contemporary classical

John Corigliano is an American composer of classical music. The son of a violinist, studied at Columbia University, before embarking on a varied musical career. As a composer, his earlier works develop further the musical language of composers such as Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and their contemporaries, followed by a period of wider experiment in the use of more varied musical materials. His opera The Ghosts of Versailles was staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1992, when it was chosen for the Composition of the Year award of the International Music Awards.

Arnold Schoenberg (pronounced [ˈaːrnɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛrk]) (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He was the most important and most influential composer of the 20th century. Schoenberg was known early in his career for successfully extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic traditions of both Brahms and Wagner, and later and more notably for his pioneering innovations in atonality.

The composer Alexander Knaifel was originally a cellist but had to give up the instrument due to a nerve inflammation. Thus Knaifel, born in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) in 1943, turned to composition. His teacher was Boris Arapov, with whom he studied in Leningrad from 1964 until 1967. Since then Knaifel has been living in St. Petersburg as a freelance composer and music editor. Knaifel evades "valid" rules of the official musical aesthetic already in his first works.

Colin Matthews (b. 1946) is an English composer. Matthews was born in London on 13th February 1946; his older brother is the composer David Matthews. He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall and Nicholas Maw. In the 1970s he taught at the University of Sussex, where he obtained a doctorate for his work on Mahler, an offshoot of his long collaboration with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. During this period he also worked at Aldeburgh with Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst.