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Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt was an Austrian composer who was the first to write atonal music. -
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Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a German composer who "fell deeply under Hitler's spell," and would wrote for him. -
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Franz Strauss
Franz Strauss was a German composer and musician. He would use poems that had a questionable reputation in his operas. -
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Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer. -
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Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Dvořák was a Czech composer. -
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Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer and was known as a master of orchestration. -
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was a German composer and believed that music should be brought back to its roots. -
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Edward Elgar
Edward Elgar was an English composer who has his words in the International Concert Repitoure. -
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Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini was an Italian opera composer. He came up the solution to the "Wagner problem" by mixing popular tunes and "blood-and-thunder orchestration." -
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Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a Jewish-Austrian composer and conductor who held a position at Vienna Court Opera, although his composing career had a slow start. He ended up not using programs in his works after many years of using them. Mahler also had an interesting relationship with Strauss. They were friends but soon become competitors. -
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Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy was a French composer who is one of the first impressionist composers. Debussy took steps away from tonal music. -
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Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss was a German composer and conductor who was best known for his tone poems and operas. He "was the model of the Jewified German." He would go along with what Hitler would do and say and did have some kind of relationship with him. Because of his Jewish wife, he avoided anything that condemned Jewish people. Eventually it was found that out that Strauss was not completely with Germany, and he had to go through a "rehabilitation" process. After WWII, his music was blacklisted. -
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Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was a Finlandia composer who was the pride of Finland. He was the most famous composer to come out of Finland and helped them find their identity, but it lead to a lot of mental health issues for him because of the pressure. Classical music retained a role in modern Finland culture because of him. He would take themes and break them down into "murmuring textures." -
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Harry T. Burleigh
Harry T. Burleigh was an American composer who introduced African spirituals in his writings. -
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W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois was an American composer who was apart of the Harlem Renaissance. -
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Will Marion Cook
Will Marion Cook was an American composer who battled with racism. His pieces "anticipated the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance." -
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Hans Pftizner
Hans Pftizner was a Russian composer who hated Jewish people. He was excited when the Nazis took over and thought it was his time to shine. After WWII, his music was black listed because of his past support for the Nazis. -
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Serge Koussevitzky
Serge Koussevitzky was a Russian composer who moved to America. He led the Boston Symphony. -
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Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian-American composer who did not need receive much formal training. He is associated with his expressionistic movements about German art and poetry. Schoenberg is the pioneer of atonal music and 12 tone scales, and mostly laid the foundation for music in 20th century. It is rumored he went mad towards the end of his career because ehe struggled with depression and thoughts of suicide. Because he took too long to compose, he didn't make it in Hollywood. -
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Charles Ives
Charles Ives was an American composer who had a promising start to his career but then disappeared for a mysterious reason. He started a career as an insurance person while also writing music. He wrote "Concord" in 1920. He also used African tunes in his pieces. -
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Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann is a German composer. He wrote "At the Prophet's" -
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Bela Bartok
Bela Bartok was a Hungarian composer who used folk music from around the world in his pieces. -
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Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky was a Russian composer who came late into composing in about 1902. He wrote "The Rite of Spring." Him and Nijinsky matched choreography to this piece. He came late into composing in about 1902. He also did a lot of research on folk music and used those in his pieces. Stravinsky focused more on rhythms than he did harmony. He had one composition appear in a Hollywood film. He was late to the 12 tone music world. -
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Percy Grainger
Percy Grainger was an Australian composer who visited English country side towns and wrote pieces after folk music he heard. -
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Edgard Varese
Edgard Varese was a French composer whose style resembles the rhythms of the "Rite" but with the folklore taken out. He helped found the International Composer's Guild. -
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Charles Seeger
Charles Seeger was a Mexican leftist composer who made the method called dissonant counterpoint. Helped found the Composer's Collective organization. The most important thing he did was collect American folk music and recorded it. -
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Vaslav Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky was a Ukrainian composer who wrote provocative works that left people astonished. -
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Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev was a Ukrainian compose. He categorized him style as "a conservative modernism rooted in Classical and Romantic traditions." His first major Soviet work was the ballet "Romeo and Juliet." He eventually settled in the Soviet Union and never left. -
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Ervin Schulhoff
Ervin Schulhoff was a Czechia-Jewish composer who had a large career ahead of him, but sadly died in a concentration camp. -
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Carl Orff
Carl Orff was a German composer who prospered after the war because he was associated with the ant-Nazi resistance and was promoted by America. -
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Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson was an American composer who moved through many different styles of modern but did not latch onto a certain one. He would write music criticism to help keep his name in public eyes. He eventually used an all black cast in some of his works. -
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Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer who believed that harmony and rhythm should be independent. He would layer rhythm over rhythm. -
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was was a Czechia composer who was one of the biggest in Hollywood. -
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George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer who was very insecure about his compositions. He would ask for lessons from composers he deemed better. In the early stages of his career he wrote "black music." When he transitioned into opera he used overtone rows. He mixed Western European, African-American, and Russian-Jewish sounds to create his pieces. -
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Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington was an American musician and composer. He was a big name in the Harlem Renaissance. He combined genres like the blues and other African inspired genres. He expanded what a jazz piece. He brought it into the realm of "large-scale classical works." -
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Carlos Chavez
Carlos Chavez was a Mexican composer who based his melodies on American folk music. -
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Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill was a Jewish-German composer who collaborated a lot with Bertolt Brecht. He started his career doing one movement operas. He was praised because his works did not contain political messages. -
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Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek was an Austrian opera composer who brought jazz to the opera stage. He used atonal music. -
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Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer. His music was very popular and they included the style of dissonant high modern. Politics highly influenced his works in his early years. He went to Mexico in 1932 and met Carlos Chavez. In his later years he geared more towards a more direct form of music activism. He wrote like, "fast movements jumped along with jazzy syncopations, slow movements cried out plaintively in empty spaces." He eventually went to movie industry. -
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Harry Partch
Harry Partch was an American composer who was inspired by western culture and created a scale of 43 notes. He also closed the gap between singing and speech. -
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Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Karl Amadeus Hartmann was a German composer who was apart of the German resistance. -
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Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich was the "star of Soviet composition." While in Russia he had exposure to many different types of musical types. He created the Union of Soviet Composers to help get Soviet composers health plans, sanatoriums, and cooperative buildings. He mostly contributed operas to the Soviet repertoire, but he was not highly liked, especially by the government and was black listed. When Hitler came into power, things turned around and he started to be successful. -
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Oliver Messiaen
Oliver Messiaen was a French composer who used unsteady beats in his works. He was let out of a prison camp to compose because the prisoner guard liked his compositions. He led a very basic life of composing, teaching, and going to church. He used "rainbow chords." He would associate certain chords with a certain color. -
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Samuel Barber
Samuel Barber was an American composer who "produced long melodic lines and rich orchestral texture." -
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John Cage
John Cage was an American composer who was the most radical composer in America. His music wavered between violence and tenderness. "He made his name as a composer for percussion, manufacturing instruments from brake drums, hubcaps, spring coils, and other cast-off car parts." He also used technology to create some of his works. -
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Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten was a gay English composer who would go and play and at former concentrations camps. He was extremely good at harmonizing. His favorite themes were love among men, the beauty of boys, the endangerment of innocence, the pressure of society on the individual, the persistence of secret wounds, and the yearning for unblemished worlds. -
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Orson Welles
Orson Welles was an American composer who "possessed exceptional musical instincts." -
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Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most famous Jewish-American composer and conductor. -
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György Ligeti
György Ligeti was a Hungarian-Austrian composer who kept himself open to music from the past and present. He researched folk music. He adopted a musical language he called "non-atonality." -
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Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez was a French composer who thought "everything was wrong with music." He would compose using rhythmic contrast and atonality. He was the first to coordinate "scales of rhythm" in one system. -
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Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez was a French composer who used electronic instruments, computerized sound synthesis, software for the instantaneous electronic manipulation of live sounds. -
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Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer who composed with atonal music He wrote minimalist music. -
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La Monte Young
La Monte Young (still alive) is an American composer who is known as the "king of the drone." He wrote minimalist works. He has never written anything that resembles "conventional tonal music." -
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Steve Reich
Steve Reich (still alive) is an American composer who wrote minimalistic music. -
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Philip Glass
Philip Glass (still alive) is an American composer who introduced constant rhythmic change. He discovered that minimal harmonic movement and minimal onstage action can convey wide emotions. -
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Louis Andriessen
Louis Andriessen was a composer from the Netherlands who is the only major minimalist composer to come from Europe. -
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John Adams
John Adams (still alive) is an American composer. Minimalism gave Adams is own voice.