Gioachino Antonio Rossini (February 29, 1792 – November 13, 1868) was an Italian musical composer who wrote more than 30 operas as well as sacred music and chamber music. His best known works include Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), and Guillaume Tell (William Tell) (the end of the overture is popularly known for being the signature tune for The Lone Ranger).
Pierre Boulez (born March 26, 1925) is a composer and conductor of contemporary and classical music. Boulez is also an articulate, perceptive and sweeping writer on music. Some articles
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.
Arcangelo Corelli (17 February 1653–8 January 1713) was an influential Italian violinist and composer of baroque music. Corelli was born at Fusignano, in the present-day province of Ravenna. Little is known about his early life. His master on the violin was Bassani, and Matteo Simonelli, the well-known singer of the pope’s chapel, taught him composition. His first major success was gained in Paris at the age of nineteen, and to this he owed his European reputation.
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.
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin(Александр Николаевич Скрябин) (1872-1915, Moscow) was a Russian composer and pianist. Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano; the earliest pieces resemble Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. Later works, however, are strikingly original, employing very unusual harmonies and textures.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, Igor' Fëdorovič Stravinskij) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a russian composer who first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and performed by Diaghilev's ballets russes (Russian Ballet): L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird") (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Le sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") (1913).
Rolf Wallin (born 1957) is a Norwegian composer who uses mathematics and algorithms and opposes them to intuition in his compositions. His website is www.rolfwallin.org.
Hugo Wolf (March 13, 1860 – February 22, 1903) was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in technique. Though he had several bursts of extraordinary productivity, particularly in 1888 and 1889, depression frequently interrupted his creative periods, and his last composition was written in 1898, before he died of syphilis.
Dave Maric (born 12 June 1970) is a British composer and musician. During the 1990s he regularly performed and recorded as a jazz and classical pianist with a number of new music ensembles including the London Sinfonietta and the Steve Martland Band. Since 2000 he has been regularly composing stylistically varied works for various instrumental combinations including music for classical soloists, chamber and orchestral ensembles and works for live performers with computer generated sound sources.