John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947)

is an American composer with strong roots in minimalism. He is best known for his opera Nixon in China, recounting Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. His choral piece On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003.

Recommended Listening - Flowering Tree (2 CD)

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750)

was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organization in composition for diverse musical forces, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.

Recommended Viewing: Johann Sebastian Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1-6 [Blu-ray]

Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos; the Goldberg Variations; the English Suites, French Suites, Partitas, and Well-Tempered Clavier; the Mass in B Minor; the St. Matthew Passion; the St. John Passion; the Magnificat, The Musical Offering; The Art of Fugue; the Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo; the Cello Suites; more than 200 surviving cantatas; and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Recommended Listening: Bach: Cantatas, BWV 41, 42

While Bach's fame as an organist was great during his lifetime, he was not particularly well-known as a composer. His adherence to Baroque forms and contrapuntal style was considered "old-fashioned" by his contemporaries, especially late in his career when the musical fashion tended towards Rococo and later Classical styles. A revival of interest and performances of his music began early in the 19th century, and he is now widely considered to be one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition.

Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881–September 26, 1945)

was a Hungarian composer and pianist, considered to be one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.

Recommended Listening Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; Hungarian Sketches

Ludwig van Beethoven, 16 December 1770 – 26 March 1827

was a German composer and pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most respected and influential composers of all time.

Beethoven was attracted to the ideals of the Enlightenment and by the growing Romanticism in Europe. He initially dedicated his third symphony, the Eroica (Italian for "heroic"), to Napoleon, believing that the general intended to sustain the democratic and republican ideals of the French Revolution. But in 1804, when Napoleon's imperial ambitions became clear, Beethoven took hold of the title-page and scratched the name Bonaparte out so violently that he made a hole in the paper. He later changed the work's title to "Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uom" ("Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man"), and he rededicated it to his patron, Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, at whose palace it was first performed.

The fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony features an elaborate choral setting of Schiller's Ode An die Freude ("Ode to Joy"), an optimistic hymn championing the brotherhood of humanity. Since 1972, an orchestral version of this part of the fourth movement, arranged by the conductor Herbert von Karajan, has been the European anthem as announced by the Council of Europe. In 1985 it was adopted as the anthem of the European Community / European Union.

Recommended listening - 9 Symphonies

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini 1801 – 1835

was an opera composer. Known for his flowing melodic lines, Bellini was the quintessential composer of Bel canto opera. Bellini's second opera, Bianca e Gernando, met with some success at the Teatro San Carlo, leading to an offer from the impresario Barbaia for an opera at La Scala. Il pirata was a resounding immediate success and began Bellini's faithful and fruitful collaboration with the librettist and poet Felice Romani.

Bellini spent the next years, 1827–33 in Milan, where all doors were open to him. Sparking controversy in the press for its new style and its restless harmonic shifts into remote keys, La straniera (1828) was even more successful than Il pirata, and allowed Bellini to support himself solely by his opera commissions. The composer showed the taste for social life and dandyism. Opening a new theater in Parma, his Zaira (1829) was a failure at the Teatro Ducale, but Venice welcomed I Capuleti e i Montecchi, which was based on the same Italian sources as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

The next five years were triumphant, with major successes with his greatest works, La Sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani, cut short by Bellini's premature death.

Recommended listening - Bel Canto Spectacular

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976)

was an English composer, conductor, violist and pianist. Britten was a prolific juvenile composer; some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention, however, were the Sinfonietta Op. 1, "A Hymn to the Virgin" (1930) and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1934 for the BBC Singers.

He completed the choral works Hymn to St. Cecilia (his last collaboration with Auden) and A Ceremony of Carols during the long sea voyage. He had already begun work on his opera Peter Grimes based on the writings of Suffolk poet George Crabbe, and its première at Sadler's Wells in 1945 was his greatest success so far. However, Britten encountered opposition from sectors of the English musical establishment and gradually withdrew from the London scene, founding the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival the following year, partly (though not solely) to perform his own works.

Recommended Viewing: Peter Grimes

Peter Grimes was the first in a series of English operas, of which Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were particularly admired. These operas share common themes. For example, most feature an 'outsider' character, who is excluded or misunderstood by society. Often this is the eponymous protagonist, as in Peter Grimes and Owen Wingrave. He was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the Coronation Honours, 1953.

Anton Bruckner (4 September 1824 – 11 October 1896)

was an Austrian composer known primarily for his symphonies, masses, and motets. His symphonies are often considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, complex polyphony, and considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.

Unlike other radicals, such as Wagner or Hugo Wolf who fit the enfant terrible mold, Bruckner showed extreme humility before other musicians, Wagner in particular. This apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the man and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music.

Recommended Listening: The Complete EMI Recordings 1946-1984, Vol. 1: Orchestral [Box Set]

Richard Gavin Bryars (born 16 January 1943)
is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism. Bryars's first works as a composer owe much to the so-called New York School of John Cage (with whom he briefly studied), Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and minimalism. One of his earliest pieces, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), is an indeterminist work which allows the performers to take a number of sound sources related to the sinking of the RMS Titanic and make them into a piece of music.

Recommended Listening - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me yet

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992)

was an American composer. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and, in the opinion of many, the most influential American composer of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for the most part of the latter's life.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. A performance of 4′33″ can be perceived as including the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed,rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and has become one of the most controversial compositions of the century.

Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990)

was an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as “the dean of American composers.” Copland's music achieved a balance between modern music and American folk styles. The open, slowly changing harmonies of many of his works are said to evoke the vast American landscape. He also incorporated percussive orchestration, changing meter, polyrhythms, polychords and tone rows in a broad range of works for concert hall, theater, ballet, and films.

Aside from composing, Copland was a teacher, lecturer, critic, writer, and conductor (generally, but not always) of his own works.

Achille-Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918)

was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he is considered one of the most prominent figures working within the field of Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. Debussy was not only among the most important of all French composers but also was a central figure in all European music at the turn of the twentieth century

Frederick Albert Theodore Delius

CH (29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer. Delius's musical style is one of the most unusual in Western musical history. Characterized by a curious mixture of pentatonic figures and chromaticism, although still largely tonal, it reflects a move from the textbook post-romanticism of the years following the death of Richard Wagner (1883) to a style that was unique to Delius, blending Impressionism with the slightly older post-romanticism and northern European and African-American folk idioms.

His use of luscious harmonies - mainly slow moving, and constantly evolving melody, with the frequent use of leitmotifs - is what prompted Sir Thomas Beecham to describe him as "the last great apostle of romantic beauty in music." His harmony and melody were influenced greatly by African-American music of the time, using blues harmony and melodic characteristics that would become distinctly jazz and blues 20 years later.

Paul Marie Thomas Vincent d'Indy (March 27, 1851 – December 2, 1931)

was a French composer and teacher. He became a devoted student of César Franck at the Conservatoire de Paris. As a follower of Franck, d'Indy came to admire what he considered the standards of German symphonism.Few of d'Indy's works are performed regularly today. His best known pieces are probably the Symphonie Cévenole or Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) for piano and orchestra (1886), and Istar (1896), a symphonic poem in the form of a set of variations.

Jean-Baptiste de Lully (Giovanni Battista di Lulli) (November 28, 1632 – March 22, 1687)

was a French composer of Italian birth, who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. Lully composed many ballets for the King during the 1650s and 1660s, in which the King and Lully himself danced. He also had tremendous success composing the music for the comedies of Molière, including Le Mariage forcé (1664), L'Amour médecin (1665), and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).

Josquin des Prez (c. 1450 to 1455 – August 27, 1521)

often referred to simply as Josquin, was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance. He is also known as Josquin Desprez, a French rendering of Dutch "Josken Van De Velde", diminutive of "Joseph Van De Velde" ("of the fields"), and Latinized as Josquinus Pratensis, alternatively Jodocus Pratensis.

He was the most famous European composer between Guillaume Dufay and Palestrina, and is usually considered to be the central figure of the Franco-Flemish School. Josquin is widely considered by music scholars to be the first master of the high Renaissance style of polyphonic vocal music that was emerging during his lifetime.

August Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (November 2, 1739 – October 24, 1799)

was an Austrian composer and violinist. With the exception of his pieces for the double bass and his concerto for harp, his works are seldom performed today. He was well known in his day, though, and is still considered an important composer of the Classical era.

After some early Italian opera buffa, he composed a number of German Singspiele, with Der Apotheker und der Doktor (1786, generally known today as Doktor und Apotheker) in particular being a tremendous success in his lifetime, playing in houses all over Europe. His symphonies (around 120 of them) are also considered fine pieces with their folk-like melodies and witty passages; they include twelve based on Ovid's Metamorphoses (six of which have survived to the present day).

He also wrote oratorios, cantatas, concertos (including two for the double bass and one for the viola), chamber music, piano pieces and other works. His memoirs, Lebenbeschreibung, were published in Leipzig in 1801.

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848)

was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. Donizetti's most famous work is Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and arguably his most immediately recognizable piece of music is the aria "Una furtiva lagrima" from L'elisir d'amore (1832). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioacchino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera.

Guillaume Dufay (Du Fay, Du Fayt) (August 5, 1397? – November 27, 1474)

was a Franco-Flemish composer and music theorist of the early Renaissance. As the central figure in the Burgundian School, he was the most famous and influential composer in Europe in the mid-15th century.

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, Order of Merit, Royal Victorian Order (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934)

was an English Romantic composer. Several of his first major orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, were greeted with acclaim. He also composed oratorios, chamber music, symphonies, instrumental concertos, and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.

César Franck (December 10, 1822 – November 8, 1890)

a composer, organist and music teacher of Belgian and German origin who lived in France, was one of the great figures in Romantic music in the second half of the 19th century.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (baptized mid-September 1583 – March 1, 1643)

was an Italian musician, one of the most important composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. The majority of Frescobaldi's extant output consists of keyboard music. His renowned prowess at the keyboard earned him several important international students, such as Johann Jacob Froberger, who composed pieces highly reminiscent of Frescobaldi's.

The Fiori Musicali and the two books of Toccatas and Partitas are his most important keyboard works.

George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937)

was an American composer. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin composed songs both for Broadway and for the classical concert hall. He also wrote popular songs with success.

Many of his compositions have been used on television and in numerous films, and many became jazz standards.In 1924, Gershwin composed his first major classical work, Rhapsody in Blue for orchestra and piano, which was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé and premièred with Paul Whiteman's concert band in New York. It proved to be his most popular work.
His most ambitious composition was Porgy and Bess (1935). Called by Gershwin himself a "folk opera," the piece premièred in a Broadway theater and is now widely regarded as the most important American opera of the twentieth century.

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (June 1 1804 – February 15 1857)

was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition inside his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka's compositions were an important influence on future Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who took Glinka's lead and produced a distinctively Russian kind of romantic (classical) music.

Edvard Hagerup Grieg (15 June 1843 – 4 September 1907)

was a Norwegian composer and pianist who composed in the Romantic period. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces.

Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003)
was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat (Pak Cokro).

Harrison is particularly noted for incorporating elements of the music of non-Western cultures into his work, with a number of pieces featuring traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments, and several more featuring versions of them made out of tin cans and other materials. The majority of his works are written in just intonation rather than the more widespread equal temperament. Harrison is one of the most prominent composers to have worked with microtones.

(Franz) Joseph Haydn (March 31, 1732 – May 31, 1809)
was an Austrian composer. He was one of the most prominent composers of the classical period, and is called by some the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".

A life-long citizen of Austria, Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Hungarian Esterházy family on their remote estate. Isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".[3]

During his lifetime, the composer was always known as Joseph Haydn. The form "Franz Joseph Haydn" is avoided by modern scholars and historians.

Gustav Theodore Holst (21 September 1874 – 25 May 1934)

was an English composer and was a music teacher for nearly 20 years. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets.

Having studied at the Royal College of Music in London, his early work was influenced by Ravel, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and fellow student Ralph Vaughan Williams,but most of his music is highly original, with influences from Hindu spiritualism and English folk tunes. Holst's music is well known for unconventional use of metre and haunting melodies.

Joseph Martin Kraus (born on June 20, 1756 - died at the age of 36 on December 15, 1792)
was a composer in the classical era who is sometimes referred to as "the Swedish Mozart." Many of Kraus's symphonies have been lost, or attributed to other composers. Of those which are certainly of Kraus's authorship, only about a dozen remain. Most of Kraus's extant symphonies are in three movement, without a minuet. Most are scored for two horns and strings, many include two flutes and two oboes, while the later ones also include two bassoons, and two additional horns.

For a time, Kraus's music was written while a Roman Catholic for Catholic services. For the second, from 1778 to 1790, Kraus was still Catholic, but wrote music for Lutheran services. Aside from short hymns and chorales, there was not much use for sacred music in Sweden at that time. There was also a debate going on regarding the role music should play in the church, and Kraus participated in that debate by writing three articles on the subject in the Stockholm Post.

Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886)
was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and teacher. Liszt became renowned throughout Europe for his great skill as a performer; to this day, many consider him to have been the greatest pianist in history. He was also an important and influential composer, a notable piano teacher, a conductor who contributed significantly to the modern development of the art, and a benefactor to other composers and performers, notably Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz.

As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind a huge and diverse oeuvre, in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony.

Jules (Émile Frédéric) Massenet (May 12, 1842 – August 13, 1912)

was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, his style fell out of favor not long after his death; and, except Manon, his works were rarely performed. Since the mid-1970s, many of his operas have seen periodic revivals.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, born and generally known as Felix Mendelssohn (February 3, 1809 – November 4, 1847)
was a German composer, pianist and conductor of the early Romantic period. He was born to a notable Jewish family which later converted to Christianity; he was a grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His work includes symphonies, concerti, oratorios, piano and chamber music. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his creative originality is now being recognized and re-evaluated. He is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.

Olivier Messiaen December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992)

was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11 and numbered Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré among his teachers. He was appointed organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death. On the fall of France in 1940 Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and while incarcerated he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time") for the four available instruments, piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners to an audience of inmates and prison guards.

Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941, and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod (who later became Messiaen's second wife), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and George Benjamin.

Messiaen's music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources), and is harmonically and melodically based on modes of limited transposition, which were Messiaen's own innovation.

Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (May 15, 1567 (baptized) – November 29, 1643)

was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer. Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the music of the Renaissance to that of the Baroque. Enjoying fame in his lifetime, he wrote one of the earliest operas, L'Orfeo, which is still regularly performed.Monteverdi is considered the founder of the opera genre.

Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)

was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. His more than 600 compositions include works widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music, and he is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart was born in Salzburg into a musical family and showed indications of prodigious abilities at a very young age. When he was five years old, he could both read and write music and had precocious skills as a keyboard and violin player.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (March 21 1839 – March 28 1881)

one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.

Like his literary contemporary Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky depicts in his music "the insulted and the injured" with all their passion and pain. He raises these characters to tragic heights until the grotesque and majestic coexist. Mussorgsky could accomplish this not simply out of compassion or guilt towards them, but because in his works he almost becomes them. Mussorgsky's music is vivid, confused, feverish and ultimately hypnotizing —again, like Dostoyevsky at his best.

Many of his major works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes, including the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition.

Carl August Nielsen (9 June 1865 – 3 October 1931)

was a conductor, violinist, and composer from Denmark. His works have long been well known in Denmark and they have been "a mainstay throughout the Nordic countries and, to a lesser extent, in Britain," noted the critic Alex Ross in 2008 in The New Yorker, and rising young conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel and Alan Gilbert are now playing Nielsen's music in the United States.

Carl Nielsen is especially admired for his six symphonies and his concertos for violin, flute and clarinet.
Carl Nielsen appears on the Danish hundred-kroner bill.

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944, London)

is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, perhaps best known for the many scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano.

His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, and Love Counts, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist. Nyman has stated his preference for writing opera to other sorts of music.

Johann Pachelbel baptized September 1, 1653 – buried March 9, 1706)

was a German Baroque composer, organist and teacher, who brought the south German organ tradition to its peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, and his contributions to the development of the chorale prelude and fugue have earned him a place among the most important composers of the middle Baroque era.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (between 3 February 1525 and 2 February 1526 - 2 February 1594)

was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. He was the most famous sixteenth-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. Palestrina had a vast influence on the development of Roman Catholic church music, and his work can be seen as a summation of Renaissance polyphony.

Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935 in Paide, Estonia)

is Estonia's most renowned composer, working in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabulation and hypnotic repetitions that is also influenced by the intellectual counterpoint elements of European jazz, but fits a European-American post-modernism rather than an example of "world music".Continuing struggles with Soviet officials led him to emigrate in 1980 with his wife and their two sons.

NOTE: Our Music Director LOVES Arvo Parts' compositions.

Pérotin (fl. c. 1200), also called Perotin the Great

was a European composer, believed to be French, who lived around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the 13th century. He was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony. He was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions; this is due to the testimony of an anonymous English student at Notre Dame known as Anonymous IV.

Henry Purcell 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695

was an English Baroque composer. He has often been called England's finest native composer. Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements but devised a peculiarly English style of Baroque music.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff 1 April 1873 – 28 March 1943)

was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom which included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.

Understandably, the piano figures prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output, either as a solo instrument or as part of an ensemble. He made it a point, however, to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument.

Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937)

was a Basque French composer and pianist of Impressionist and Expressionist music, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music have become staples of the concert repertoire.

Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses tonal color and variety of sound and instrumentation very effectively.

Ravel is perhaps best known for his orchestral work, Boléro, which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music."

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov 18 March 1844 – 21 June 1908

was a Russian composer, one of the Russian composers known as "The Five", and was later a teacher of harmony and orchestration. He is particularly noted for a predilection for folk and fairy-tale subjects, and for his extraordinary skill in orchestration, which may have been influenced by his synesthesia.

The first part of his surname, Rimsky, is due to the fact that some of his forefathers undertook a pilgrimage to Rome.

Gioachino Antonio Rossini (February 29, 1792 – November 13, 1868)

was a popular Italian composer who created 39 operas as well as sacred music and chamber music. His best known works include Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), La Cenerentola and Guillaume Tell (William Tell).

Franz Peter Schubert (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828)

was an Austrian composer. He wrote some 600 lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. He is particularly noted for his original melodic and harmonic writing.

While Schubert had a close circle of friends and associates who admired his work (including his teacher Antonio Salieri, and the prominent singer Johann Michael Vogl), wider appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited at best. He was never able to secure adequate permanent employment, and for most of his career he relied on the support of friends and family. Interest in Schubert's work increased dramatically in the decades following his death and he is now widely considered to be one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition.

Bedřich Smetana 2 March 1824 - 12 May 1884)

was a Czech composer, one of the most significant that his country has ever hosted. He is best known for his symphonic poem Vltava (also known as The Moldau from the German), the second in a cycle of six which he entitled Má vlast ("My Country"), and for his opera The Bartered Bride.

Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 – 23 November 1585)

was an English composer. Tallis flourished as a church musician in 16th century England. He occupies a primary place in anthologies of English church music, and is considered among the best of its earliest composers. Tallis has been said to be one of the most important composers of his time and is honoured for his original voice in English musicianship

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi October 9 or 10, 1813 – January 27, 1901)

was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of Italian opera in the 19th century. His works are frequently performed in opera houses throughout the world and, transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture - such as "La donna è mobile" from Rigoletto, "Va, pensiero" (The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves) from Nabucco, and "Libiamo ne' lieti calici" (The Drinking Song) from La traviata.

Although his work was sometimes criticized for using a generally diatonic rather than a chromatic musical idiom and having a tendency toward melodrama, Verdi’s masterworks dominate the standard repertoire a century and a half after their composition.

Johann Vierdanck Born: 1605 Died: 1646

This German organist also played the violin and cornet. As a youth he was a choirboy at the Dresden Hofkapelle and between 1630 and 1631 he was an instrumentalist at the Hofkapelle. While serving in the Gustrow court Vierdanck was able to travel to Lubeck and Copenhagen and in 1635, until his death, he served as the organist at the Marienkirche in Straslund.

Vierdanck is considered to have composed the first German solo concerto contained in "Ander Theil. . .Capricci." It was scored for one cornet and three trombones.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28, 1741)

nicknamed il Prete Rosso ("The Red Priest"), was a Venetian priest and Baroque music composer, as well as a famous virtuoso violinist; he was born and raised in the Republic of Venice. The Four Seasons, a series of four violin concerti, is his best-known work and a highly popular Baroque piece.

Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179)

also known as Blessed Hildegard and Saint Hildegard, was a German abbess, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, visionary and composer. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165.

She is the first composer with an extant biography. One of her works, the Ordo Virtutum, is quite possibly the first staged liturgical drama, and may be considered a distant precursor to opera.
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature Illuminations.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (August 12, 1644 – May 3, 1704)

was a Bohemian-Austrian composer and violinist. Biber's music exemplifies the Austrian baroque style, which is a combination of Italian and German influences. His works show a predilection for canonic use and harmonic diapason that pre-date the later Baroque works of Johann Pachelbel and Johann Sebastian Bach. He was known as a violin virtuoso and is best known for his highly virtuosic and expressive violin works, many of which employ scordatura (unconventional tunings of the open strings).

Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (18 December 1786 - 5 June 1826)

was a German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school.
Weber's works, especially his operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon greatly influenced the development of the Romantic opera in Germany. He was also an innovative composer of instrumental music.

Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945)

was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known proponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical technique later known as total serialism.

Alexander Zemlinsky or Alexander von Zemlinsky (October 14, 1871 – March 15, 1942)

was an Austrian composer, conductor, and teacher. Zemlinsky had a valuable supporter in Johannes Brahms. Zemlinsky also met Arnold Schoenberg when the latter joined Polyhymnia, an orchestra in which he played cello and helped found in 1895. The two became close friends--and later mutual admirers and brothers in law when Schoenberg married his sister Mathilde. Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg lessons in counterpoint, thus becoming the only formal music teacher Schoenberg would have.

Zemlinsky's best-known work is the Lyric Symphony (1923), a seven-movement piece for soprano, baritone and orchestra, set to poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (in German translation), which Zemlinsky compared in a letter to his publisher to Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (though the first part of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is also a clear influence). The work in turn influenced Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, which quotes from it and is dedicated to Zemlinsky.