So the late 19th century was an important transitional era, as composers rejected the constraints of the past and looked to create a new world in the new century. Looks like the first composer on stage today is Gustav Mahler, an Austrian composer of the late 19th century.
René Eespere 1953 Estonian Eibhlis Farrell 1953 Irish David Felder 1953 American David First 1953 American Georg Friedrich Haas 1953 Austrian Double Concerto for accordion, viola and chamber ensemble, Concerto for violin and orchestra
It includes only composers of significant fame and importance. The style of the composer's music is given where possible, bearing in mind that some defy simple classification. Names are listed first by year of birth, then in alphabetical order within each year.
21st century (since 2001) This is a list of composersof 20th-century classical music, sortable by name, year of birth, year of death, nationality, notable works, and remarks. It includes only composers of significant fame and importance. The style of the composer's music is given where possible, bearing in mind that some defy simple classification.
Composers of the Baroque PeriodQuestionAnswerWhich Baroque composer's father wanted him to be a lawyer rather than a musician?HandelWhich Baroque composer came from a family of musicians, with a father who taught him to play violin and harpsichord as well as an uncle who taught him to play the organ?Bach8 more rows
The three composers that consistently appear in the top spots are Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart. Scholars and fans vary on the rest, but those listed below are often regarded as some of the most significant.
10 of the best 20th-century composersEdward Elgar (1857–1934) ... Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) ... Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) ... Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) ... William Grant Still (1895-1978) ... Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) ... Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) ... Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)More items...•
30 of the greatest classical music composers of all timeJohann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) ... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) ... Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) ... Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) ... Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) ... George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) ... Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) ... Claude Debussy (1862-1918)More items...•
10 of the best Classical era composersCarl Phillip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) ... Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) ... Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) ... Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) ... Marianna Martines (1744-1812) ... Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) ... Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799)More items...•
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven are the most famous figures of the era but, as we'll see, there were a number of other composers who wrote impressive and significant works.
Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) French composer, considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.
List of 20th-century classical composersNameYear of birthYear of deathTheodor Kirchner18231903Carl Reinecke18241910Richard Hol18251904Ludwig Minkus18261917101 more rows
Charles Ives. Charles Ives was a modernist composer and is considered the first major composer from America to reach international fame. His works, which includes piano music and orchestral pieces, were often based on American themes.
Not surprisingly, Josquin has been called 'the first composer whose music appeals to our modern sense of art'. After him, it is easy for our ears to follow the development of music into the language which is familiar to us today through the works of the great classical composers of two centuries later.
Bach, born on March 21, 1685, and known as the father of classical music, created more than 1,100 works, including roughly 300 sacred cantatas.
The Top 12 Composers of the 21st Century, From Hans Zimmer to Nick CaveHans Zimmer. WaterTower Music. ... Klaus Badelt. ryeinc. ... Alexandre Desplat. Georgie Bradley. ... Marco Beltrami. Marco Beltrami - Topic. ... Ryuichi Sakamoto. Milan Records USA. ... Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Goldark. ... Javier Navarrete. Zarmatura. ... Jonny Greenwood. Awkadan.More items...•
Best classical composers of all time: Hildegard von Bingen, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Edward Elgar. Picture: PA / Getty. Introducing you to the most famous classical composers in music history, who have brought us the very best classical tunes ever written.
Chopin was a great Romantic composer and keyboard virtuoso. His solo piano music remains some of the finest there is, his seminal works being his preludes, nocturnes and virtuosic waltzes.
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) Vivaldi, one of the most productive composers of the Baroque era, wrote an astonishing 500 concertos – including the still oft-heard Four Seasons, four violin concertos that each depict one season of the year.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) By the time he was 12, German composer Mendelssohn already had four operas, 12 string symphonies and a large quantity of chamber and piano music under his belt. He was prodigiously talented, and he continued to produce stunning music as his career progressed.
Composing in, and defining, the Classical era, Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, numerous concertos, revolutionary Italian operas including The Marriage of Figaro and Cosí fan tutte, and chamber works that are loved as much by audiences today as when they were composed.
According to Beethoven expert and Classic FM presenter, John Suchet, “A good Beethoven performance should turn your knuckles white from gripping the arms of your seat, your nerves shredded, but leaving you imbued with a feeling of exhilaration and triumph — as well as deep love and admiration.”. Yep.
On 29 May 1913, at a theatre in Paris, a riot broke out in front of a ballet’s world premiere. The ballet in question was The Rite of Spring, with music by revolutionary composer Igor Stravinsky and choreography by the just-as-revolutionary Sergei Diaghilev.
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) The birth of jazz was one of the most significant artistic developments of the 20th Century. Bernstein was one of a number of composers – George Gershwin being another notable example – who fused the influence of this new music with the classical orchestral tradition.
Its grand “Dance of the Knights” theme is particularly well-known: ‘Dance of the Knights’ by Sergei Prokofiev. 5. William Grant Still (1895-1978) Still is associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a fertile scene of African American artists and writers centred around the Harlem district of New York in the 1920s.
Stravinksy’s freewheeling approach to rhythm is particularly evident, with frequently shifting time signatures. He experimented with a range of styles including Neoclassicism (where he took influence from the Classical period, writing more consonant, ordered music) and serialism. 4.
The three experimented with a 12-tone approach to composition, in which a tone row, made up of all twelve tones in the chromatic scale placed in a given order, forms the basis of a piece. This technique is also known as serialism. Schoenberg was Jewish and his work was labelled “degenerate” by the Nazi Party.
Following The Firebird (1910) and Petruska (1911), The Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913 .
Shostakovich’s legacy is defined by his relationship with Soviet rule in his native Russia, where strict tabs were kept upon his artistic output to make sure that it met with the approval of the Communist Party hierarchy.
As the Romantic era reached a climax around the turn of the 20th Century, there was a feeling that there was little more that could be done within the rules and conventions that had largely remained in place within classical music since the 17th Century. Yearning for change and innovation, composers began to break from tradition in a whole host of ways.
There were many composers who were important to this transition, but let's start with Gustav Mahler, Austrian composer of the late 19th century whose works are characterized by the heavy use of narrative theme and incorporation of vocals into symphonies.
Claude Debussy. Next up on our musical trip back in time is Claude Debussy, a Late-Romantic French composer of the late 19th and early 20th century most associated with Impressionism. The Impressionists were painters who used color to capture the feeling of a passing moment in time, to capture an impression.
In general, Romantic music is characterized by a focus on subjective emotion and personal experience, national pride, and musical richness or flamboyance requiring virtuosic skill. Before this, music was often stiff and rigid - beautiful, but focused on achieving an almost academic perfection. The rules were strict.
Not only did this help Bartók create the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, the study of folk music, but the use of non-traditional time signatures, tempos, chords, keys, scales, and rhythms greatly impacted modernist music and helped define the 20th century as a period of experimentation.
By the Late-Romantic period, composers were obsessed with pushing the limits of music, and this is where we see the transition into Modernism, the music of the 20th century, characterized by freedom and experimentation with traditional rules of musical composition.
Mahler also creates this sense of narrative by using vocals as a major part of the performance. Traditionally, this was only done in opera, and in those cases the voice was really the focus, separate from the orchestra. Mahler used voice as part of the symphony, as just another instrument.
Mahler was one of the last great Romantic composers from this region, and his compositions represent the synthesis of a century of Austro-German Romantic music into something new and fresh. Mahler wrote symphonies, compositions with several musical parts made to be played by large ensembles.
At the same time as his successes in Paris, Meyerbeer, as a Prussian Court Kapellmeister (Director of Music) from 1832, and from 1843 as Prussian General Music Director, was also influential in opera in Berlin and throughout Germany.
In 1909, there were 60 Wagner performances, and only three of Meyerbeer ( Les Huguenots being the sole work performed).
The name Giacomo Meyerbeer first became known internationally with his opera Il crociato in Egitto —premiered in Venice in 1824 and produced in London and Paris in 1825; incidentally, it was the last opera ever written to feature a castrato, and the last to require keyboard accompaniment for recitatives. This 'breakthrough' in Paris was exactly what Meyerbeer had been aiming for over the past ten years; he had been carefully preparing for it, developing contacts, and fully reaped his reward.
Apart from around 50 songs, Meyerbeer wrote little except for the stage.
Meyerbeer's costly operas, requiring grand casts of leading singers, were gradually dropped from the repertoire in the early 20th century. They were banned in Germany from 1933, and subsequently in subject countries, by the Nazi regime because the composer was Jewish, and this was a major factor in their further disappearance from the repertory.
Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra.
Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jacob Liebmann Beer; 5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) was a German opera composer of Jewish birth, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner ". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard which helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century.
Scott, the second of six children, grew up with music in the household. Aged seven he started playing the piano, taking lessons from Julius Weiss, a German music teacher who lived in Joplin’s hometown. In his late teens, Joplin left Texarkana and his then-job as a railroad labourer to become a travelling musician.
Its moral message is education as a fundamental right for all African Americans. Comedian Lenny Henry recently championed the opera in a documentary on forgotten Black classical composers.
History has remembered Joplin as the “ragtime guy”. But he also wrote two operas, one – Treemonisha (1911) – for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
Now dubbed the ‘King of Ragtime’, Joplin spent his lifetime trying to become an African American composer of “serious music”. But it wasn’t until some time after his death that much of his music started making its way into public consciousness.
Who was Scott Joplin, the ‘King of Ragtime’? Picture: Getty. By Maddy Shaw Roberts. Scott Joplin is one of the legends of the piano canon – every aspiring pianist under the sun has banged away at ‘The Entertainer’.
For a short time, he was a member of the Texarkana Minstrels. But as a Black pianist, Joplin struggled to get regular work – churches and red-light districts being by far the best option then for a musician of colour.
My Tango With Barbara Strozzi. Russell Hoban (Bloomsbury) A quirky modern-day love story inspired by the Baroque Italian composer. When novelist Phil Ockerman takes a tour of an exhibition of composer portraits, he comes across an arresting picture of La Virtuosissima Cantatrice, Barbara Strozzi.
Mozart & the Wolf Gang is a very different beast to Burgess’s renowned 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Published in 1991 towards the end of Burgess’s life, it is based around a set of discussions between famous composers, and is written like a play.
The Noise of Time. Julian Barnes (Vintage) A poetic story based on Shostakovich’s life under Stalin’s dangerous gaze. This was quite rightly a bestseller when it was published in 2016. In his three-part tale, Barnes plunges us into Shostakovich ’s nervous existence.
James Hamilton-Patterson (Faber & Faber) A brilliantly-imagined recreation of Elgar’s undocumented adventure to the Amazon. When Anthony Payne elaborated the surviving sketches for Elgar ’s Third Symphony, he created a remarkable piece so Elgarian in feel that it was hard to tell musical fact from fiction.
He goes home to luxuriate in her music, which in turn leads him to try out a tango class. There he meets Bertha Strunk, a professional glass eyeball painter who he thinks looks so like Strozzi that he starts calling her Barbara.
Vivaldi’s Virgins. Barbara Quick (Harper Collins) The evocative tale of a talented orphan violinist, exploring her roots in 18th-century Ve nice. OK, so the title might not inspire confidence, but there is treasure within the pages of Barbara Quick’s 2007 novel.
In 1923, three years after his wife had died, the rather lost, disillusioned and semi-retired Elgar decided on a whim to take a six-week voyage to the Amazon, which is where this enjoyable novel steps in. True, it starts with a weighty and tiresome dream sequence, but the tale soon perks up.
As a violin scholar at the Royal College of Music, he was taught composition under Charles Villiers Stanford and soon developed a reputation as a composer, with Edward Elgar recommending him to the Three Choirs festival in 1896.
Read more. Maurice Arnold Strothotte (1865-1937) studied in Berlin and wrote an opera and a symphony that were highly praised by Dvorák, but his work was rarely performed and has all but dropped off the musical map – he ended up making his living teaching violin and conducting provincial operettas.
Compositions such as Coleridge-Taylor’s African Suite attempted to incorporate African influences in the same way that, say, Dvorák used Hungarian folk themes, but much more successful is Hiawatha’s Wedding, which is occasionally performed today.
Please try again later. And George Walker , born in 1922 and still working today, was the first black American composer to win the Pulitzer prize for music (for Lilacs, a piece for voice and orchestra, in 1996). However, for all his acclaim, he still remains a cult figure in the world of contemporary composition.
William Grant Still (1895-1978) wrote 150 works, studied with Edgard Varèse , was the first African American to conduct a major US symphony orchestra (the New Orleans Philharmonic), composed for Hollywood and found his works performed by leading orchestras around the world, including his 1930 Afro-American Symphony.
Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954) founded Harlem’s Negro Grand Opera Company, but his two all-black Wagnerian operas are barely staged. Chi-chi Nwanoku: 'I want black musicians to walk on to the stage and know they belong'. Read more.
The newly formed Chineke orchestra aims to include a work by a composer of ethnicity in each of its concert programmes. John Lewis looks at some of the neglected writers whose music might finally get an airing