There are may notable composers that are a part of the LGBTQ+ community who have contributed wonderful works and contributions to the field of music. The composers in this page are those who's works and contributions are available at the UNT Music Library. To access a list of materials for each of the composer, clicking on their name will redirect you to the UNT Library Discover Catalog with a pre-filtered list of their works and contributions.
We are always open to suggestions at the Music library. If you have any recommendations for composers you feel need to be represented in this guide, feel free to email us at musicref@unt.edu or fill out our New Purchase Request/Recommendation form for the Music Library and we can process these requests.
Adamo, Mark (b. 1962)
American composer and librettist. He attended New York University, where he won the Paulette Goddard Remarque award for undergraduate playwriting, and the Catholic University of America, from which he received a Bachelor of Music degree in composition in 1990 and was the winner of the Theodore Presser award for outstanding undergraduate composition. Adamo's music, which embraces a wide variety of 20th- and 21st-century techniques and influences ranging from music-theatre to serialism, has garnered commissions for four full-length operas from the companies of San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston, as well as orchestral and chamber works for Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Sir James Galway, baritone Thomas Hampson, and the chamber choir Chanticleer.
Source: Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Adamo, Mark." Grove Music Online. 31 Jan. 2014. From Grove Music Online database. Photo source: Mark Adamo official website.
Addinsell, Richard (1904-1977)
English composer. After a brief spell at the RCM (1925–6), he began his career contributing songs to revues and incidental music for stage plays. An early and productive collaboration began in 1928, when he wrote incidental music for Adam's Opera by the writer Clemence Dane (1882–1965). By 1936 he had started scoring for feature films and documentaries, his first major success coming with Goodbye Mr Chips in 1939. Although he contributed many works to the theatre and films, his Warsaw Concerto for the 1941 British film Dangerous Moonlight eclipsed all others as far as the public was concerned. Following its success, Addinsell's popular piano-concerto style resulted in numerous similar pieces by other composers: Bath's Cornish Rhapsody, Williams's Dream of Olwen and Rota's Legend of the Glass Mountain are three prime examples.
Source: Ades, David. "Addinsell, Richard." Grove Music Online. 2001. From Grove Music Online database. Photo source: European American Music Distributors Company website.
Anthony, Kristopher Jon (1954-1992)
Kristopher Jon Anthony was a Wisconsin native and earned a Bachelor degree from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He received his Masters in Music Theory & Composition form the University of Miami, and completed some doctoral work at the University of North Texas. He was composer-in-residence and Assistant Director of the Turtle Creek Chorale and produced three compact disc recordings by the Chorale. The third features his original composition, When We No Longer Touch: A Cycle of Songs for Survival, with libretto from the ancient Requiem rite melded with modern poetry by Peter McWilliams. The CD also contains Antony's string quartet, Traces of My Self.
Source: Dallas Voice. "Kristopher John Anthony". Texas Obituary Project. website.
Composer and organist Jared Isaac Aragón has been immersed in music his entire life. Growing up in the bosques of Central New Mexico, his parents owned a music store where he discovered his love for music. As a composer, Aragón has won awards from the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the College Music Society, the DissonArt Ensmble (Thessaloniki, Greece), the Santa Fe Community Orchestra (Santa Fe, NM), and Les amis de l’orgue de Montréal (Montréal, Canada). He has presented his music and performed as an organist at the 2015 Lucca International Festival for new music in Lucca, Italy and created performance editions of several newly discovered works by composer Florence Price for the E.W. Jones Black Music Festival at the University of Arkansas. His music is published by Jeanné-Inc. and Firehead Editions of London. Aragón serves as organist and director of handbells at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona and is a member of the percussion-organ duo sonidos encendidos.
Source: “Bio.” Jared Isaac Aragón. Photo source: Jared Isaac Aragón website.
American composer. One of the most honored and most frequently performed American composers in Europe and the Americas during the mid-20th century, Barber pursued, throughout his career, a path marked by a vocally inspired lyricism and a commitment to the tonal language and many of the forms of late 19th-century music. Almost all of his published works – including at least one composition in nearly every genre – entered the repertory soon after he wrote them and many continue to be widely performed today.
Source: Heyman, Barbara B. "Barber, Samuel." Grove Music Online. 2001. From Grove Music Online database. Photo source: Channel Records International website.
The Australian-English composer Arthur Benjamin possessed an adventurous and generous sprit that enabled him to assimilate influences as disparate as Brahms, Gershwin, and Jamaican popular music. Benjamin's love of popular culture, while admirable and foresighted, did his career considerable harm during his lifetime and has mute his posthumous reputation. He was further damaged by courageously rejecting modernist fashions and by composing a piece of genuine popular music, the Jamaican Rhumba (1938). His ambitions as an opera composer were thwarted in part by the operatic successes of his erstwhile piano student Benjamin Britten, but Vaughan Williams had warm praise for Benjamin's grand opera, A Tale of Two Cities (1950).
Source: George Haggerty. 2005. Encyclopedia of Gay Histories and Cultures. Garland Reference Library of the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge. Photo source: Hyperion Records website
Bennett, Richard Rodney (1936-2012)
Few composers nowadays manage to avoid being ‘pigeon-holed’; Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (b. 1936), however, is a rare and fine exception. As well as writing for the opera theatre and the concert hall, he also composes film music, and, a versatile pianist, plays jazz and performs songs from the shows in cabaret. Above all else, he is a composer with an overwhelming desire to communicate.
Source: "Sir Richard Rodney Bennett". Universal Edition. website. Photo Source:
Bernstein, Leonard (1918-1990)
Academy Award nominee Leonard Bernstein was the first American musician to receive worldwide acclaim for his skills as a conductor and composer. He was music director of the new York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969, leading more concerts than any other conductor. His compositions, the musical West Side Story (1957) above all, were both critical and commercial successes. In spite of his classical music background, the conductor was eager to explore popular culture and frequently appeared on television, displaying his flamboyant style of conducting to the delight of vast audiences. As his popularity grew in the 1960s, Bernstein also lent his support to radical causes, such as anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and the civil rights movement. Yet, throughout his life, he was unable to fully come out of the closet and declare openly his homosexuality. Commenting on his death, journalist Paul Moor (“Klassik in Berlin,” 1990) wrote: “over and over, Leonard Bernstein gave the appearance of a profoundly troubled man desperately trying to come out. But if he never came out in the customary sense, he did everything just short of it. . . . if he had, it would have made him a far less unhappy man.”
Source: Luca Prono. 2008. Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture. Westport, Conn: Greenwood. Photo source: West Side Story website.
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein was born in Philadelphia on March 2nd, 1905. Born to an affluent family, his musical gifts were apparent at an early age. He went on to study piano with Alexander Siloti, (a pupil of Liszt and Tchaikovsky), and made his professional concerto debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Liszt’s E flat Piano Concerto when he was 21. After studying composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, he continued his studies in Europe with Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin,and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Source: "Biography". European American Music Distributors Company. website. Photo source: European American Music Distributors Company website.
Bosmans, Henriette (1895-1952)
The name Henriëtte Bosmans isn’t well-known today. But in the years before the Second World War, she was a prominent female composer in The Netherlands. As a bisexual woman with a Jewish mother and Catholic father she was under threat during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She survived and one of her songs became an anthem of liberation for the Dutch people at the end of the war. It has a strong Canadian connection because the piece celebrates the arrival of Canadian soldiers in the final stages of the war.
Born: December 6, 1895, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Died: July 2, 1952, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Source: Robb, Peter. 2017. Artsfile. website. Photo source: Artsfile. website.
Juliette Nadia Boulanger (16 September 1887 – 22 October 1979) was a French composer, conductor, and teacher. She is notable for having taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century. She also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist.[1] From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were those who became leading composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Igor Markevitch, Virgil Thomson.
Source: Rolle, Elisa. Queer Places. website. Photo Source: Discogs. website.
Paul Bowles was one of the last surviving members of a generation of gay artists whose work shaped 20th century literature and music. Bowles thought of himself first as a composer. His music, in contrast with his writings, is as full of light as his fiction is of dark. During the early 1930s he studied composition with the great gay composer Aaron Copland, with whom he had an affair, plus he was a protégé of the great gay composer Virgil Thomson. Copland and Bowles traveled extensively in Europe during their love affair. They settled for a while in Paris where they hung out with Jean Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Bowles nihilistic personality irritated Stein who encouraged Bowles and Copland to travel to Tangiers. It was a journey that changes Bowels’ life.
Source: Rutledge, Stephen. 2021. "#BornThisDay: Writer/Composer, Paul Bowles". The Wow Report. website. Photo source: Gay Influence blog. website
English composer and conductor, and one of the most prominent figures of 20th century British classical music, known for works such as the War Requiem and the opera Peter Grimes. He received his earliest music education from his mother, and wrote his first composition when he was five. He later attended the Royal College of Music, where his teachers were wary of him having too much technical skill. After graduating, Britten was hired to score a series of documentaries. There he met the poet W. H. Auden, who became an artistic mentor, and encouraged the rather orthodox Britten to be more accepting of his homosexuality. Two years later, in 1937, Britten met the tenor Peter Pears through a mutual friend, and in 1939, the relationship turned romantic. Though not very political, Britten had been a dedicated pacifist since childhood, and as World War II began stirring in Europe, he and Pears followed Auden to the United States. It wasn’t until reading a poem describing his hometown that Britten became homesick and decided to return to England, where he registered as a conscientious objector.
Source: Rosenthal, Michele. Queer Portraits. website. Photo source: Boosey & Hawkes. website.
Silvano Bussotti, known as Sylvano, is an Italian eccentric, some say genius, and the word ‘flamboyant’ appears in many articles about this modern Renaissance man. He is a composer, poet, set and costume designer, painter, journalist, actor, singer, theatre and film director and sometime bad boy of the arts. Internationally he is more known as a composer.
Source: Gramilano. 2012. "Sylvano Bussotti: flamboyant composer, poet, set and costume designer, theatre director, and… and… and…". Gramilano. website. Photo source: Discogs. website.
ONE OF THE MOST eclectic artists of the 20th century was avant-garde composer John Cage, who was also a philosopher, a visual artist, and a writer. Cage transformed modernist æsthetics with his embrace of randomness, chance operations, and early adoption of technology in his artistic practice. And silence: in his composition 4’33” (1952), musicians sit in silence and do not intentionally make sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds.
Source: Killacky, John R. "When John Cage Composed in Words". The Gay & Lesbian Review. website. Photo source: Wikiwand. website.
Film score composer and electronic music pioneer. Growing up in Rhode Island, Carlos inherited a love of piano from her mother. She began taking piano lessons at six, and wrote her first composition when she was ten. She also had an early interest in electronics, building her own computer in high school which won her a scholarship. She went on to earn a master’s degree in composition from Columbia, which housed the first center for electronic music in the US. While there, she met the engineer Robert Moog at a trade show. Their friendship turned into an ongoing partnership, and Carlos is credited with providing vital feedback for the earliest Moog synthesizers. In 1967, with the support of her close friend and collaborator Rachel Elkind, Carlos began transitioning, though she would keep her gender identity a secret among her closest friends for the next twelve years of her career. The following year, she released her first album, Switched-On Bach, which used the Moog synthesizer to tediously compose the music of Bach note by note. It became the first classical album ever to go platinum, won three Grammys, and lent new credibility to electronic music. Her 1969 follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, was also well received. In 1971, she was asked to work with Stanley Kubrick on the iconic score for A Clockwork Orange. Her 1972 album, Sonic Seasonings, took a different route as an influential precursor to ambient music. By the late 70s, dressing up as a man for her rare public appearances had taken an emotional toll. She decided to go public as a trans woman through a 1979 interview in Playboy magazine, choosing Playboy because of its history as a “liberated” publication, though she later had second thoughts about the choice. She continued to enjoy a successful career after coming out, working with Kubrick once again on The Shining, and composing the music for the Disney film Tron, as well as releasing a number of her own albums. Today she is recognized as one of the important early pioneers of electronic music. She’s also a passionate photographer of solar eclipses.
Source: Queer Portraits in Music History. Wendy Carlos. Website. Photo source: Wendy Carlos website. Website.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990), widely regarded as one of the most respected American classical composers of the twentieth century, conducted his “personal life with the characteristic modesty, tactfulness, and serenity that marked his professional life as well.” Copland was described as a carefully balanced and tactful individual. Never aggressive, he always knew the right thing to say in the right circumstances. “The United States could send him abroad with full confidence that he would represent it well because he has an extraordinary sense of justness.” From an early age, Copland understood and accepted his sexual orientation, and he was neither ashamed nor tortured by his homosexuality.
Source: Predota, Georg. 2015. "Uncommon Men: Aaron Copland and Victor Kraft". Interlude. Website. Photo source: String Ovation. Website.
John Paul Corigliano (born February 16, 1938) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School. Corigliano is best known for his Symphony No. 1, a response to the AIDS epidemic, and his film score for François Girard's The Red Violin (1997), which he subsequently adapted as the 2003 Concerto for Violin and Orchestra ("The Red Violin") for Joshua Bell.
Source: Wikipedia. website. Photo source: Cantaloupe Music. website.
All his career, Noel Coward was the most resilient of butterflies. He was a middle-class boy from Teddington in the London suburbs who, through talent and drive, made his way to the top. He was gay in an era when homosexual acts were still illegal, yet his friendships extended to the Royal Family. He wrote some of the most effective stage comedy of his era, as well as memorable songs, both comic and romantic. But turning 50 after World War Two he realized none of this would maintain the expansive way of life he'd become used to. So, from 1951, he performed seasons of cabaret at the Cafe de Paris in London.
Source: Dowd, Vincent. 2015. "Noel Coward's encounter with The Mob". BBC News. website. Photo source: BBC News. website.
Henry Dixon Cowell (March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s: Henry Cowell's music covers a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer. His experiments begun three decades ago in rhythm, in harmony, and in instrumental sonorities were considered then by many to be wild. Today they are the Bible of the young and still, to the conservatives, "advanced."... No other composer of our time has produced a body of works so radical and so normal, so penetrating and so comprehensive. Add to this massive production his long and influential career as a pedagogue, and Henry Cowell's achievement becomes impressive indeed. There is no other quite like it. To be both fecund and right is given to few.
Source: Rolle, Elisa. Queer Places. website. Photo source: Wise Music Classical. website.
Dr. Richard Crosby has served as an EKU Foundation Professor since 2014, the first from the School of Music to achieve this honor, and served 9 years as National President of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity. Richard Crosby was born in Ashland, OH, and raised in Largo, FL. He holds the Bachelor of Music degree in Music Education, the Master of Music degree in Piano Performance and Wind Conducting, and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Performance, all from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He has been at Eastern Kentucky University since 1986 where he teaches piano and music history. He has released a CD through Capstone Records entitled An American Portrait, containing works by Charles Griffes, Amy Beach, William Grant Still, Lee Hoiby, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, David Guion, and George Gershwin. Richard is also distinguished himself as a successful composer.
Source: EKU School of Music Official website. Photo source: EKU school of Music Official website.
Hamburg native Walter Ingolf Marcus became Ingolf Dahl (1912-1970) upon emigrating from Switzerland to the United States in 1939. He ended up in southern California, where he joined a large community of European expatriate composers. In 1945 he began teaching at the University of Southern California. He remained there for the rest of his career. His compositions include a Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble, the Sinfonietta, and many orchestral works. He is considered one of the most important American composers for the saxophone. He was also involved in the broader entertainment industry, creating arrangements for Tommy Dorsey and Victor Borge, and touring with Edgar Bergen and Gracie Fields. Work with Igor Stravinsky and his music was a strong influence on Dahl’s composition.
Source: Pease, Andy. 2013. "Sinfonietta by Ingolf Dahl". Wind Band Literature. website. Photo source: Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Experience. website.
Davies, Peter Maxwell (1934-2016)
Peter Maxwell Davies was one of the most significant figures in post-War European music * Rose to prominence in late 1960s with neo-expressionistic music-theatre pieces Eight Songs for a Mad King and Vesalii Icones, orchestra scores Worldes Blis and St Thomas Wake, and opera Taverner * Many works composed for distinctive chamber sextet of Fires of London * Since the 1970s, worklist included Trumpet Concerto, 10 Symphonies, and 10 Strathclyde Concertos written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra * Many works for young performers * Was active as conductor, both of his own works and standard repertoire * Master of the Queen's Music 2004-14.
Source: "snapshot". Boosey & Hawkes. website. Photo source: wikipedia. website.
For composer Chris DeBlasio, the omnipresence of HIV/AIDS during the final years of his life helped to channel his creative energies into a unique compositional voice. At a time when certain elements of the New York music scene rewarded atonality and musical experimentation, DeBlasio pursued a lyrically tonal, theatrically-informed style in the company of composers such as Jake Heggie and Ricky Ian Gordon. Unfortunately, his death in 1993 at age thirty-four limited the growing awareness of his compositions in the greater artistic community and robbed him of the success eventually experienced by his fellow tonal compatriots. Today, he is best known for a single song (“Walt Whitman in 1989”) published in The AIDS Quilt Songbook.
Source: "Chris DeBlasio". Cor Flammae. website. Photo source: Cor Flammae. website.
Generally recognized as the father of the Neo-Romantic movement in music, David Del Tredici has received numerous awards and has been commissioned and performed by nearly every major American and European orchestral ensemble. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for In Memory of a Summer Day for soprano and orchestra. Much of his early work consisted of elaborate vocal settings of James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. More recently, Del Tredici has set to music a cavalcade of contemporary American poets, often celebrating a gay sensibility.
Source: "Biography". Boosey & Hawkes. website. Photo source: Boosey & Hawkes. website
David Diamond was born on July 9, 1915 in the Rochester district of the State of New York. As a child, Diamond would often experiment with the violin. By the age of seven, he came up with his own musical notation. When his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1927, a Swiss Musician by the name of Andre de Ribaupierre soon discovered Diamond’s rare talent. At that time, Andre was teaching at the Institute of Music in Cleveland, and he was Diamond’s first teacher of music theory. Diamond then continued his studies with Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music, where he also studied the violin with Effie Knauss. Diamond also studied with Paul Boepple and Roger Sessions on scholarship from the New Music School. Perhaps the most important part of his student life came in 1937, when he joined the famous Fontainebleau institute. Here, Diamond received the blessings of the legendary Igor Stravinsky, through which he won Juilliard Publication Award in 1937 for one of his works called ‘Psalm for Orchestra’. The Psalm, together with another work of his called “The Elegy for Brass, Percussion and Harps” propelled the career of the young Diamond towards unprecedented heights.
Source: Famous Composers. website. Photo source: Famous Composers. website.
Roger Edens (November 9, 1905 – July 13, 1970) was a Hollywood composer, arranger and associate producer, and is considered one of the major creative figures in Arthur Freed's musical film production unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the "golden era of Hollywood". Before moving to California, Edens had been married to Martha LaPrelle, but they spent much time apart and eventually divorced.
Source: Rolle, Elisa. Queer Places. website. Photo source: Queer Places. website.
Mohammed Fairouz, born in 1985, is one of the most frequently performed, commissioned, and recorded composers of his generation. Hailed by The New York Times as "an important new artistic voice", and by BBC News as "one of the most talented composers of his generation", his distinctive musical language melds Middle-Eastern modes and Western structures to deeply expressive effect. His large-scale works, including four symphonies and an opera, engage major geopolitical and philosophical themes with persuasive craft and a marked seriousness of purpose. His solo and chamber music attains an "intoxicating intimacy," according to New York's WQXR, which selected his CD Critical Models as Album of the Week.
Source: Fairouz, Mohammed. Composer's official website. Photo source: Composer's official website.
Manuel María de Falla y Matheu was born into a prosperous family in Cádiz, Spain. His father was Valencian, his mother from Catalonia. Falla studied piano and composition with private tutors before entering the Real Conservatorio de Música in Madrid. His early compositions, written for small ensembles, were heavily influenced by Spanish folk music. He even wrote six zarzuelas (Spanish folk operettas).
Source: "Composer Manuel de Falla". 2014. Gay Influence. website. Photo source: Gay Influence. website.
Gareth Farr was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He began his studies in composition and percussion at the University of Auckland in 1986. The experience of hearing a visiting gamelan orchestra in 1988 prompted his return to Wellington to attend Victoria University, where the characteristic rhythms and textures of the Indonesian gamelan rapidly became the hallmarks of his own composition.
Farr continued with postgraduate study in composition and percussion at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where his teachers included Samuel Adler and Christopher Rouse.
Source: "About". Gareth Farr: Composer's Official website. Photo source: Composer's Official website.
Galante earned a degree in trumpet performance from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992. He then was accepted into the film scoring program at the University of Southern California and studied with film composer Jerry Goldsmith. Mr. Galante has composed music for the films Bite Marks, The Last Straight Man, Monday Morning and Channels. He has served as orchestrator for over sixty studio films including A Quiet Place, The Mummy, Logan, Big Fat Liar, Scary Movie 2, The Tuxedo, and Tuesdays With Morrie, to name only a few. For his large-scale wind ensemble compositions, he has been commissioned by the Federation of Gay Games-Paris 2018, Atlanta Freedom Band, Lake Braddock High School Band, Hofstra University Symphonic Band, and the Nebraska Wind Symphony, among many others.
Source: "Rossano Galante". The Wind Repertory Project. website. Photo source: Barnhouse Company. website.
Julie is an extremely well rounded composer, writing works for symphony orchestra (including chorus), chamber ensembles, wind ensembles, soloists, brass and woodwind quintets and many other serious and commercial formats. She began writing music for concert band in 1983, publishing her first band work Mystery on Mena Mountain with Southern Music Company. Since that time, she has composed and published numerous works for professional wind ensembles, military bands, colleges and public schools and has conducted her music in clinics worldwide. She is also a very well received speaker and clinician. Julie is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).
Source: "Julie Giroux". 2010. Musica Propria. website. Photo Source: Musica Propria. website.
Griffes, Charles Tomlinson (1884-1920)
Although not a household name, Charles Tomlinson Griffes played an important role in the development of the American art song. Griffes possessed one of the most distinctive voices in American music, and his song catalog, while moderate in size, demonstrated his unique ability to fuse music and text, especially in his mature songs. It is regrettable that he suffered an untimely death, at the age of thirty-five, just as he reached the pinnacle of his career. Even so, professional musicians as well as the concert-going public have greatly benefited from the contributions Griffes bestowed on America.
Source: "Biographies: Charles Griffes". Library of Congress. website. Photo source: Bach Cantatas Website. website.
Reynaldo Hahn (August 9, 1874 in Caracas, Venezuela – January 28, 1947 in Paris, France) was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic, diarist, theatre director, and salon singer. Hahn studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Jules Massenet, Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns and Émile Decombes. Best known as a composer of songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie. As a conductor Hahn specialised in Mozart. For many years he was one of the best critics on music and musicians and a influential music critic of the leading Paris daily, Le Figaro.
Source: "Reynaldo Hahn- The Bewildered Nightingale". 2017. Classical Music Journey. website. Photo source: Classical Music Journey. website.
Lou Harrison is one of our most influential percussion composers and innovators. His career has included work as a composer, performer, teacher, musical theorist, ethnomusicologist, conductor, instrument maker, poet, calligrapher, critic, polemicist, dancer, puppeteer and playwright.
Harrison received his earliest training in piano and dance, later taking up composition, and finally studying music at San Francisco State College. His interest in writing music for percussion dates from the 1930s when he heard the ostinatos in a Henry Cowell theater work. From 1934 to 1935 he studied with Cowell, having previously taken his University of California Music of the Peoples of the World course.
Source: Fairchild, Frederick D. "PAS Hall of Fame: Lou Harrison". Percussive Arts Society. website. Photo source: Percussive Arts Society. website.
Henze, Hans Werner (1926-2012)
Hans Werner Henze, (born July 1, 1926, Gütersloh, Germany—died October 27, 2012, Dresden), German composer whose operas, ballets, symphonies, and other works are marked by an individual and advanced style wrought within traditional forms.
Henze was a pupil of the noted German composer Wolfgang Fortner and of René Leibowitz, the leading French composer of 12-tone music. One of Henze’s early works, the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947), demonstrated his mastery of 12-tone technique, which dominated his writing until 1956. Henze considered his early works, up to his Symphony No. 2 (1949), to be simple, or even primitive, as they depended greatly upon the effectiveness of his melodies.
Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. 2022. "Hans Werner Henze". Encyclopedia Britannica. website. Photo Source: Encyclopedia Britannica. website.
Jerry Herman is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors. Born: 1931. Living in: United States
Source: "Jerry Herman Biography". Singers.com. website. Photo source: Singers.com. website.
Pulitzer Prize and three-time Grammy-winner Jennifer Higdon (b. Brooklyn, NY, December 31, 1962) taught herself to play flute at the age of 15 and began formal musical studies at 18, with an even later start in composition at the age of 21. Despite these obstacles, Jennifer has become a major figure in contemporary Classical music. Her works represent a wide range of genres, from orchestral to chamber, to wind ensemble, as well as vocal, choral and opera. Her music has been hailed by Fanfare Magazine as having "the distinction of being at once complex, sophisticated but readily accessible emotionally", with the Times of London citing it as "…traditionally rooted, yet imbued with integrity and freshness." The League of American Orchestras reports that she is one of America's most frequently performed composers.
Source: "Biography". 2022. Jennifer Higdon. Composer's official website. Photo source: Jennifer Higdon. Composer's official website.
American composer John Kander (b. Kansas City, MO, March 18, 1927) is the musical partner of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb, who together created at least sixteen Broadway shows, Flora the Red Menace (1965), Cabaret (1966), Chicago (1975), and Curtains (2007) among them. They also contributed material to fourteen films and television specials over their forty-year association. Independently John Kander supplied the scores to many films, including Something For Everyone (1970), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), and Billy Bathgate (1991).
Source: "John Kander". 2022. Masterworks Broadway. website. Photo source: Fassler, Ron. 2021. "The Music Man: John Kander". website.
Praised as “radiantly visionary…a composer unafraid of grand gestures and openhearted lyricism” (TIME), Lowell Liebermann is one of America's most frequently performed and recorded living composers. He has written nearly one hundred forty works in all genres, several of which have gone on to become standard repertoire. His Sonata for Flute and Piano and his Gargoyles for piano are among the most frequently performed contemporary works for their instruments, appearing regularly on recital and competition programs; each of them has been recorded on compact disc more than twenty times to date.
Source: "Lowell Liebermann - Biography". 2020. Lowell Liebermann. Composer's official website. Photo source: Lowell Liebermann. Composer's official website.
Passionate, versatile, and engaging, composer Robert Maggio embraces the collaborative and deeply communicative act of making music. Maggio is equally comfortable composing for a string quartet, chorus, wind ensemble or an orchestra, as he is collaborating on a new musical, a modern ballet, or songs and incidental music for a play.
Hailed as a composer of music that is smart, vital, and inventive* Maggio has created an unusually diverse and substantial body of work. Each project creates a unique connection between Maggio’s wondrously eclectic vocabulary** and a wide array of commissions, artist residencies and interdisciplinary collaborations. Lyrical, passionate, melodic, and rhythmically charged***, Maggio’s music has been performed on concert stages, in orchestra pits, in school auditoriums, and at arts festivals around the world.
Source: "About Robert". 2022. Robert Maggio. The composer's official website. Photo source: Robert Maggio. The composer's official website.
Born in Montreal, Canada, Colin McPhee was a distinctive and imaginative composer, ethnomusicologist, pianist, and writer, most noted for absorbing the sounds of Balinese music into his own compositions. He came to the U.S. to study at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where his composition teacher was Gustav Strube (1867-1953). He returned to Canada to study piano with Arthur Friedheim in Toronto. The Toronto Symphony gave his First Piano Concerto a world premiere in 1924. He left Toronto for Paris to study piano with Isidore Philipp, and composition with Paul Le Flem.
Source: Russell, Maureen. 2013. "Highlights from the Ethnomusicology Archive: the Colin McPhee collection". Ethnomusicology Review. website. Photo source: Ethnomusicology Review. website.
Menotti, Gian Carlo (1911-2007)
Gian Carlo Menotti, composer (b. July 7, 1911--d. February 1, 2007) Gian Carlo Menotti became the most-performed contemporary opera composer of his era. He stood alone on the American scene as the first to create American opera with so much appeal to audiences that it became established in permanent repertory. He adapted his natural Italian gift for operatic drama and performance to the requir ents of the American stage and changing times. According to fellow composer Ned Ror : "It is not opinion but fact that Menotti singlehandedly revitalized the concept of living opera for Americans...and violently altered the nature of lyric theater here and, by extension, throughout the world."
Source: "Gian Carlo Menotti". 2022. The Kennedy Center. website. Photo source: Opera Wire. website.
Angela Morley’s first memories were of sitting on the floor surrounded by the records she was playing on an enormous wind-up gramophone. During World War II, the 15 year old saxophone player, who was assigned male at birth, was in demand. She had an ability to sight read music and by age 20 she was performing with Geraldo’s Band, a top U.K. group. Self-taught until then, Morley began to study composition and conducting. At 29, she became music director of Philips Records (U.K.) – arranging for artists like Mel Torme and Rosemary Clooney.
Source: "Angela Morley - Nominee". 2022. The Legacy Project. website. Photo source: Cor Flammae. website.
Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Tallis Scholars, and King’s College, Cambridge, among others. He is a collaborative partner at the San Francisco Symphony and has been featured at the Barbican and the Philharmonie de Paris as composer, performer, and curator.
Source: "Biography". 2022. Nico Muhly. composer's official website. Photo source: Nico Muhly. composer's official website.
Born at 95 Cowbridge Road, Cardiff, 15 January 1893, of a very musical family who soon moved to Llwyn-yr-eos, 11 Cathedral Road, Cardiff, the only son of David Davies, rates collector, and Clara Novello Davies. He attended Mrs. Soulez' school nearby and received musical tuition from his mother and (Sir) Herbert Brewer, Gloucester. His good soprano voice won him prizes at eisteddfodau, and a choral scholarship to Magdalen College School, Oxford, when he was 10 years old. He soon became a soloist with the college choir but never sang in public after his voice broke at the age of 16. He returned home as a piano teacher and accompanist at his mother's concerts but left for London a year later where he continued as her accompanist and composed ballads. In 1913 he moved to 11 Aldwych where he lived for the rest of his life, though he had a country home at Downley, Bucks., and later bought Redroofs, near Maidenhead. He died suddenly 6 March 1951, a bachelor at the height of his fame.
Nearly the whole of his life was spent in a musical atmosphere. He was constantly busy, acting in films or plays - many of which were his own work - sometimes filming during the day, on stage in the evening, and every spare moment writing and composing new works, nearly every one more brilliant than the one before
Source: "Novello, Ivor: composer, playwright, stage and film actor". 2001. Dictionary of Welsh Biography. website. Photo Source: English Heritage. website.
Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer,cperformer and humanitarian was about opening hercown and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In thec'50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY,The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
Source: "about". 2020. Pauline Oliveros. Composer's official website. Photo Source: Pauline Oliveros. Composer's official website.
A talented composer and songwriter, Cole Porter handled both music and lyrics with ease, and conquered Broadway and Hollywood with his witty songs. His work includes "Night and Day" and "I've Got You Under My Skin." However, his life was marred by a 1937 riding accident that left him unable to walk. He died in California in 1964, having written more than 800 songs.
Source: "Cole Porter". 2022. Biography. website. Photo source: The New Yorker. website.
The brilliant French composer, Francis (Jean Marcel) Poulenc, was born into a wealthy family of pharmaceutical manufacturers. His mother, an amateur pianist, taught him to play, and music formed a part of family life. At 16, he began taking formal piano lessons with Ricardo Viñees.
A decisive turn in his development as a composer occurred when Francis Poulenc attracted the attention of Erik Satie, the arbiter elegantiarum of the arts and social amenities in Paris. Deeply impressed by Satie's fruitful eccentricities in the then-shocking manner of Dadaism, Poulenc joined an ostentatiously self-descriptive musical group called the Nouveaux Jeunes. In a gratuitous parallel with the Russian Five, the French critic Henri Collet dubbed the "New Youths" Le Groupe de Six, and the label stuck under the designation Les Six. The 6 musicians included, besides Poulenc: Auric, Durey, Arthur Honegger, Milhaud, and Tailleferre. Although quite different in their styles of composition and artistic inclinations, they continued collective participation in various musical events. Les Six also had links with Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau.
Source: Oron, Aryeh. "Francis Poulenc (Composer)". 2007. Bach Cantatas Website. Photo source: Bach Cantatas Website.
Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a twentieth-century French composer and pianist, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. His piano, chamber music and orchestral works have become staples of repertoire.
Ravel's piano compositions, such as Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, are virtuosic, and his orchestrations, as in Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, are notable for their effective use of tonal color and variety of sound and instrumentation.
To the general public, Ravel is probably best known for his orchestral work, Bolero, which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music." Still, upon closer inspection, Bolero reveals Ravel's brilliant, and often adventurous orchestrational technique.
Source: "Maurice Ravel". 2018. New World Encyclopedia. website. Photo Source: Encyclopedia Britannica. website.
Words and music are inextricably linked for Ned Rorem. Time magazine has called him "the world's best composer of art songs," yet his musical and literary ventures extend far beyond this specialized field. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy, Rorem has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, and an array of other orchestral works; music for numerous combinations of chamber forces; ten operas; choral works of every description; ballets and other music for the theater; and literally hundreds of songs and cycles. He is the author of sixteen books, including five volumes of diaries and collections of lectures and criticism.
Source: "About Ned". The Ned Rorem website. Photo source: The Ned Rorem website.
Saint-Saëns, Camille (1835-1921)
Camille Saint-Saëns, in full Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, (born October 9, 1835, Paris, France—died December 16, 1921, Algiers [Algeria]), composer chiefly remembered for his symphonic poems—the first of that genre to be written by a Frenchman—and for his opera Samson et Dalila. Saint-Saëns was notable for his pioneering efforts on behalf of French music, and he was a gifted pianist and organist as well as a writer of criticism, poetry, essays, and plays.
Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "Camille Saint-Saens". 2022. Encyclopedia Britannica. website. Photo source: Encyclopedia Britannica. website.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was an Austrian romantic composer and although he died at the age of 31, he was a prolific composer, having written some 600 lieder and nine symphonies.
Source: "Franz Schubert: Biography". 2022. Classic FM. website. Photo source: Wikipedia. website.
Marc Shaiman (b. Scotch Plains, NJ, October 22, 1959) is a pianist, composer, lyricist, arranger, orchestrator, musical director, conductor, writer, producer, actor, and general all-round musician working in films, television, and musical theatre. He has contributed in some capacity or another to fifty-two films and television shows (Broadcast News, When Harry Met Sally, The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Sister Act, Sleepless in Seattle, A Few Good Men, The American President, The First Wives Club, In & Out, Patch Adams, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Bowling for Columbine, The Cat in the Hat), composed two full Broadway musicals (Hairspray and Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me), and won countless honors including two Tony Awards®, two Drama Desk Awards (all for Hairspray), seven ASCAP Awards, an Emmy®, and five Oscar® nominations.
Source: "Marc Shaiman". 2022. Masterworks Broadway. Sony Music Entertainment. website. Photo source: Los Angeles Times. website.
Born 22 April 1858, London, England, Died 8 May 1944, Hook Heath, Woking, England
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth attained prominence as one of the most accomplished female composers in a male dominated environment, and as one of the main representatives of the suffragette movement.
Smyth was born to a wealthy bourgeois family, daughter of Major-General John Hall Smyth and Emma Struth Smyth. Against her father’s wishes she decided to pursue a musical career. In 1887 Smyth entered the Leipzig Conservatory, staying for one year only after becoming disenchanted with the tuition and staff. Remaining in Leipzig, Smyth then took harmony and counterpoint lessons with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. During this period she met many of the most significant composers of the day, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, Clara Schummann and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The latter was especially encouraging, describing Smyth in his memoirs as ‘one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation’.
Source: "Ethel Smyth". British Library Board. website. Photo source: British Library Board. website.
Stephen Sondheim, in full Stephen Joshua Sondheim, (born March 22, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 26, 2021, Roxbury, Connecticut), American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theatre.
Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. 2022. Encyclopedia Britannica. website. Photo source: Wikipedia. website.
Ingrid Stölzel (b.1971) has been hailed “as a composer of considerable gifts” who is “musically confident and bold” by National Public Radio’s classical music critic. Her music has been described as “tender and beautiful” (American Record Guide) and as creating a “haunting feeling of lyrical reflection and suspension in time and memory” (Classical-Modern Review). At the heart of her compositions is a belief that music can create a profound emotional connection with the listener.
Source: "Composer: Ingrid Stolzel". 2022. Navona Records. website. Photo source: Parma Recordings. website.
Strayhorn, William (Billy) Thomas (1915-1967)
Born on November 29, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, Strayhorn joined his four older living siblings (four others died). His parents were Lillian Young Strayhorn and James Nathaniel Strayhorn. The family struggled financially. After living in several cities in Strayhorn’s early life, they settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1924. Strayhorn attended Westinghouse High School there as well as the Pittsburgh Musical Institute for piano lessons and classical music study. To help him escape his abusive father and to nurture Strayhorn’s budding musical talent, his mother sent him on extended visits to his grandparents’ home in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Source: Anders, Tisa M. 2013. Black Past. website. Photo source: Black Past. website.
Conrad Susa was resident composer for the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and served as dramaturge for the O'Neill Center in Connecticut. He also wrote numerous scores for documentary films and PBS television productions, choral and instrumental works and operas (Transformations, Black River and The Love of Don Perlimplín) commissioned by the Minnesota Opera Company, San Francisco Opera and Pepsico. His church opera The Wise Women, was written for the American Guild of Organists and The Dangerous Liaisons, for the San Francisco Opera.
Mr. Susa served as staff pianist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and as assistant editor of Musical America magazine. He won numerous awards, including Ford Foundation fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts grants and a National Endowment Consortium grant. He earned a B.F.A. from Carnegie Institute of Technology and received an M.S. from The Juilliard School, where he studied with William Bergsma, Vincent Persichetti, and P.D.Q. Bach.
Source: "Conrad Susa". ECS Publishing Group. website. Photo source: ECS Publishing Group. website.
Szymanowski, Karol (1882-1937)
Karol Szymanowski, in full Karol Maciej Szymanowski, (born Oct. 6, 1882, Timoshovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died March 29, 1937, Lausanne, Switz.), the foremost Polish composer of the early 20th century. Szymanowski began to compose and play the piano at an early age. In 1901 he went to Warsaw and studied harmony, counterpoint, and composition privately until 1904. Finding the musical life in Warsaw limiting, he went to Berlin, where he organized the Young Polish Composers’ Publishing Co. (1905–12) to publish new works by his countrymen. His compositions from this period, which include the opera Hagith (1913), show the influence of Strauss, Wagner, and Scriabin.
Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "Karol Szymanowski". 2022. Encyclopedia Britannica. website. Photo source: The Guardian. website.
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich (1840-1893)
Russian composer. He was the first composer of a new Russian type, fully professional, who firmly assimilated traditions of Western European symphonic mastery; in a deeply original, personal and national style he united the symphonic thought of Beethoven and Schumann with the work of Glinka, and transformed Liszt’s and Berlioz’s achievements in depictive-programmatic music into matters of Shakespearian elevation and psychological import (Boris Asaf′yev).
Source: Wiley, Roland John. "Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il′yich." Grove Music Online. 2001. From Grove Music Online database. Photo source: flickr website.
Tilson Thomas, Michael (b. 1944)
Michael Tilson Thomas is Founder and Artistic Director Laureate of the New World Symphony, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra. In addition to conducting the world’s leading orchestras, MTT is also noted for his work as a composer and a producer of multimedia projects that are dedicated to music education and the reimagination of the concert experience. He has won eleven Grammys for his recordings, is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors, and is an Officier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
Source: "Biography." Michael Tilson Thomas. website. Photo source: Michael Tilson Thomas website.
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was a many-faceted American composer of great originality and a music critic of singular brilliance. Utilizing a musical style marked by sharp wit and overt playfulness, he composed in almost every genre of music, producing a highly original body of work rooted in American speech rhythms and hymnbook harmony. His music was influenced by Satie’s ideals of clarity, simplicity, irony, and humor. Though mostly diatonic and tonal in feeling, some of his work was densely chromatic (Three Tone Poems) and even 12-tone in organization (A Solemn Music).
Source: "Virgil Thomson." Virgil Thomson. website. Photo source: New York Times article.
Michael Tippett was born in London and studied music at the Royal College before embarking on an early career as a composer, supported by work with the orchestra and choir of Morley College in South London, tasks that he found socially relevant. His idiosyncratic style developed relatively slowly, flowering in a series of remarkable operas for which he provided his own libretti. Public recognition came with a knighthood in 1966 and appointment as a Companion of Honour in 1979.
Source: "Tippett, Michael." Naxos Music Library. From the Naxos Music Library database. Photo source: Classic FM website.
Drawing from inspirations as diverse as Medieval chant to contemporary pop, the music of composer and conductor Evan Williams (b. 1988) explores the thin lines between beauty and disquieting, joy and sorrow, and simple and complex, while often tackling important social and political issues. Williams’ catalogue contains a broad range of work, from vocal and operatic offerings to instrumental works, along with electronic music.
Source: "Biography" Evan Williams. website. Photo source: Evan Williams Music website.
