20th Century Classical

composers

21th century classical

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Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux (born January 22, 1916 in Angers, France) is one of the most important French composers of the second half of the 20th century, producing work in the tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel, but in a style distinctly his own. As a young man, Dutilleux studied harmony, counterpoint and piano with Victor Gallois at the Douai Conservatory before leaving for Paris.

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french

Contemporary

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Jennifer Higdon

Jennifer Higdon (born December 31, 1962) is an American composer of classical music and flutist. Higdon was born in Brooklyn, but spent her first 10 years in Atlanta before moving to Tennessee. With almost no advanced flute training, she studied at Bowling Green State University towards a degree in flute performance. While at Bowling Green she met Robert Spano, who was teaching a conducting course there; Spano would go on to be the foremost champion of Higdon's music in the American orchestral community.

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avant-garde - experimental

to check out

female

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Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 - 8 May 1990) was an Italian composer. He studied at the Venice Conservatoire where he became acquainted with serialism. (He married Arnold Schönberg's daughter Nuria in 1955). He became a leading composer of instrumental and electronic music. In 1950, he attended the "Ferienkurse für neue Musik" in Darmstadt, where he met composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Works from this first period include: Polifonica-Monodica-Ritmica (1951), Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca (1952-1953), La victoire de Guernica (1954) and Liebeslied (1954).

Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Born nr Cologne 1918. Enigmatic and difficult to categorise, Zimmerman was an early exponent of the stylistic pluralism so prevalent in what is now labelled post-modernism, but which, during his lifetime, was not considered to occupy the vanguard of the new. He studied at Bonn, Konigsdorf and Berlin Universities while working as a labourer and playing for dance bands, and later taught at Cologne University and Hochschule.

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german

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George Crumb

George Crumb (born October 24, 1929) is an American composer of modern and avant garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres. Examples include spoken flute (one speaks while blowing into the instrument) and glass marbles poured onto an open piano. After initially being influenced by Anton Webern, Crumb became interested in exploring unusual timbres. He often asks for instruments to be played in unusual ways and several of his pieces are written for electrically amplified instruments.

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Avant-Garde

composers

american

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Karol Szymanowski

Karol Maciej Korwin-Szymanowski (October 6, 1882–March 28, 1937) was a Polish composer and pianist. His style developed in three distinct stages, from a strong affinity with Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin and countryman Frédéric Chopin, to flavourings of the Orient, the Mediterranean, and the impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, to Polish folk music and the Eastern Church. Even when writing in a Polish idiom, Szymanowski far exceeded the established musical language of central Europe, and is remembered as an exotic outlier of 20th century music.

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polish

impressionism

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Percy Grainger

Percy Aldridge Grainger (8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961) was an Australian-born pianist, composer, and champion of the saxophone and the Concert band. He was born in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. His father was an architect who emigrated from London, England, and his mother, Rose, was the daughter of hoteliers from Adelaide, South Australia, also of English immigrant stock. His father was an alcoholic.

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Nicholas Ludford

Nicholas Ludford (c. 1485–c. 1557) was an English composer of the Tudor period. He is known for his festal masses, which are preserved in two early-16th-century choirbooks, the Caius Choirbook at Caius College, Cambridge, and the Lambeth Choirbook at Lambeth Palace, London, along with those of the older composer Robert Fayrfax (1462–1521), with whom his music is often associated. Ludford's composing career, which appears to have ended in 1535, is seen as bridging the gap between between the music of Fayrfax and that of John Taverner (1495–1545).

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Mauricio Kagel

Mauricio Kagel (born in Buenos Aires, December 24, 1931, died in Cologne, September 18, 2008) was an Argentine composer who has lived in Germany for most of his career. He was most famous for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance. Many of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, to physically interact with other performers and so on.

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