non-classical

George Benjamin (born January 31, 1960, London, England) is a British composer of classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher. Benjamin attended Westminster School and then studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire during the second half of the 1970s. Messiaen himself was reported to have described Benjamin as his favourite pupil. He then read music at King's College, Cambridge, studying under Alexander Goehr, and emerged in his early twenties as a mature and confident voice.

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.

Read more about Mauricio Kagel on Last.fm.

Robert Ashley may be either of two different artists - an American opera writer or an American video-games journalist and podcaster. A) Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.

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).

Read more about Luigi Nono on Last.fm.