Michael Finnissy is an English composer and pianist born in Tulse Hill, London in 1946.
Finnissy's own ablilities as a pianist underlie much of his compositions. A significant number of these are piano transcriptions in his very complex style which typically involves irrational musical rhythmic values, virtuosic technique (in the piano pieces) and intricate linear, rather than harmonic, textures.
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.
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (born 16 January 1943 in Coventry) is a British composer. Ferneyhough was awarded the Felix Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. As of 1999, he is William H. Bonsall Professor in Music at Stanford University. Ferneyhough became closely associated with the so-called New Complexity school of composition, characterised by its extension of the modernist tendency towards formalisation (particularly as in integral serialism).