Conlon Nancarrow (b. October 27, 1912, Texarkana - d. August 10, 1997, Mexico City) was an American-born composer who lived most of his life in Mexico. Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, utilising their capacity to play complex polyrhythms at tempos far beyond human performance ability.
Frank Martin (15 September 1890 – 21 November 1974) was a Swiss composer, who lived a large part of his life in the Netherlands. He was born in Geneva, the tenth and last child of Charles Martin, a pastor. Before he started school, he was already playing the piano and improvising. At nine, he was composing complete, fully formed songs, without having had any instruction in song forms or harmony. A performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion which he heard at the age of twelve left upon him an ineradicable impression, and Bach became his true master.
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).
David Behrman (born Salzburg, Austria, August 16, 1937) is a US composer and the producer of Columbia Records' Music of Our Time series. He was also a founding member of the Sonic Arts Union. He toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and has worked with Ben Neill. He was a part of Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether interview series. He is known as a minimalist composer. His music has often involved interactions between live performers and computers, usually with the computer generating sounds triggered by some aspect of the live performance...
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
Krzysztof Penderecki (born November 23, 1933 in D?bica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has changed to encompass a post-Romantic idiom.
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.