16 Of The Greatest American Composers You Should Know

Start with: “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story”🏆 16 Grammy Awards

Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918 and studied at Harvard and the Curtis Institute. His big break came in November 1943, when he stepped in at short notice for an ill Bruno Walter to conduct the New York Philharmonic. The concert made the front page of The New York Times. In 1957 he was named the orchestra’s music director, the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra.

As a composer he moved easily between the concert hall and Broadway. His ballet Fancy Free (1944) grew into the musical On the Town, and West Side Story (1957) retold Romeo and Juliet on the streets of New York. He also wrote Candide, three symphonies and the Chichester Psalms, and won 16 Grammy Awards.

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Start with: “The Batman Theme”Four Oscar nominations

Elfman (born 1953) grew up in Los Angeles and had no formal training as a composer. He played violin with a theater troupe in France, spent ten months traveling through Africa collecting percussion instruments, then led the band Oingo Boingo. Tim Burton and Paul Reubens, both fans, asked him to score Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985.

That started one of the longest partnerships in film. Elfman has scored most of Burton’s films, including Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, where he also sang the part of Jack Skellington. He wrote The Simpsons theme and scored Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films.

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Start with: “Mood Indigo”🏆 Special Pulitzer citation

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. His orchestra’s residency at Harlem’s Cotton Club from 1927 made him famous through radio broadcasts, and he kept a big band together for almost 50 years. He treated it as his instrument, writing parts for the particular sound of each player.

He wrote or co-wrote more than a thousand pieces, including “Mood Indigo”, “Sophisticated Lady”, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “In a Sentimental Mood”. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and in 1999, 25 years after his death, a special Pulitzer Prize citation.

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

Porter was born into a wealthy family in Peru, Indiana, in 1891, and studied at Yale, where he led the Glee Club. Success took a while: his first Broadway show flopped, and his breakthrough came only in 1928 with Paris, when he was 36. Unusually for Broadway, he wrote both the music and the lyrics.

Anything Goes (1934) is full of his best songs, and Kiss Me, Kate (1948) won the first Tony Award for Best Musical. In 1937 a riding accident crushed his legs. He went through more than 30 operations and lost his right leg in 1958, and he died in 1964.

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Start with: “Maple Leaf Rag”🏆 Posthumous Pulitzer

Joplin was born in Texas around 1868. His father had been enslaved and his mother was freeborn, and both were amateur musicians. He became known as the King of Ragtime, and the Maple Leaf Rag (1899) became his signature piece, although its first print run took a year to sell.

He wanted ragtime taken seriously and wrote an opera, Treemonisha, which he could not get staged in his lifetime. He died in a New York hospital in 1917. Half a century later the film The Sting (1973) made “The Entertainer” a hit, and in 1976 he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

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Start with: “Rhapsody in Blue”

Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. A piano bought for his older brother Ira became his, and at 15 he left school to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. His first national hit was “Swanee”, sung by Al Jolson in 1919. With Ira writing the lyrics, he went on to write a string of Broadway shows.

Rhapsody in Blue (1924), premiered by Paul Whiteman’s band, brought jazz into the concert hall. An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess followed. He moved to Hollywood in 1936 to write for films, and died there of a brain tumor in 1937, aged 38.

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Start with: “Symphony No. 1 in E Minor”First Black woman played by a major US orchestra

Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887. She gave her first piano performance at four and had a composition published at 11. She studied at the New England Conservatory, then moved to Chicago, where her Symphony No. 1 in E Minor won first prize in the 1932 Wanamaker competition.

In 1933 Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony performed it, making her the first African American woman to have a work played by a major American orchestra. Her friendship with Margaret Bonds linked her with Langston Hughes and Marian Anderson. In 2009 a trove of her lost manuscripts was found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois.

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Start with: “Metamorphosis One”🏆 Golden Globe win

Glass (born 1937) grew up in Baltimore, studied at Juilliard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and was shaped by working with Ravi Shankar on a film score in 1966. Indian music’s additive rhythms led him to his own style of slowly shifting repeated patterns. He dislikes the word minimalism, preferring “music with repetitive structures”.

Recognition was slow. Even after the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), made with Robert Wilson, he supported himself as a plumber and taxi driver. Since then he has written symphonies, operas and film scores, winning a Golden Globe for The Truman Show and earning Oscar nominations for Kundun, The Hours and Notes on a Scandal.

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Start with: “Sonatas and Interludes”

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied with Arnold Schoenberg. In 1940, writing a dance piece for a Seattle venue with no room for a percussion group, he invented the prepared piano, wedging screws, bolts and rubber between the strings. Sonatas and Interludes (1946 to 1948) is the masterpiece of that sound.

From 1951 he composed using chance, tossing coins and consulting the ancient Chinese Book of Changes to make decisions for him. His most famous piece, 4′33″ (1952), asks the performer not to play at all, so the music is whatever the audience hears. His partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, was his closest collaborator. Cage died in 1992, weeks before his 80th birthday.

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Start with: “Appalachian Spring”🏆 Pulitzer Prize and Oscar

Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900, the youngest of five children. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris for three years, came home to write full time, and won crucial support from the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. He became known as the Dean of American Music.

His open, plain-spoken style became the sound of the American landscape, in the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, which won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize. Plenty of people know the “Hoe-Down” from Rodeo without knowing it, from the “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” commercials that began in 1992. He also won an Oscar for The Heiress.

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Start with: “By the Bend of the River”

Edwards was born Clara Gerlich in Minnesota in 1880. She trained as a singer, studied in Vienna and gave concerts across Europe and the United States. When her husband died in 1916 she was left a single mother without a steady income, and in the 1920s she turned to composing.

She wrote more than 100 works and published over 60 songs, some under the pen name Bernard Haigh. “By the Bend of the River” and “Into the Night” became recital favorites, sung by stars such as Lily Pons and Ezio Pinza, and voice teachers still assign them to students. She died in New York in 1974.

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Start with: “Hymn to the Sea”🏆 Two Oscar wins

Horner was born in Los Angeles in 1953 and studied in London and at USC and UCLA. His break came in 1982 with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and he went on to score Braveheart, Apollo 13, The Land Before Time and Avatar. His scores often blend orchestra, choir, electronics and Celtic instruments.

Titanic (1997) won him two Oscars, for the score and for the song “My Heart Will Go On”, and became the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time. He also won six Grammys. Horner, a keen pilot, died in 2015 when the plane he was flying crashed in California’s Los Padres National Forest.

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

Reich (born 1936) is from New York and was one of the founders of minimalism. In It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) he set two tape loops of the same speech running at slightly different speeds, so they drift out of sync. He called the effect phasing and soon applied it to live players in pieces such as Drumming.

Music for 18 Musicians (1974 to 1976) is his best-loved work, an hour of pulsing pianos, mallets and voices. Different Trains (1988), which sets recorded voices against a string quartet to reflect on the Holocaust, won a Grammy, and Double Sextet won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

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Start with: “The Unanswered Question”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874, the son of a bandleader who encouraged him to experiment. He studied at Yale with Horatio Parker, then made his living in insurance, running the firm Ives & Myrick while composing in his spare time. His organ piece Variations on “America” dates from 1891, when he was 17.

He used clashing keys, rhythms and tone clusters years before they were common in Europe, in works such as The Unanswered Question, Three Places in New England and the Concord Sonata. His music was largely ignored until late in his life. His Symphony No. 3 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, and his Fourth Symphony was not premiered until 1965.

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

Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1910 and wrote his first piece at seven. He entered the Curtis Institute at 14. His Adagio for Strings, premiered by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in 1938, became America’s unofficial music of mourning and was played after the deaths of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

His lyrical, Romantic style stood apart from the experimental music around him. His partner, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, wrote the libretto for his opera Vanessa, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, and his Piano Concerto won him a second Pulitzer. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is another favorite.

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Start with: “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”🏆 Pulitzer Prize

Adams (born 1947) grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and learned the clarinet from his father. At Harvard he was the first student allowed to submit a musical composition as his senior thesis. He took minimalism’s repeated patterns and gave them a bigger, more Romantic sweep, in pieces such as Harmonielehre and the fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

He is best known for operas drawn from recent history: Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic. Klinghoffer has drawn protests, and the Boston Symphony canceled a performance of its choruses in November 2001. His 9/11 memorial piece On the Transmigration of Souls won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

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