded and ran a small airfreight company prior to the deregulation of the airline industry in the 1980s. Ivan had previously been married to an artist named Florence Walton (whose painting name is Goodstein-Shapiro) with whom he had a daughter, Lisa Kubiske, eight years older than Alex and now a senior diplomat in the U.S. Department of State. This extended family played a significant role in Shapiro’s life as an only child.
Raphael Veronese
Raphael Veronese was born on March 5, 1974 in the Nova Friburgo State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the third son of Jose Carlos Veronese and Katia Ferreira. His interest in music began at an early age. His grandfather, Jose Felix Veronese, who was a lawyer and also served as inspector of the Santa Doroteia College of Philosophy in Nova Friburgo, was a lover of classical music, but did not have the opportunity to study it in his childhood. So he encouraged Veronese’s father to do so instead.
Andersen Viana
An active and prolific composer, Andersen Viana has written over 200 pieces, worked as a composer-conductor and a cultural producer, and has taught comparative music history at Palacio das Artes and Film Music at the Escola Livre de Cinema, both in Belo Horizonte. In addition, he occasionally lectures in universities around the country.