20 Of The Greatest 20th-Century Composers You Need To Know

Start with: “Boléro”

Ravel is often grouped with Debussy as an Impressionist, though both men rejected the label. At the Paris Conservatoire his modern style clashed with the establishment: he failed to win the Prix de Rome five times, and his early elimination in 1905 caused a scandal that led the Conservatoire’s director, Théodore Dubois, to resign.

He was one of the finest orchestrators who ever lived, as his ballet Daphnis et Chloé and his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition show. Boléro (1928) builds one melody over a single snare-drum rhythm for about 15 minutes, and Torvill and Dean skated to it to win Olympic gold in 1984.

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Start with: “Verklärte Nacht”Invented the 12-tone method

Schoenberg began as a late Romantic, writing the lush string sextet Verklärte Nacht in 1899. Around 1908 he abandoned key altogether, writing atonal music without a home key, cadences or traditional harmony. In the early 1920s he devised the 12-tone method, in which a piece is built from a fixed ordering of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

With his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, he formed what is called the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg was Jewish, and the Nazis branded his music degenerate. He left Germany in 1933 and settled in Los Angeles, where his pupils included John Cage.

Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 Of The Greatest Serialist Composers You Should Know

Start with: “The Rite of Spring”

Stravinsky shot to fame with three ballets for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite’s Paris premiere famously ended in uproar, though historians think the scale of the riot has been exaggerated over the years.

Its pounding, shifting rhythms and clashing harmonies changed music for good. Stravinsky kept reinventing himself, turning to Neoclassicism in the 1920s with works like Pulcinella and, late in life, adopting serial techniques. He later became a French and then an American citizen.

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Start with: “Romeo and Juliet: Dance of the Knights”

Prokofiev was a prodigy. His first written-down piano piece dates from when he was five, and at nine he wrote his first opera, The Giant. He left Russia in 1918, living in the United States and Paris, before returning to the Soviet Union for good in 1936.

That year he wrote Peter and the Wolf, in which a narrator tells the story and each character is played by a different instrument. In 1948 the Soviet authorities denounced his music for formalism. His ballet Romeo and Juliet, with its grand Dance of the Knights, is his best-known work.

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Start with: “Afro-American Symphony”Dean of Afro-American composers

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, Still is linked with the Harlem Renaissance. He worked as an arranger and player for W. C. Handy and other bandleaders before focusing on concert music, and went on to write five symphonies, nine operas, four ballets and more than 30 choral works.

His Afro-American Symphony, which draws on the blues, premiered in 1931 under Howard Hanson. It was the first symphony by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra, and until 1950 it was the most widely performed symphony by any American composer.

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Start with: “Symphony No. 5”15 symphonies

Shostakovich spent his whole career under Soviet rule, and his relationship with the state shaped his music. In 1936 the Communist Party newspaper Pravda attacked his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and his career was in danger.

His Fifth Symphony of 1937 was a huge success and won him back official favor, but in 1948 he was denounced again for formalism. Things eased after Stalin’s death in 1953. Alongside his 15 symphonies, his 15 string quartets are some of his most personal and darkest music.

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Start with: “Sonatas and Interludes”

After studying with Schoenberg, Cage became the leading figure of experimental music. His best-known piece, 4′33″ (1952), has the performers stay silent for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the music becomes whatever sounds happen in the room. It still sparks arguments about what music is.

He invented the prepared piano, placing screws, bolts and rubber between the strings to turn the instrument into a percussion ensemble, as in his Sonatas and Interludes. He also used chance in composing, consulting the ancient Chinese Book of Changes to make musical decisions in works such as Music of Changes.

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Start with: “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”

Britten is the most important British opera composer of the 20th century. Peter Grimes (1945), about an outsider in a Suffolk fishing village, was a critical and popular success and put English opera back on the international stage.

His War Requiem, written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, sets the poems of First World War soldier Wilfred Owen alongside the Latin Mass for the dead. The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, built on a theme by Purcell, introduces each section of the orchestra in turn. He was also a fine pianist and conductor.

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Start with: “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story”

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Bernstein was one of several composers, along with George Gershwin, who blended jazz and Broadway with the classical tradition. He wrote symphonies and choral works as well as the scores for On the Town and West Side Story, one of the greatest musicals ever written.

He was just as famous as a conductor, serving as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Between 1958 and 1972 he presented the orchestra’s Young People’s Concerts on television, explaining music to millions of viewers.

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Start with: “Appalachian Spring”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Born in Brooklyn in 1900, Copland took piano lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn from 1914 and studied harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark. In 1921 he went to the new American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, then spent three years in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger.

His open, wide-spaced harmonies came to define the sound of America. The ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, which won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, are his best-known works, along with Fanfare for the Common Man. As a teacher and champion of younger composers, he became known as the Dean of American Composers.

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Start with: “Concerto for Orchestra”

Bartók is one of the most influential Hungarian composers of the 20th century. His mother, a piano teacher, gave him his first lessons, and he studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where hearing Richard Strauss’s music had a big effect on his early style.

With his friend Zoltán Kodály he traveled the countryside collecting and transcribing thousands of folk songs, and their rhythms and scales became the core of his own modern language. He emigrated to the United States in 1940. His six string quartets, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and the piano suite Out of Doors are among his most important works.

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Start with: “Quartet for the End of Time”

Messiaen grew up in a literary family and entered the Paris Conservatoire at 11. His music draws on his Catholic faith, on birdsong, which he transcribed in the wild and worked into pieces like the piano cycle Catalog of Birds, and on rhythms from Indian music and ancient Greek poetry.

He had synesthesia and saw colors when he heard chords, which helps explain the rich textures of works like the Turangalîla-Symphonie. Captured by the Germans in 1940, he wrote his Quartet for the End of Time in the Stalag VIII-A prisoner-of-war camp, where it premiered in January 1941.

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Start with: “Metamorphosis One”

Glass is the youngest composer on this list and one of the leading figures of minimalism, which grew up in the 1960s as a reaction to the complexity of serialism. He studied flute as a child at the Peabody Institute, went to the University of Chicago at 15, then to Juilliard, and studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

In Paris he also worked with Ravi Shankar, and Indian music shaped his use of repeating, slowly changing patterns. His operas Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten form a trilogy of portrait operas. He has also written film scores including Koyaanisqatsi, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal.

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Start with: “The Lark Ascending”9 symphonies

Born in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, Vaughan Williams created a distinctly English sound, shaped by the folk songs he collected, hymns and Tudor church music. He wrote nine symphonies, and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis shows his love of early music.

The Lark Ascending, a romance for solo violin and orchestra inspired by George Meredith’s poem, regularly tops polls of Britain’s favorite classical pieces. Other highlights include Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, the choral plea for peace Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Serenade to Music, which sets lines from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

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Start with: “Rhapsody in Blue”

Gershwin bridged popular song and the concert hall, blending jazz, Broadway and classical music into a sound that is unmistakably American. Rhapsody in Blue (1924), with its famous opening clarinet glissando, was followed by the Concerto in F and An American in Paris.

His opera Porgy and Bess (1935), based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, gave the world “Summertime”, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”. He died of a brain tumor in 1937 at just 38, having done more than almost anyone to break down the wall between high and low art.

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Start with: “Lux Aeterna”

Ligeti was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania. In 1944 he was sent to a forced labor unit, and his father and brother died in the Nazi camps. After the war he studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where Stalinist censorship kept him from writing the music he wanted.

He fled to Vienna in 1956 after the Hungarian Revolution and met the post-war avant-garde, including Stockhausen and Boulez. His shimmering clouds of sound, as in Atmosphères and the choral Lux Aeterna, reached a huge audience when Stanley Kubrick used them in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Start with: “Carmina Burana: O Fortuna”

Orff was born in Munich and studied at the Munich Academy of Music. His most famous work, Carmina Burana (1937), is a cantata for choir, soloists and orchestra that sets medieval poems in Latin and German. Its opening and closing chorus, O Fortuna, is one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music, used in countless films and adverts.

Carmina Burana later became the first part of a trilogy called Trionfi, with Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite. Orff also had a huge impact on music education: with Gunild Keetman he developed the Orff Schulwerk approach, which uses movement, singing and simple percussion and is taught in schools worldwide.

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Start with: “Adagio for Strings”🏆 2 Pulitzer Prizes

Barber’s music sits between Romanticism and modernism, with long, singing melodies. He began piano at six, wrote his first piece at seven, and entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia at 14. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his opera Vanessa and his Piano Concerto.

His Adagio for Strings began as the slow movement of his String Quartet. Arturo Toscanini conducted the string orchestra version in 1938, and it has become one of the most played pieces of the century, often heard at times of mourning. The poor reception of his opera Antony and Cleopatra, which opened the new Metropolitan Opera house in 1966, hit him hard.

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Start with: “Le Marteau sans maître”

Boulez began studying mathematics in Lyon before moving to Paris at 17 to devote himself to music. He joined Olivier Messiaen’s harmony class at the Paris Conservatoire and studied the 12-tone technique privately with René Leibowitz, then became a leader of the post-war avant-garde.

Early works such as the Second Piano Sonata (1948) are famously complex, but Le Marteau sans maître (1955), setting surrealist poems by René Char, made his name. He was also a leading conductor, heading the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and he founded the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.

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Start with: “Music for 18 Musicians”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Reich is one of the founders of minimalism, the style that emerged in the United States in the 1960s with Terry Riley, Philip Glass and others, built on short repeating patterns. His early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out let two loops drift out of sync, a process he called phasing.

He studied drumming in Ghana in 1970 and later Balinese gamelan, and both fed into works like Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians. His Jewish heritage shapes pieces like Different Trains. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Double Sextet.

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