Musicians
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Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945): Topic PageHungarian composer. His works are influenced by folk music and often use modality. His music is highly dissonant and contrapuntal, but not atonal.
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Luciano Berio (1925 - 2003): Topic PageItalian composer. His work, usually involving electronic sound, combines serial techniques with commedia dell'arte and antiphonal practices, as in Alleluiah II (1958) for five instrumental groups.
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Harrison Birtwistle (1934 - ): Topic PageBorn in Accrington, Lancashire, he began his career as a clarinettist. While in Manchester he formed, with other young musicians including Peter Maxwell Davies and John Ogdon, the New Manchester Group for the performance of modern music.
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John Cage (1912 - 1992): Topic PageAmerican composer, b. Los Angeles. A leading figure in the musical avant-garde from the late 1930s.
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Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990): Topic PageUS composer. His early works, such as his piano concerto (1926), were in the jazz style but he gradually developed a gentler style with a regional flavour drawn from American folk music.
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Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918): Topic Page
French composer, exponent of musical impressionism. -
Brian Eno (1948 - ): Topic PageA pioneer synthesizer player with Roxy Music, Eno later earned a reputation as a leading avant-garde figure in rock-music circles, and explored the potential of ambient music in such albums as Music for Airports (1979).
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Lukas Foss (1922 - 2009): Topic PageUS composer, conductor, and pianist. His stylistically varied works, including the cantata The Prairie (1944) and Time Cycle for soprano and orchestra (1960), express an ironic view of tradition.
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Roberto Gerhard (1896 - 1970): Topic PageSpanish-born British composer. His achievement was to unite atonal methods with the colours and rhythms of his native Spain.
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Philip Glass (1937 - ): Topic PageAmerican composer, b. Baltimore. Considered one of the most innovative of contemporary composers, he was a significant figure in the development of minimalism in music.
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Percy Grainger (1882 - 1961): Topic PageAustralian-born US experimental composer and pianist.
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Paul Hindemith (1895 - 1963): Topic PageGerman composer and teacher. His operas Cardillac (1926, revised 1952) and Mathis der Maler/Mathis the Painter (1933-35) are theatrically astute and politically aware.
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Charles Ives (1874 - 1954): Topic PageUS composer. He experimented with atonality, quarter tones, and clashing time signatures, decades before the avant-garde movement.
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Darius Milhaud (1892 - 1974): Topic PageFrench composer and pianist. A member of the group of composers known as Les Six, he was extremely prolific in a variety of styles and genres, influenced by jazz, the rhythms of Latin America, and electronic composition.
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Krzysztof Penderecki (1933 - ): Topic PagePolish composer. His expressionist works, such as the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961) for strings, use cluster and percussion effects.
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Steve Reich (1936 - ): Topic PageUS composer. His minimalist music employs simple patterns carefully superimposed and modified to highlight constantly changing melodies and rhythms.
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Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951): Topic PageAustrian composer, b. Vienna. He revolutionized modern music by abandoning tonality and developing a twelve-tone, "serial" technique of composition.
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Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975): Topic PageRussian composer. His music is chromatically tonal/modal, expressive, and sometimes highly dramatic; it was not always to official Soviet taste.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007): Topic PageGerman composer of avant-garde music. He explored new musical sounds and compositional techniques from the 1950s.
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Toru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996): Topic PageJapanese composer. He was mainly self-taught and was initially influenced by Schoenberg, Messiaen, and musique concrète.
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Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959): Topic PageBrazilian composer and conductor. He absorbed Russian and French influences in the 1920s to create neo-baroque works in Brazilian style, using native colours and rhythms.
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Anton Webern (1883 - 1945): Topic PageAustrian composer. He wrote spare, enigmatic miniatures combining a pastoral poetic with severe structural rigor.
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Iannis Xenakis (1922 - 2001): Topic PageRomanian-born French composer of Greek parentage. He evolved a method of ‘stochastic’ composition using the mathematics of chance and probability and also employing computers.
Terms
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Aleatory Music: Topic PageMusic in which deliberate use is made of chance or indeterminacy; the term chance music is preferred by many composers.
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Atonality: Topic PageIn music, systematic avoidance of harmonic or melodic reference to tonal centers. The term is used to designate a method of composition in which the composer has deliberately rejected the principle of tonality.
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Electronic Music: Topic PageMusic composed completely or partly of electronically generated and/or modified sounds.
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Minimalism: Topic PageMovement in abstract art and music towards extremely simplified composition.
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Serial Music: Topic PageThe body of compositions whose fundamental syntactical reference is a particular ordering (called series or row) of the twelve pitch classes—C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B—that constitute the equal-tempered scale.