21 Of The Most Famous LGBTQ+ Composers You Should Know

Start with: “Messiah: Hallelujah chorus”

Born in Halle in 1685, Handel settled in London, became a British subject in 1727 and wrote some of the most popular music of the Baroque era. Queen Anne gave him a yearly pension, the Water Music was played for George I on the Thames in 1717, and Messiah was first performed in Dublin in 1742.

Handel never married and kept his private life to himself, so his sexuality is unknown. Some scholars, notably Ellen T. Harris in her book Handel as Orpheus (2001), have read the chamber cantatas he wrote for patrons in Italy as coded expressions of same-sex desire. Others think the evidence is too thin to say.

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Start with: “Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes”First composer made a life peer

Benjamin Britten is one of the great opera composers of the 20th century. Peter Grimes (1945) was hailed as the first genuinely successful British opera since Purcell, and he went on to write 15 operas in all, including The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice, as well as the War Requiem (1962). In 1976 he became the first composer to be made a life peer.

He met the tenor Peter Pears in 1937, and they were partners for the rest of Britten's life. Pears sang many of the leading roles Britten wrote. Their relationship was widely known but not publicly discussed in his lifetime. When Britten died in 1976 he turned down a burial in Westminster Abbey so that he could lie in Aldeburgh, where Pears was later buried beside him.

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Start with: “Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs”

Born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence in 1632, Lully caught the eye of the young Louis XIV as a dancer and became the most powerful musician in France. He was naturalized in 1661, ran the Académie Royale de Musique from 1672 and, with the librettist Philippe Quinault, invented French opera, the tragédie en musique. With Molière he created comedy-ballets such as Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

He married Madeleine Lambert, the daughter of the composer Michel Lambert, in 1662. His affairs with men caused scandal, and in 1685 one involving a page named Brunet angered the king. Lully died in 1687 after striking his foot with the heavy staff he used to beat time, which led to gangrene.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 15 of the greatest Baroque composers

Start with: “Danse macabre”

Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy who made his official debut at ten, playing Mozart and Beethoven concertos, and went on to become one of the leading French composers of his time. His best-known works include the tone poem Danse macabre (1874), the "Organ" Symphony No. 3 (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals, which he banned from performance in his lifetime because he feared it would hurt his reputation.

In 1875, aged 39, he married 19-year-old Marie-Laure Truffot. Both their sons died in 1878, and the couple separated in 1881. Some biographers believe he was more attracted to men than to women, though there is no firm evidence either way.

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Start with: “Swan Lake”

Tchaikovsky was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression abroad. His ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker are among the most performed in the world, and his symphonies, concertos and the 1812 Overture are concert favorites.

Biographers generally agree that he was gay. His letters, especially those to his brother Modest, describe his feelings for men, though Soviet censors cut those passages for decades. In 1877 he married a former student, Antonina Miliukova, a disastrous match. They separated after about two and a half months, and he never blamed her for it.

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Start with: “West Side Story”

Leonard Bernstein was the first American-born conductor to win international acclaim and the first to lead a major American orchestra, serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. His televised Young People's Concerts taught millions about music.

As a composer he wrote West Side Story (1957), Candide and his theater piece Mass (1971). He married the actress Felicia Montealegre in 1951 but also had relationships with men, and in 1976 he left Felicia for a time to live with the music scholar Tom Cothran.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 of the greatest musical theater composers

Start with: “The March of the Women”First female composer made a dame

Ethel Smyth wrote operas, choral works and chamber music at a time when women composers were rarely taken seriously. Her opera Der Wald (1902) was the only opera by a woman staged at the Metropolitan Opera for more than a century, and The Wreckers (1906) is often called one of the most important English operas between Purcell and Britten. In 1922 she became the first female composer made a dame.

She was also a militant suffragette. Her The March of the Women (1911) became the movement's anthem, and in 1912 she served two months in Holloway Prison, where she was seen conducting fellow prisoners with a toothbrush. She had deep attachments to women, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf, as well as a long relationship with the writer Henry Brewster.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 25 of the greatest female composers

Start with: “Gloria”

Francis Poulenc was one of Les Six, the group of young French composers who reacted against Romantic seriousness in the 1920s. His music can be witty and cheeky one moment and deeply devout the next, especially after a visit to the shrine of Rocamadour in 1936 restored his Catholic faith.

His later works include the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), the Gloria and the Oboe Sonata (1962). Poulenc's most important relationships were with men, including Richard Chanlaire, Raymond Destouches and, in his last years, Louis Gautier, though he also had a brief affair with a woman and fathered a daughter in 1946.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 13 of the greatest French composers

Start with: “Appalachian Spring”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Born in Brooklyn, Aaron Copland became known as the "Dean of American Music." Works such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man and Appalachian Spring, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, use open harmonies and folk tunes to suggest the wide American landscape. He also won an Oscar for his score to The Heiress.

Copland was gay and had long relationships with several men, including the photographer Victor Kraft, whom he met in 1932. He guarded his privacy carefully, but his biographer Howard Pollack notes that he was one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his partners.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 16 of the greatest American composers

Start with: “Take the "A" Train”

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Billy Strayhorn spent part of his childhood with his grandmother in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and studied music in Pittsburgh. He hoped to become a classical composer, but racial barriers closed that path, and he turned to jazz. Duke Ellington heard him in 1938 and was especially struck by his song "Lush Life."

For nearly three decades Strayhorn was Ellington's arranger, composer and creative partner. He wrote "Take the 'A' Train," which became the band's signature tune in 1941, and "Chelsea Bridge." He was openly gay within Ellington's circle, lived with his partner, the musician Aaron Bridgers, until 1947, and supported the civil rights movement.

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Start with: “Adagio for Strings”🏆 Two Pulitzer Prizes

Samuel Barber grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in a musical family: his mother was a pianist and his aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1938, when he was 28, Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony premiered his Adagio for Strings, which has become one of the most famous pieces of American music.

He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for his opera Vanessa (1958) and his Piano Concerto (1963). Barber met the composer Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute in 1928, and they were partners for about 40 years, living together at their house, Capricorn, north of New York City. They stayed close friends after they separated in the early 1970s.

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Start with: “Deep Listening”

Born in Houston, Pauline Oliveros was a central figure in experimental and electronic music after World War II. In the early 1960s she co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center and later served as its director. She played the accordion and often used it in her own performances.

Her best-known idea is Deep Listening, which grew out of a 1988 recording made in an underground cistern with its long echo. It asks performers and listeners, trained or not, to pay close attention to every sound around them. Oliveros was openly lesbian, challenged the place of women in classical music, and shared a 32-year creative partnership with the sound artist IONE.

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Start with: “Going to a Town”🏆 GLAAD Media Award

Rufus Wainwright, the son of the folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, came out as gay in his teens. His self-titled debut album on DreamWorks Records (1998) won a GLAAD Media Award and a Juno Award, and he built a following with lush, theatrical albums such as Poses and Want One.

He has moved well beyond pop. In 2006 he recreated Judy Garland's famous Carnegie Hall concert song for song, and he has written two operas, Prima Donna (2009) and Hadrian (2018). He married the arts administrator Jörn Weisbrodt in 2012.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 14 of the most famous LGBTQ piano players

Start with: “La Koro Sutro”

Born in Portland, Oregon, Lou Harrison grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area surrounded by Asian and Pacific music, from Cantonese opera to Hawaiian steel guitar. He studied with Henry Cowell, and after reading Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music he gave up equal temperament for just intonation.

With his partner Bill Colvig he built Javanese-style gamelans and helped found the American gamelan movement. Harrison came out in high school and lived openly as a gay man all his life. His opera Young Caesar (1970) explores the young Julius Caesar's relationship with King Nicomedes, and his La Koro Sutro sets a Buddhist text in Esperanto.

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Start with: “Switched-On Bach”🏆 3 Grammy Awards

Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1939, Wendy Carlos helped bring the synthesizer into the mainstream. Her 1968 album Switched-On Bach, Bach played on a Moog synthesizer, was a surprise hit and won three Grammy Awards. She also worked closely with Robert Moog, suggesting features such as the touch-sensitive keyboard.

She went on to score Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), and Disney's Tron (1982). Carlos had begun living as a woman by 1968 and publicly discussed being transgender in interviews with Playboy in 1979. She is the first transgender person to win a Grammy.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: Johann Sebastian Bach: 13 interesting facts

Start with: “Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano”

John Cage, a student of Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, changed how people think about what music is. In 1940 he invented the prepared piano, with screws, bolts and rubber placed between the strings, and from 1951 he used chance methods, often tossing coins to consult the ancient Chinese book of changes. His most famous piece, 4′33″ (1952), asks the performer to play nothing, so that the sounds of the room become the music.

Cage was married to the artist Xenia Kashevaroff from 1935 to 1945. In the early 1940s he became involved with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was his partner for the rest of his life and his collaborator on decades of dance works.

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Start with: “Femenine”

Julius Eastman was born in New York City, grew up in Ithaca and studied at the Curtis Institute. A fine baritone, he became known for singing Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King. As a composer he developed what he called "organic music," in which material builds up gradually and then falls apart, mixing minimalism with energy borrowed from pop. Stay On It (1973) and Femenine (1974) are two of his best-known works.

Eastman was a gay Black composer who put both identities at the center of his work, most provocatively in the titles of his piano pieces of around 1979 and 1980, including Gay Guerrilla. In the 1980s he struggled with homelessness, and when he died in Buffalo in 1990 his obituary did not appear for eight months. His music has since been revived around the world.

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Start with: “Your Song”🏆 Oscar win

Born Reginald Dwight in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1947, Elton John studied at the Royal Academy of Music and became one of the best-selling artists in history, with more than 300 million records sold. With his lyricist Bernie Taupin he wrote hits such as "Your Song," "Rocket Man" and "Tiny Dancer," and with Tim Rice he wrote the songs for Disney's The Lion King, winning an Oscar for "Can You Feel the Love Tonight."

He came out as bisexual in a 1976 Rolling Stone interview and later spoke openly about being gay. He founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, entered a civil partnership with David Furnish in 2005 and married him in 2014. They have two sons.

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Start with: “blue cathedral”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Jennifer Higdon came to composing late. As a teenager she taught herself the flute from an old method book, and she arrived at college knowing very little music theory before a professor encouraged her to write. She went on to teach composition at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1994 to 2021.

Her one-movement orchestral piece blue cathedral (2000), written in memory of her brother, has been played by more than 400 orchestras. She won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto, has won three Grammy Awards, and wrote the opera Cold Mountain (2015). Higdon is openly lesbian.

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Start with: “Anything Goes”🏆 First Tony for Best Musical

Born in Peru, Indiana, Cole Porter wrote both the music and the witty lyrics for some of the best-loved songs of the 20th century, including "Night and Day," "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "You're the Top." Anything Goes (1934) is one of his greatest scores, and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) won the first Tony Award for Best Musical.

In 1919 he married Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy divorcée eight years older than him, and they stayed together until her death in 1954. Porter was gay, and Linda knew it. Their marriage gave him a respectable public front at a time when homosexuality could not be openly acknowledged.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 of the greatest musical theater composers

Start with: “Two Boys”

Born in Vermont in 1981, Nico Muhly studied at Columbia and Juilliard and spent eight years working for Philip Glass as an editor, conductor and keyboard player. He moves easily between concert music and pop, working with Björk, Sufjan Stevens, Antony and the Johnsons and Grizzly Bear, and he is part of the Icelandic collective and label Bedroom Community.

The Metropolitan Opera has commissioned two of his operas. Two Boys, about a crime rooted in online deception, premiered at English National Opera in 2011 and reached the Met in 2013, and Marnie followed in 2017. Muhly is openly gay.

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