Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• Academic journal
• Accent (music)
• Adolf Neuendorff
• Adrian Boult
• Aesthetics
• Alan Gilbert
• Alban Berg
• Aldo van Eyck
• Aleatoric music
• Alexander Calder
• Alfred Brendel
• Allmusic
• Alto (voice)
• Andrew Gerzso
• András Schiff
• André Previn
• Andrée Vaurabourg
• Andrés Segovia
• Anne-Sophie Mutter
• Anselm Kiefer
• Antal Doráti
• Anthèmes
• Anton Bruckner
• Anton Seidl
• Anton Webern
• Antoni Tàpies
• Arnold Schoenberg
• Arthur Honegger
• Arthur Rubinstein
• Artur Rodziński
• Arturo Toscanini
• Arvo Pärt
• Atonality
• B.B. King
• Baltic states
• Baton (conducting)
• Bayreuth Festival
• BBC
• BBC Proms
• Benjamin Britten
• Berlin Philharmonic
• Birgit Nilsson
• Björk
• Bluebeard's Castle
• Bob Dylan
• Boris Christoff
• Brett Dean
• Bruce Nauman
• Bruce Springsteen
• Bruno Walter
• Burt Bacharach
• Béla Bartók
• Cantata
• Carl Bergmann
• Cecilia Bartoli
• Chinary Ung
• Choir
• Christian Tetzlaff
• Cimbalom
• Claes Oldenburg
• Clarinet
• Claude Debussy
• Claudio Abbado
• Cleveland Orchestra
• Colin Davis
• Collège de France
• Composer
• Concerto
• Conducting
• Daniel Barenboim
• Darmstadt
• Darmstadt School
• David Chipperfield
• De Nederlandse Opera
• Denmark
• Denys Lasdun
• Deutsche Grammophon
• Die Reihe
• Dimitri Mitropoulos
• Dizzy Gillespie
• DJ Spooky
• Dmitri Shostakovich
• Dodecaphonic music
• Downtown music
• Dynamics (music)
• Earle Brown
• Edgard Varèse
• Edison Award
• Eduardo Chillida
• El Sistema
• Electronics
• Elton John
• Emil Paur
• Ennio Morricone
• Eric Ericson
• Erich Leinsdorf
• Esa-Pekka Salonen
• Faber and Faber
• Fermata
• Flute
• Frank Gehry
• Frank Zappa
• Franz Welser-Möst
• Frei Otto
• Fumihiko Maki
• Gamelan
• Georg Solti
• George Szell
• George Tsontakis
• Georges Pompidou
• Gerhard Richter
• Giancarlo De Carlo
• Gidon Kremer
• Gilberto Gil
• Giya Kancheli
• Glenn Gould Prize
• Glockenspiel
• Grace note
• Grawemeyer Award
• Guitar
• Gustav Mahler
• György Kurtág
• György Ligeti
• Hans Knappertsbusch
• Harold C. Schonberg
• Harp
• Harrison Birtwistle
• Hector Berlioz
• Heinz Holliger
• Hildegard Behrens
• Human voice
• Iannis Xenakis
• Igor Stravinsky
• Incises (Boulez)
• IRCAM
• Isaac Stern
• Israel
• Ivan Tcherepnin
• Jacques-Louis Monod
• James Turrell
• Janet Baker
• Jasper Johns
• Jazz
• Jean Nouvel
• Jean-Pierre Rampal
• Jiří Bělohlávek
• Joan Peyser
• Joan Tower
• John Barbirolli
• John Cage
• John Corigliano
• John Eliot Gardiner
• Jonathan Nott
• Joni Mitchell
• Jordi Savall
• Josef Stránský
• Josef Tal
• José Antonio Abreu
• Jørn Utzon
• Kaija Saariaho
• Karel Husa
• Karol Szymanowski
• Keith Jarrett
• Kronos Quartet
• Krystian Zimerman
• Krzysztof Penderecki
• Kurt Masur
• Kyoto Prize
• Lars Ulrik Mortensen
• Led Zeppelin
• Leonard Bernstein
• Leonard Cohen
• Leonard Slatkin
• Leopold Damrosch
• Leopold Stokowski
• Leoš Janáček
• Lev Koblyakov
• Lorin Maazel
• Louis Andriessen
• Louise Bourgeois
• Lucerne Festival
• Luciano Berio
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Lulu (opera)
• Lyon
• Mahler
• Malcolm Sargent
• Marc Chagall
• Marie-Claire Alain
• Mathematics
• Maurice Ravel
• Michala Petri
• Miles Davis
• Miriam Makeba
• Miroirs
• Mobile form
• Mogens Wöldike
• Montbrison, Loire
• Moses und Aron
• Music
• Nationalist
• Nazis
• Nikolai Sokoloff
• Nikolaus Harnoncourt
• Olivier Messiaen
• Ondes Martenot
• Orchestra
• Orchestre de Paris
• Oscar Peterson
• Palais Garnier
• Paris Conservatoire
• Parsifal
• Patrice Chéreau
• Patti Smith
• Paul McCartney
• Per Nørgård
• Percussion
• Permanent revolution
• Peter Eisenman
• Peter Gabriel
• Peter Lieberson
• Peter Schreier
• Pianist
• Piano
• Pierre Boulez
• Pina Bausch
• Pink Floyd
• Pitch (music)
• Pli selon pli
• Plácido Domingo
• Polar Music Prize
• Polyphonie X
• President of France
• Punctualism
• Péter Eötvös
• Quincy Jones
• R. Murray Schafer
• Rafael Kubelík
• Ravi Shankar
• Ray Charles
• René Leibowitz
• Renée Fleming
• Resonance
• Rhythm
• Riccardo Muti
• Richard Wagner
• Robert Moog
• Robert Schumann
• Rosemarie Trockel
• Royal Albert Hall
• Royal Opera House
• Rudolf Kempe
• Répons
• Salzburg Festival
• Sanford Medal
• Sebastian Currier
• Sergiu Celibidache
• Serialism
• Simon Bainbridge
• Simon Rattle
• Sofia Gubaidulina
• Solo (music)
• Sonning Award
• Sonny Rollins
• Soprano
• Spatial music
• Staatskapelle Berlin
• Stanley Sadie
• Steve Reich
• Stevie Wonder
• Structures (Boulez)
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Susanna Mälkki
• Sviatoslav Richter
• Tan Dun
• The Guardian
• The New York Times
• Theater an der Wien
• Theodore Eisfeld
• Thomas Adès
• Tom Service
• Toru Takemitsu
• Tristan und Isolde
• Tōru Takemitsu
• Unsuk Chin
• Ureli Corelli Hill
• Valery Gergiev
• Vasily Safonov
• Vibraphone
• Vienna Philharmonic
• Viola
• Violin
• Vladimir Horowitz
• Walter Damrosch
• Welsh National Opera
• Wiener Singverein
• Wikipedia Persondata
• Willem Mengelberg
• Witold Lutosławski
• Wolf Prize
• Wolf Prize in Arts
• Wozzeck
• WP IPA for French
• Xylorimba
• Yale University
• Yehudi Menuhin
• Yo-Yo Ma
• York Höller
• Yuri Bashmet
• Zubin Mehta
• Álvaro Siza Vieira
• 
  

• 
  Baltic states
  The term Baltic states (also Baltics, Baltic nations or Baltic countries) refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (from north to south); Finland also fell within the scope of the term from the 1920s to 1939.Estonia is only considered Baltic geographically, not linguistically or culturally, as Estonians and Finns are descendants of the Baltic Finns.
  The term in the indigenous languages of the Baltic states is:
  The term "Baltic" stems from the name of the Baltic Sea – a hydronym dating back to the 11th century (Adam of Bremen mentioned Latin: Mare Balticum) and earlier.
  The Latvian and Lithuanian term Baltija most likely originates from the Indo-European root *bhel meaning white, fair. In modern Baltic languages, namely, Lithuanian language, baltas literally means white, and in Latvian language balts means white also.
  Beginning in the Middle Ages and through the present day, the Baltic Sea appears on the maps subscribed in Germanic languages as German: Ostsee, Danish: Østersøen, Dutch: Oostzee, Swedish: Östersjön, etc. In English "Ost" is "East", and in fact, the Baltic Sea mostly lies to the east for Germany, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Clearly, part of the Baltic Sea lies to the east of Germany and Sweden, and due north of parts of Germany.
  
  wn.com/Baltic_states
• 
  Bayreuth Festival
  The Bayreuth Festival (German: Bayreuther Festspiele) is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Wagner himself conceived of and promoted the idea of a special festival to showcase his own works, in particular his monumental cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen and Parsifal.
  Performances take place in a specially designed theatre, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Wagner personally supervised the design and construction of the theatre, which contained many architectural innovations to accommodate the huge orchestras for which Wagner wrote as well as the composer's particular vision about the staging of his works. The Festival has become a pilgrimage destination for Wagner enthusiasts, who often must wait years to obtain tickets.
  The origins of the Festival itself lie rooted in Richard Wagner's interest in establishing his financial independence. A souring of the relationship with his patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria, led to his expulsion from Munich, where he had originally intended to launch the festival. Wagner next considered Nuremberg, which would have reinforced the thematic significance of works such as Die Meistersinger. On the advice of Hans Richter, however, the focus fell upon Bayreuth which enjoyed three distinct advantages.
  
  wn.com/Bayreuth_Festival
• 
  Collège de France
  Coordinates: 48°50′57″N 002°20′44″E / 48.84917°N 2.34556°E / 48.84917; 2.34556 The Collège de France (French pronunciation: [kɔlɛʒ də fʁɑ̃s]) is the most prestigious higher education and research establishment (Grand établissement) in France. It mainly supports research; it also provides teaching, but to professors and researchers.
  It is located Paris, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles.
  It was established in 1530 by King Francis I of France, as an imitation of the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain, at the urging of Guillaume Budé. Of humanist inspiration, this school was established as an alternative to the Sorbonne to promote such disciplines as Hebrew language, Ancient Greek (the first teacher being the celebrated scholar Janus Lascaris) and Mathematics. Initially called Collège Royal, and later Collège des Trois Langues (Latin: Collegium Trilingue), Collège National, Collège Impérial, it was named Collège de France in 1870.
  
  wn.com/Collège_de_France
• 
  Denmark
  The Kingdom of Denmark (Danish: Kongeriget Danmark, pronounced [ˈkɔŋəʁiːəð ˈdanmɑɡ̊] ( listen)) is a constitutional monarchy and sovereign state consisting the country of Denmark in northern Europe and two autonomous constituent countries, the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and Greenland in North America. The kingdom is a unitary state with some power being devolved from Denmark proper to Greenland and the Faroe Islands; this polity is referred to as the Danish Realm. Denmark proper is the hegemonial area, where judicial, executive, and legislative power resides. The Faroe Islands are defined to be a community of people within the kingdom, and the Greenlandic people are defined as a separate people with the right to self-determination.
  Denmark is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, located southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. The country consists of a large peninsula, Jutland and many islands, most notably Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster and Bornholm, as well as hundreds of minor islands often referred to as the Danish Archipelago.
  
  wn.com/Denmark
• 
  Deutsche Grammophon
  Deutsche Grammophon is a German classical record label which was the foundation of the future corporation to be known as PolyGram. It is now part of Universal Music Group (UMG) since its acquisition and absorption of PolyGram in 1999, and it is also UMG's oldest active label. It is also the oldest surviving established record company.
  Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft was founded in 1898 by German-born United States citizen Emile Berliner as the German branch of his Berliner Gramophone Company. Based in the city of Hannover (the founder's birthplace), the company had links with the U.S. Victor Talking Machine Company and the British Gramophone Company, but those links were severed at the onset of World War I.
  In 1941 Deutsche Grammophon was purchased by the Siemens & Halske electronics company.
  In 1949, Deutsche Grammophon sold the German rights of the His Master's Voice trademark to the Electrola Records unit of EMI. The dog and gramophone were replaced by the crown of tulips, designed by Siemens advertising consultant Hans Domizlaff.
  
  wn.com/Deutsche_Grammophon
• 
  IRCAM
  IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) is a European institute for science about music and sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organizationally linked with, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
  Several concepts for electronic music and audio processing have emerged at IRCAM. John Chowning pioneered work on FM synthesis at IRCAM, and the real-time audio processing graphical programming environment Max/MSP including many of its derivatives, such as jMax,which were developed there. Max/MSP has subsequently become a widely used tool in electroacoustic music. Many of the techniques associated with spectralism, such as analyses based on fast Fourier transforms, were made practical by technological contributions at IRCAM. IRCAM has also developed a special microphone capable of isolating each of the cello's four strings for separate amplification or electronic treatment.
  
  wn.com/IRCAM
• 
  Israel
  Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
  Israel, officially the State of Israel ( /ˈɪzriːəl/ or  /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل‎, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
  Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.^{[neutrality is disputed]} Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
  
  wn.com/Israel
• Lucerne Festival
  The Lucerne Festival is a summer music festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.
  The festival was founded in 1938 with a series of concerts in the gardens of Wagner's villa conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had formed an orchestra with members of different orchestras and soloists for the concert. With the rise of the Nazi regime several major performers and conductors, including Toscanini, Fritz Busch and Bruno Walter decided not to perform in the traditional German and Austrian music festivals such as the Bayreuth Festival and Salzburg festival. The Lucerne Festival in Switzerland was a good place for those who did not want to perform in Germany.
  Since 2004 the festival has taken place at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre designed by Jean Nouvel.
  Since its foundation the festival features concerts by the Festival's resident orchestra, recitals by soloists and concerts by guest orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Lucerne_Festival
• 
  Lyon
  Coordinates: 45°45′35″N 4°50′32″E / 45.7597°N 4.8422°E / 45.7597; 4.8422
  Lyon (French pronunciation: [ljɔ̃] ( listen), locally: [lijɔ̃]; Occitan: Lion [liˈu]; Arpitan: Liyon [ʎjɔ̃]; English: /liːˈɒn/), traditionally spelt Lyons in English, is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located approximately 470 km (292 mi) from Paris, 320 km (199 mi) from Marseille, 420 km (261 mi) from Strasbourg, 160 km (99 mi) from Geneva, 280 km (174 mi) from Turin. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais.
  The city of Lyon has 483,181 inhabitants. Together with its suburbs and satellite towns, Lyon forms the largest conurbation in France outside Paris with a population estimated to be 1,422,331; its overall metropolitan area was estimated to have a population of 2,118,132. Its urban region represents half of the Rhône-Alpes region population with 2.9 million inhabitants. Lyon is the capital of this region, as well as the capital of the smaller Rhône département.
  
  wn.com/Lyon
• 
  Royal Albert Hall
  The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall situated on the northern edge of the South Kensington area, in the City of Westminster, London, England, best known for holding the annual summer Proms concerts since 1941.
  Since its opening by Queen Victoria in 1871, the world's leading artists from several performance genres have appeared on its stage and it has become one of the UK's most treasured and distinctive buildings. Each year it hosts more than 350 events including classical concerts, rock and pop, ballet and opera, sports, award ceremonies, school and community events, charity performances and banquets.
  The hall was originally supposed to have been called The Central Hall of Arts and Sciences, but the name was changed by Queen Victoria to Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences when laying the foundation stone as a dedication to her deceased husband and consort Prince Albert. It forms the practical part of a national memorial to the Prince Consort – the decorative part is the Albert Memorial directly to the north in Kensington Gardens, now separated from the Hall by the road Kensington Gore.
  
  wn.com/Royal_Albert_Hall
• 
  Royal Opera House
  The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, Handel's first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
  The current building is the third theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1857. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,256 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high. The main auditorium is a Grade 1 listed building.
  
  wn.com/Royal_Opera_House
• 
  Theater an der Wien
  The Theater an der Wien (The Theatre on the Wien River) is a historic theatre on the Left Wienzeile in the Mariahilf district of Vienna. Completed in 1801, it has seen the premieres of many celebrated works of theatre, opera, and symphonic music. Since 2006, the theatre has served primarily as an opera house, hosting its own company.
  The theatre was the brainchild of the Viennese theatrical impresario Emanuel Schikaneder, who is best known to history as Mozart's librettist and collaborator on the opera The Magic Flute (1791). Schikaneder's troupe had already been successfully performing for several years in Vienna in the smaller Theater auf der Wieden, where The Magic Flute had premiered. Schikaneder, whose performances often emphasized spectacle and scenery, felt ready to move to a larger and better equipped venue.
  He had already been granted an imperial licence to build a new theatre in 1786, but it was only in 1798 that he felt ready to act on this authorization. The building was designed by the architect Franz Jäger in Empire style (it has since been remodeled). Construction was completed in 1801. The theatre has been described as "the most lavishly equipped and one of the largest theatres of its age.".
  
  wn.com/Theater_an_der_Wien
• 
  Yale University
  Yale University is an American private Ivy League research university located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States.
  Incorporated as the "Collegiate School," the institution traces its roots to 17th-century clergymen who sought to establish a college to train clergy and political leaders for the colony. In 1718, the College was renamed "Yale College" to honor a gift from Elihu Yale, a governor of the British East India Company. In 1861, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences became the first U.S. school to award the PhD. Yale became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. Yale College was transformed, beginning in the 1930s, through the establishment of residential colleges: 12 now exist and two more are planned. Yale employs over 1,100 faculty to teach and advise about 5,300 undergraduate and 6,100 graduate and professional students. Almost all tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.
  
  wn.com/Yale_University

• Aaron Jay Kernis
  Aaron Jay Kernis (born January 15, 1960) is an American composer and professor at the Yale School of Music.
  Aaron Jay Kernis is Jewish, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Manhattan School of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Yale University (under John Adams, Jacob Druckman, Morton Subotnick, and Charles Wuorinen).,[1]
  Notable works include the New Era Dance, his second string quartet Musica Instrumentalis (which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Music), Colored Field for English horn and orchestra (winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition, and later arranged for cello), Superstar Etude for piano, and Symphony in Waves.
  He began his musical career studying the violin and then piano before deciding at age 13 to take up composition; this influence can be seen in his frequent and skillful use of strings in orchestral works and as solo instruments. At age 16 he won the first of three BMI Foundation Student Composer Awards, one of the most prestigious prizes for young composers. His use of instrumental color in general is notable, as is his integration of a variety of musical, literary, and social influences into his work. Kernis is an active composer in high demand by such groups as the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony; he currently also serves as Composer Institute Director for the Minnesota Orchestra and on the Artistic Advisory Panel of the BMI Foundation.
  
  wn.com/Aaron_Jay_Kernis
• 
  Adolf Neuendorff
  Adolf Heinrich Anton Magnus Neuendorff, also known as Adolph Neuendorff (June 13, 1843 - December 4, 1897) was a German-American composer, violinist, pianist and conductor, stage director and theater manager.
  Born in Hamburg, Germany, Neuendorff emigrated with his father to New York in 1855. Here he studied music, violin lessons with G. Matzka and Joseph Weinlich, and lessons of piano, music theory and composition with Dr. Gustav Schilling. In 1859 he made his début as a concert pianist at Dodworth Hall. In 1861 went on a tour around Brazil, playing the violin.
  In 1864 he returned to the United States, now living in Milwaukee. Here he was conductor of the orchestra at the German Theatre and chorus-master of Carl Anschutz's German Opera Company. Later he succeeded Anschutz as conductor.
  
  wn.com/Adolf_Neuendorff
• 
  Adrian Boult
  Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH (8 April 1889 – 22 February 1983) was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1924. When the British Broadcasting Corporation appointed him director of music in 1930, he established the BBC Symphony Orchestra and became its chief conductor. The orchestra set standards of excellence that were rivalled in Britain only by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), founded two years later.
  Forced to leave the BBC in 1950 on reaching retirement age, Boult took on the chief conductorship of the LPO. The orchestra had declined from its peak of the 1930s, but under his guidance its fortunes were revived. He retired as its chief conductor in 1957, and later accepted the post of president. Although in the latter part of his career he worked with other orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, it was the LPO with which he was primarily associated, conducting it in concerts and recordings until 1978, in what was widely called his "Indian Summer".
  
  wn.com/Adrian_Boult
• Alan Gilbert
  Alan Gilbert (born February 23, 1967) is an American conductor and violinist. He is currently the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, making his debut performance as the orchestra's music director on September 16, 2009.
  Alan Gilbert was born in New York City, into a New York Philharmonic family. Both his father, Michael Gilbert, and his Japanese mother, Yoko Takebe, have had careers as violinists in the Philharmonic — his father retired in 2001, and his mother still performs in the orchestra. Growing up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Gilbert attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. As a youth, he learned the violin, viola, and piano.
  In the 1980s Gilbert studied music at Harvard University, where he was music director of the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra in 1988–89. While in Boston, Gilbert also studied with violinist Masuko Ushioda at the New England Conservatory of Music. After obtaining his degree at Harvard, Gilbert studied conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School of Music with Otto-Werner Mueller. In 1994, he won the Georg Solti prize, which garnered him a week's private tutoring with maestro Solti. Also in 1994, Gilbert won first prize at the International Competition for Musical Performance in Geneva.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Gilbert
• 
  Alban Berg
  Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9, 1885 – December 24, 1935) was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.
  Berg was born in Vienna, the third of four children of Johanna and Conrad Berg. His family lived comfortably until the death of his father in 1900.
  He was more interested in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. In late February or early March 1902 he fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a servant girl in the Berg family household. His daughter, Albine, was born on December 4, 1902.
  Berg had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas. He also wrote songs, including his Seven Early Songs (Sieben Frühe Lieder), three of which were Berg's first publicly performed work in a concert that featured the music of Schoenberg's pupils in Vienna that year. The early sonata sketches eventually culminated in Berg's Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908); it is one of the most formidable "first" works ever written.
  
  wn.com/Alban_Berg
• 
  Aldo van Eyck
  Aldo van Eyck or van Eijk (16 March 1918, Driebergen, Utrecht, Netherlands - 14 January 1999,Loenen aan de Vecht) was an architect from the Netherlands.
  He was a son of poet, critic, essayist and philosopher Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck or van Eijk and wife Nelly Estelle Benjamins, a woman of Jewish and Latin origin born and raised in Suriname.
  His brother is poet, artist and art restorer Robert Floris van Eyck or van Eijk.
  His family moved to Great Britain in 1919 and he was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset 1932–1935 in England during his youth, after which he finished his secondary school in The Hague between 1935 and 1938, and went to study at the ETH Zurich, graduating in 1942, after which he remained in Switzerland until the end of World War II, where he entered the circle of many other avant-garde artists around Carola Giedion-Welcker, wife of historian Sigfried Giedion.
  He taught at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture from 1954 to 1959 and he was a professor at the Delft University of Technology from 1966 to 1984. He also was editor of the architecture magazine Forum from 1959 to 1963 and in 1967. Aldo van Eyck was one of the most influential protagonists of the movement Structuralism.
  
  wn.com/Aldo_van_Eyck
• 
  Alexander Calder
  Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing abstract sculptures he called "mobiles". In addition to mobile and "stabile" sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.
  Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July 22, 1898. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in Philadelphia. Calder’s grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland and immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868. He is best known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia's City Hall tower.
  Calder’s mother, Nanette Lederer Calder, was a professional portrait painter who studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She then moved to Philadelphia where she met Alexander Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Calder’s parents were married on February 22,1895.
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Calder
• 
  Alfred Brendel
  Alfred Brendel KBE (born 5 January 1931) is an Austrian pianist, born in Czechoslovakia and a resident of the United Kingdom. He is also a poet and author.
  Brendel was born in Wiesenberg, Czechoslovakia, now Loučná nad Desnou, Czech Republic, to a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb when Brendel was six, and later to Graz, where they lived during World War II, towards the end of which the 14-year old Brendel was sent to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. However, he developed frostbite and was taken to hospital. Brendel began piano lessons when he was six with Sofija Deželić, and at 14 he studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan and composition in the Graz Conservatory for the next two years, but otherwise had little formal music education.
  After the war, Brendel composed music, as well as continuing to play the piano and to paint. However, he never had more formal piano lessons and although he attended masterclasses with Edwin Fischer and Eduard Steuermann, he was largely self-taught.
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Brendel
• András Schiff
  András Schiff (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˌɒndraːʃ ˈʃifː]) (born 21 December 1953) is a Hungarian-born British classical pianist and conductor, who made numerous recordings and is one of the most highly honored pianists of our time, having won numerous major awards. He has also become an outspoken critic of the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, whom he has publicly accused of racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-fascism, stating in January 2012 that he would never again set foot in his native country.
  Schiff was born in Budapest into a Jewish family and began piano lessons at the age five with Elisabeth Vadasz. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest until 1974 and in London with George Malcolm. He was a finalist in the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition in 1975. He emigrated from Hungary in 1979. He was unable to meet requirements for US citizenship because of his long absences for touring , and accepted Austrian citizenship in 1987 and established homes in London and Salzburg. He became a British citizen in 2001. He is married to the violinist Yuuko Shiokawa, and resides in London, England, and Florence, Italy.
  
  wn.com/András_Schiff
• André Previn
  André George Previn, KBE (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929) is a German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings.
  Previn was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Charlotte (née Epstein) and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to be "a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, In a pre-concert public interview at the Lincoln Center, in May 2012, Previn laughed at the suggestion that he is related to Mahler. The year of his birth is uncertain. Whilst most published reports give 1929, Previn himself has stated that 1930 is his birth year. This situation is a consequence of his the family losing Previn's birth certificate when they left Germany in 1938.^{[citation needed]} His elder brother was director Steve Previn.^{[citation needed]} The Previn family, which was Jewish,^{[citation needed]} emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime in Germany.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/André_Previn
• 
  Andrée Vaurabourg
  Andrée Vaurabourg (8 September 1894, Toulouse - 18 July 1980, Paris) was a French pianist and teacher. She was the wife of Swiss-French composer Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), whom she met at the Paris Conservatoire in 1916. Honegger married her in 1926 on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They lived apart for the duration of their marriage, with the exceptions of an attempt at living together in 1935, which lasted less than a year, and the last year of Honegger's life, when he could no longer live alone. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932.
  In September 1934, while traveling in Spain, Honegger's car ran into a tree after a tire burst. He only broke an ankle, but Vaurabourg, in the front passenger seat, broke both knees and was unable to walk for almost a year. She never fully recovered from the accident.
  She studied piano at the Paris Conservatoire, receiving first prize in counterpoint. She often performed her husband's piano works.
  Vaurabourg's students of counterpoint included Pierre Boulez and Roger Matton.
  
  wn.com/Andrée_Vaurabourg
• 
  Andrés Segovia
  Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña (pronounced: [anˈdɾes seˈɣoβja ˈtores]) (February 21, 1893 – June 2, 1987), known as Andrés Segovia, was a virtuoso Spanish classical guitarist from Linares, Jaén, Andalucia, Spain. He is widely considered to be one of the best known and most influential classical guitar personalities of the 20th century, having a considerable influence on later guitarists, particularly because of important guitar works that were dedicated to him by composers such as Federico Moreno Torroba.
  Segovia is credited for his modern-romantic repertoire, mainly through works dedicated to him by modern composers, but he also created his own transcriptions of classical works that were originally for other instruments. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive (often instantly recognizable) musical personality in tone, phrasing and style.
  Segovia stated that he began to play the guitar at the age of six.Angelo Gilardino, who has worked at the Fundación Andrés Segovia in Spain, noted: "Though it is not yet completely documented, it seems clear that, since his tender childhood, [Segovia] learnt playing as a flamenco guitarist. The first guitar he owned had formerly been played by Paco de Lucena who died when Segovia was five years old. Since then, Segovia was given some instruction by Agustinillo, an amateur flamenco player who was a fan of Paco de Lucena." Nevertheless, Segovia did not really play flamenco. Instead he preferred expressive art-music such as that by Federico Moreno Torroba, and revived interest in the instrument as an expressive medium for the performance of classical art-music.
  
  wn.com/Andrés_Segovia
• 
  Anselm Kiefer
  Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.
  In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. Themes from Nazi rule are particularly reflected in his work; for instance, the painting "Margarethe" (oil and straw on canvas) was inspired by Paul Celan's well-known poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue").
  His works are characterised by a dull/musty, nearly depressive, destructive style and are often done in large scale formats. In most of his works, the use of photography as an output surface is prevalent and earth and other raw materials of nature are often incorporated. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or places particularly pregnant with history. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with a style called "New Symbolism."
  
  wn.com/Anselm_Kiefer
• Antal Doráti
  Antal Doráti, KBE (9 April 1906 – 13 November 1988) was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1947.
  Antal Doráti was born in Budapest, where his father Alexander Doráti was a violinist with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra and his mother Margit Kunwald was a piano teacher.
  He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy with Zoltán Kodály and Leo Weiner for composition and Béla Bartók for piano. His links with Bartók continued for many years: he conducted the world premiere of Bartók's Viola Concerto, as completed by Tibor Serly, with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1949, with William Primrose as the soloist.
  He made his conducting debut in 1924 with the Budapest Royal Opera.
  As well as composing original works, he compiled and arranged pieces by Johann Strauss II for the ballet Graduation Ball (1940), premiered by the Original Ballet Russe in Sydney, Australia, with himself on the conductor's podium. For Ballet Theatre (later renamed American Ballet Theatre) he created scores for the ballets Bluebeard (1941) from music by Jacques Offenbach and The Fair at Sorochinsk (1943) from music by Modest Mussorgsky.
  
  wn.com/Antal_Doráti
• 
  Anton Bruckner
   Anton Bruckner (help·info) ((1824-09-04)4 September 1824 – 11 October 1896(1896-10-11)) was an Austrian composer known for his symphonies, masses, and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.
  Unlike other musical radicals, such as Richard Wagner or Hugo Wolf who fit the enfant terrible mould, Bruckner showed extreme humility before other musicians, Wagner in particular. This apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the man and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music.
  His works, the symphonies in particular, had detractors, most notably the influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, and other supporters of Johannes Brahms, who pointed to their large size, use of repetition, and Bruckner's propensity to revise many of his works, often with the assistance of colleagues, and his apparent indecision about which versions he preferred. On the other hand, Bruckner was greatly admired by subsequent composers, including his friend Gustav Mahler, who described him as "half simpleton, half God".
  
  wn.com/Anton_Bruckner
• 
  Anton Seidl
  Anton Seidl (7 May 1850 – 28 March 1898) was a Hungarian conductor.
  He was born at Pest, Hungary. He began the study of music at a very early age, and when only seven years old could pick out at the piano melodies which he had heard at the theatre. At 15, he became a student of harmony in counterpoint under Nicolitsch at the Hungarian national musical academy, of which Liszt was director. He attended the normal school at Pest for three years, the gymnasium eight years, and afterward attended the university for two years. At 16, he had been thinking of becoming a priest, but his love for music prevailed, and he entered Leipzig Conservatory in October 1870, remaining there until 1872, when he was summoned to Bayreuth as one of Richard Wagner's copyists.
  At Bayreuth, he assisted in making the first fair copy of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner treated him as one of the "chosen few", and it was natural that he should take a part in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. Wagner also sent him to Vienna to place Siegfried and Götterdämmerung on the stage.
  
  wn.com/Anton_Seidl
• 
  Anton Webern
   Anton Webern (help·info) (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of pitch, rhythm and dynamics were formative in the musical technique later known as total serialism.
  Webern was born in Vienna, Austria, as Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a civil servant, and Amelie (née Geer) who was a competent pianist and accomplished singer — the only obvious source of the future composer's talent. He never used his middle names and dropped the von in 1918 as directed by the Austrian government's reforms after World War I. After spending much of his youth in Graz and Klagenfurt, Webern attended Vienna University from 1902. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years by employing palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials.
  
  wn.com/Anton_Webern
• 
  Antoni Tàpies
  Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies (Catalan pronunciation: [ənˈtɔni ˈtapiəs]; 13 December 1923 – 6 February 2012) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.
  The son of lawyer Josep Tàpies i Mestre, and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens.
  Tàpies studied at the German School of Barcelona. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. Tàpies died in early February 2012. He was 88.
  Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly influential French critic and curator Michel Tapié (no relation, despite the similar name) enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tàpies.
  
  wn.com/Antoni_Tàpies
• 
  Arnold Schoenberg
   Arnold Schoenberg (help·info) (pronounced [ˈaːɐ̯nɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k]; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).
  Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art^{[citation needed]}.
  Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested the term "atonality" as inaccurate in describing his intentions) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.
  
  wn.com/Arnold_Schoenberg
• 
  Arthur Honegger
  Arthur Honegger (pronounced [aʁtyʁ ɔnɛɡɛːʁ]; 10 March 1892 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les Six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.
  Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger (the first name was never used) in Le Havre, France, he initially studied harmony and violin in Paris, and after a brief period in Zurich, returned there to study with Charles-Marie Widor and Vincent d'Indy. He continued to study through the 1910s, before writing the ballet Le dit des jeux du monde in 1918, generally considered to be his first characteristic work. In 1926 he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire, on the condition that they live in separate apartments. They lived apart for the duration of their marriage, with the exceptions of an attempt at living together in 1935, which lasted less than a year, and the last year of Honegger's life, when he could no longer live alone. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. Honegger also had a son, Jean-Claude (1926–2003), with the singer Claire Croiza.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Honegger
• 
  Arthur Rubinstein
  Arthur Rubinstein (January 28, 1887 – December 20, 1982) was a Polish-American classical pianist who received international acclaim for his performances of the music written by a variety of composers; many regard him as the greatest Chopin interpreter of his time. He is widely considered one of the greatest classical pianists of the twentieth century.
  Rubinstein was born in Łódź, Congress Poland (part of the Russian Empire for the entire time Rubinstein resided there) on January 28, 1887, to a family of assimilated Jews. He was the youngest of eight children, and his father was a wealthy factory owner.
  Rubinstein's birth name was Artur Rubinstein, although in English-speaking countries, he preferred to be known as Arthur Rubinstein. However, his United States impresario Sol Hurok insisted he be billed as Artur, and records were released in the West under both versions of his name.
  At the age of two, Rubinstein demonstrated perfect pitch and a fascination with the piano, watching his elder sister's piano lessons. By the age of four, he was recognised as a child prodigy. Rubinstein first studied piano in Warsaw. His early piano training came from Karl Heinrich Barth.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Rubinstein
• Artur Rodziński
  Artur Rodziński (January 1, 1892 – November 27, 1958) was a Polish conductor of opera and symphonic music. He is especially noted for his tenures as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic in the 1930s and 1940s.
  Artur Rodziński was born in Split, the capital of Dalmatia on January 1, 1892. Soon after, his father, of Polish descent, and a general in the army of the Habsburg empire returned with his family to Lwów, Poland. Artur studied music in Lwów, and then law in Vienna, where he simultaneously enrolled at the Academy of Music; his teachers there included Josef Marx and Franz Schreker (composition), Franz Schalk (conducting), and Emil von Sauer and Jerzy Lalewicz (piano). He returned to Lwów where he was engaged as chorus master at the Opera House, making his debut as a conductor in 1920 with Verdi's Ernani. The following year saw him conducting the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Warsaw Opera House. While visiting Poland, Leopold Stokowski heard Rodziński leading a performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and exclaimed "I have found that rare thing, a born conductor!" and invited him to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra.
  
  wn.com/Artur_Rodziński
• 
  Arturo Toscanini
  Arturo Toscanini (Italian pronunciation: [arˈtuːro toskaˈniːni]; March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory. As music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra he became a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire.
  Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied the cello. He joined the orchestra of an opera company, with which he toured South America in 1886. While presenting Aida in Rio de Janeiro, Leopoldo Miguez, the locally hired conductor, reached the summit of a two-month escalating conflict with the performers due to his rather poor command of the work, to the point that the singers went on strike and forced the company's general manager to seek a substitute conductor. Carlo Superti and Aristide Venturi tried unsuccessfully to finish the work. In desperation, the singers suggested the name of their assistant Chorus Master, who knew the whole opera from memory. Although he had no conducting experience, Toscanini was eventually convinced by the musicians to take up the baton at 9:15 P.M., and led a performance of the two-and-a-half hour opera. The public was taken by surprise, at first by the youth and sheer aplomb of this unknown conductor, then by his solid mastery. The result was astounding acclaim. For the rest of that season Toscanini conducted eighteen operas, all with absolute success. Thus began his career as a conductor, at age 19.
  
  wn.com/Arturo_Toscanini
• 
  Arvo Pärt
  Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935; Estonian pronunciation: [ˈɑrvo ˈpært]) is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also takes inspiration from Gregorian chant.
  Pärt was born in Paide, Järva County, Estonia. A prolonged struggle with Soviet officials led him to emigrate with his wife and their two sons in 1980. He lived first in Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship, and then re-located to Berlin. He returned to Estonia around the turn of the 21st century and now lives alternately in Berlin and in Tallinn.
  Familiar works by Pärt are Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell (1977) and the string quintet "Fratres I" (1977, revised 1983), which he transcribed for string orchestra and percussion, the solo violin "Fratres II" and the cello ensemble "Fratres III" (both 1980).
  
  wn.com/Arvo_Pärt
• 
  Benjamin Britten
  Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten,OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist; and one of the central figures of 20th century British classical music. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. For the next fifteen years he devoted much of his compositional attention to writing operas, establishing him as one of the leading 20th century figures in this genre.
  Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging; he produced important music in such varied genres as orchestral, choral, solo vocal (much of it written for his life partner, tenor Peter Pears), chamber and instrumental, as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, and was an outstanding pianist and conductor.
  Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 22 November 1913, the youngest of four children. His father, Robert, was a dentist, and his mother Edith, a talented amateur musician who gave Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He showed musical gifts very early in life, making his first attempts at composition aged five, and thereafter composing prolifically as a child. He started piano lessons with a teacher from his pre-prep school when aged 7, and viola lessons with Audrey Alston when 10 years old.
  
  wn.com/Benjamin_Britten
• 
  Birgit Nilsson
  Birgit Nilsson (17 May 1918 – 25 December 2005) was a celebrated Swedish dramatic soprano who specialized in operatic and symphonic works. Her voice was noted for its overwhelming force, bountiful reserves of power and the gleaming brilliance and clarity in the upper register.
  Nilsson made such strong imprints on many roles that they came to be known as the "Nilsson repertory". She sang the operas of Richard Strauss and made a specialty of Puccini's Turandot, but it was the music of Wagner that made her career; her command of his music was comparable to that of Kirsten Flagstad, who owned the Wagner repertory at the Metropolitan Opera during the years before World War II.^{[citation needed]}
  Märta Birgit Svensson was born on a farm at Västra Karup in Skåne (100 km/60 miles north of Malmö). When she was three years old she began picking out melodies on a toy piano her mother bought for her. She once told an interviewer that she could sing before she could walk, adding, "I even sang in my dreams". Her vocal talent was first noticed when she began to sing in her church choir. A choirmaster near her home heard her sing and advised her to take voice lessons.
  
  wn.com/Birgit_Nilsson
• 
  Björk
  Björk Guðmundsdóttir ( /ˈbjɜrk/; [ˈpjœr̥k ˈkvʏðmʏntsˌtoʊhtɪr] ( listen); born 21 November 1965), known as Björk, is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her musical style is eclectic and she has achieved recognition in rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical, and folk.
  Björk's 1990s singles "It's Oh So Quiet", "Army of Me" and "Hyperballad" charted in the UK Top 10.^{[citation needed]} Her record label, One Little Indian, reported that by 2003 she had sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. She has acquired a high level of critical acclaim. She has won four BRIT Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, one MOJO Award, three UK Music Video Awards, and, in 2010, the Polar Music Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, in recognition for her "deeply personal music and lyrics, her precise arrangements and her unique voice".
  Björk has also been nominated for twelve Grammy Awards, one Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. She won the Best Actress Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Dancer in the Dark. She was ranked thirty-sixth in VH1's "The 100 Greatest Women in Rock and Roll", eighth in MTV's "22 Greatest Voices in Music", and sixtieth in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".
  
  wn.com/Björk
• 
  Bob Dylan
  Bob Dylan ( /ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
  Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.
  
  wn.com/Bob_Dylan
• Boris Christoff
  Boris Christoff (Bulgarian: Борис Христов, by official transliteration Boris Hristov) (May 18, 1914 – June 28, 1993) was a Bulgarian opera singer, widely considered to have been one of the greatest basses of the 20th century.
  Born in Plovdiv, Christoff demonstrated early his singing talent and sang as a boy at the choir of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Sofia. In the late 1930s he graduated in law and started on a career as a magistrate. He, however, continued singing in his spare time in the Gusla Chorus in Sofia, achieving an enormous success as the chorus soloist in 1940. Thanks to a government grant, Christoff left in May 1942 for Italy where he was tutored for two years in the core Italian bass repertoire by the great baritone of an earlier generation, Riccardo Stracciari.
  After several guest appearances and recitals in Austria in 1944 and 1945, Christoff returned to Italy in December 1945. He made his operatic debut as Colline in La bohème at Reggio Calabria on March 12, 1946. The following years Christoff appeared in a number of roles at Milan's La Scala, Venice's La Fenice, the Rome Opera, Covent Garden in London, the opera theatres in Naples, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, etc.
  
  wn.com/Boris_Christoff
• Brett Dean
  Brett Dean (born 23 October 1961 in Brisbane) is a contemporary Australian composer, violist and conductor.
  Dean studied at the Queensland Conservatorium where he received a Medal of Excellence. From 1985 to 1999, Dean was a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2000, he decided to pursue a career as a freelance artist and returned to Australia. As a composer and musician, he is a regularly invited guest to many professional concert stages around the world.
  Brett Dean was Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne until June 2010 when his brother, Paul Dean, took up the post.
  The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra celebrates Brett Dean's 50th birthday, and his contribution to music as composer, performer and teacher, in its 2011 Metropolis Festival.
  Dean’s clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music won an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 1995. Winter Songs for tenor and wind quintet received the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize in 2001; Moments of Bliss for orchestra was named Best Composition at the Australian Classical Music Awards in 2005. In 2002–2003, Dean was artist in residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and composer in residence at the Cheltenham Festival. In 2007–2008, he became artist in residence with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR.
  
  wn.com/Brett_Dean
• Bruce Nauman
  Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.
  Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1960–64), and art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis (1965–6). In 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud. Upon graduation (MFA, 1966), he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970. In 1968 he met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk and signed with the dealer Leo Castelli. Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena in 1969. In 1979, Nauman further moved to New Mexico where he continues to work and live along with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg.
  
  wn.com/Bruce_Nauman
• 
  Bruce Springsteen
  Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter-performer who records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.
  Springsteen's recordings have included both commercially accessible rock albums and more somber folk-oriented works. His most successful studio albums, Born in the U.S.A. and Born to Run, showcase a talent for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily American life; he has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and more than 120 million worldwide and he has earned numerous awards for his work, including 21 Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award. He is widely regarded by many as one of the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, and in 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 23rd Greatest Artist of all time.
  Springsteen was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and spent his childhood and high school years in Freehold Borough. He lived on South Street in Freehold Borough and attended Freehold Borough High School. His father, Douglas Frederick Springsteen, was of Dutch and Irish ancestry and worked, among other vocations, as a bus driver, although he was frequently unemployed; his surname is Dutch for jump stone. His mother, Adele Ann (née Zerilli), was a legal secretary and was of Italian ancestry. His maternal grandfather was born in Vico Equense, a city near Naples. He has two younger sisters, Virginia and Pamela. Pamela had a brief film career, but left acting to pursue still photography full time; she took photos for the Human Touch and Lucky Town albums.
  
  wn.com/Bruce_Springsteen
• 
  Bruno Walter
  Bruno Walter (September 15, 1876 – February 17, 1962) was a German-born conductor. Born in Berlin, he lived in several countries between 1933 and 1939, before finally settling in the United States in 1939. Though he was born Bruno Schlesinger, he began using Walter as his surname in 1896, and officially changed his surname to Walter upon becoming a naturalised Austrian in 1911. Walter was active as a composer for many years, but his works have not entered the repertoire.
  Born near Alexanderplatz in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family as Bruno Schlesinger, he began his musical education at the Stern Conservatory at the age of eight, making his first public appearance as a pianist when he was nine. However, following visits to one of Hans von Bülow's concerts in 1889 and to Bayreuth in 1891, he changed his mind and decided upon a conducting career. He made his conducting début at the Cologne Opera with Albert Lortzing's Der Waffenschmied in 1894. Later that year he left for the Hamburg Opera to work as a chorus director. There he first met and worked with Gustav Mahler, whom he idolized and with whose music he later became strongly identified.
  
  wn.com/Bruno_Walter
• 
  Burt Bacharach
  Burt F. Bacharach ( /ˈbækəræk/ BAK-ə-rak; born May 12, 1928) is an American pianist, composer and music producer. He is known for his popular hit songs and compositions from the mid-1950s through the 1980s, with lyrics written by Hal David. Many of their hits were produced specifically for, and performed by, Dionne Warwick. Following on with the initial success of this collaboration, Bacharach went on to produce hits with Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, Jackie DeShannon and others.
  As of 2006^[update], Bacharach had written 70 Top 40 hits in the U.S., and 52 Top 40 hits in the UK.
  Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but grew up in the Forest Hills section of New York City, graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1946. He is the son of Irma (née Freeman) and Bert Bacharach, a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist, and is of German-Jewish descent. Bacharach studied music at McGill University, under Helmut Blume, at the Mannes School of Music, and at the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California. His composition teachers included Darius Milhaud, Henry Cowell, and Bohuslav Martinů. Following service in the Army, Bacharach worked as a pianist, both as a solo player and as an accompanist for singers such as Vic Damone, Polly Bergen, Steve Lawrence, the Ames Brothers and Paula Stewart (who became his first wife). For some years he was musical arranger for Marlene Dietrich as well as touring with her.
  
  wn.com/Burt_Bacharach
• 
  Béla Bartók
  Béla Viktor János Bartók ( /ˈbɑrtɒk/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒrtoːk]; March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.
  Béla Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on March 25, 1881. Bartók's family reflected some of the ethno-cultural diversities of the country. His father, Béla Sr., considered himself thoroughly Hungarian, because on his father's side the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsod county (Móser 2006a, 44; Bartók 1981, 13), though his mother was from a Roman Catholic Serbian family (Bayley 2001, 16). His mother, Paula (born Paula Voit), had German as a mother tongue, but was ethnically of "mixed Hungarian" origin: Her maiden name Voit is German, probably of Saxon origin from Upper Hungary (Since 1920 in Czechoslovakia, since 1993 in Slovakia), though she spoke Hungarian fluently.^{[citation needed]} Among her closest forefathers there were family names like Polereczky (Magyarized Polish or Slovak) and Fegyveres (Magyar). Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the age of four, he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano; his mother began formally teaching him the next year.
  
  wn.com/Béla_Bartók
• 
  Carl Bergmann
  Carl Bergmann (born Ebersbach,^{[disambiguation needed ]}Saxony, April 12, 1821, died New York, August 10, 1876) was a German-American cellist and conductor.
  In 1827, he began studies with Adolph Zimmerman in Zittau, and later he studied with organist-composer Adolph Hesse in Breslau. By 1842, he was conducting and playing the cello in Breslau. Eventually, Bergmann conducted orchestras in Vienna, Breslau, Budapest, Warsaw, and Venice.
  Motivated by his implication in the revolutions of 1848 in Vienna, Bergmann came to the United States in 1850 as first cellist in the Germania Orchestra, a touring band of young German musicians, mostly refugees. When the conductor of that orchestra resigned the same year, Bergmann took over. The Germania Orchestra subsequently based itself in Boston before disbanding in 1854 after giving 800 concerts over its career. During this period Bergmann also directed the Handel and Haydn Society of that city. After this Bergmann went to Chicago and was immediately invited to direct the Chicago Philharmonic Society. However, he left quickly after giving only two concerts because the Chicago musicians intrigued against him.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Bergmann
• 
  Cecilia Bartoli
  Cecilia Bartoli, Cavaliere OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [tʃeˈtʃiːlja ˈbaɾtoli]; born June 4, 1966 in Rome) is an Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano opera singer and recitalist. She is best known for her interpretation of the music of Mozart and Rossini, as well as for her performances of lesser-known Baroque and classical music. She is known for having the versatility to play both soprano and mezzo roles.
  Bartoli is considered a coloratura mezzo-soprano (Koloratur-Mezzosopran) with an unusual timbre. She is one of the most popular (and one of the top-selling) opera singers of recent years. Bartoli is much liked by the concert-going public for her vivacious on-stage persona,^{[citation needed]} while her lyric voice and investigations of Baroque music have given her considerable recognition even among the non-opera-going public.^{[citation needed]}
  Bartoli's parents, Silvana Bazzoni and Pietro Angelo Bartoli, were both professional singers and gave her her first music lessons. Her first public performance was at age eight as the shepherd boy in Tosca. Bartoli later studied at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome.
  
  wn.com/Cecilia_Bartoli
• Chinary Ung
  Chinary Ung (b. November 24, 1942, Takéo, Cambodia) is a composer. After arriving in the United States in 1964 to study clarinet, he additionally studied composition with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts from Columbia University in 1974. His music is noted for combining traditional Cambodian musical elements with western instrumentation, and his series of pieces titled Spiral has received considerable acclaim. Now a U.S. resident, Ung teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Previously, he had taught at Northern Illinois University, Connecticut College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Arizona State University. In 1988, he became the first American to win the Grawemeyer Award (Music Composition) for musical composition. Additionally, he received the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, as well as awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Asia Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts. In October 2007 the Del Sol String Quartet was invited to premiere the composer's Spiral X playing the Library of Congress' collection of Stradivarius instruments. He remains remains committed to the cause of Cambodian music and culture. He frequently lectures and performs in Asia and is the principal curator for the 2013 Season of Cambodia festival in New York.
  
  wn.com/Chinary_Ung
• Christian Tetzlaff
  Christian Tetzlaff (born April 24, 1966) is a German violinist.
  Tetzlaff was born in Hamburg. He began playing the violin and piano at the age of 6, and made his concert debut at 14 years old. He studied with Uwe-Martin Haiberg at the Musikhochschule Lübeck and with Walter Levin at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
  He is much in demand as a soloist with major orchestras of the world and praised for his recordings, including recent Beethoven works performed with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under David Zinman.
  He plays a contemporary violin by Stefan-Peter Greiner which he has had since 2002, preferring it to his previous Stradivarius instrument. He uses a Peccatte bow, and Vision strings by Thomastik-Infeld in Vienna.
  His sister, Tanja Tetzlaff, is a professional cellist with whom he sometimes performs.
  
  
  
  
  
  wn.com/Christian_Tetzlaff
• 
  Claes Oldenburg
  Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is a Swedish American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York.
  Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28th, 1929 in Stockholm, he was the son of a Swedish diplomat stationed in New York. In 1936 his father was appointed Consul General of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he took classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1956, he moved to New York, working part-time in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration.
  
  wn.com/Claes_Oldenburg
• 
  Claude Debussy
  Claude-Achille Debussy (French pronunciation: [klod aʃil dəbysi]) (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. In France, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903. A crucial figure in the transition to the modern era in Western music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.
  His music is noted for its sensory component and for not often forming around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.
  
  wn.com/Claude_Debussy
• 
  Claudio Abbado
  Claudio Abbado, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudio abˈbaːdo]; born June 26, 1933), is an Italian conductor. He has served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1989 to 2002, when he retired from the position for health reasons.
  Born in Milan, Italy, Abbado is the son of the violinist and composer Michelangelo Abbado, who was his first piano teacher, and the brother of musician Marcello Abbado. After studying piano at the Milan Conservatory, in 1955 Claudio Abbado studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music. In 1958 he won the international Koussevitsky Competition for conductors, which resulted in a number of operatic conducting engagements in Italy, and in 1963 he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize for conductors, allowing him to work for five months with the New York Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Claudio_Abbado
• 
  Colin Davis
  Sir Colin Rex Davis, CH, CBE (born 25 September 1927) is an English conductor. His repertoire is broad, but among the composers with whom he is particularly associated are Mozart, Berlioz, Elgar, Sibelius, Stravinsky and Tippett.
  He studied as a clarinettist, but was intent on becoming a conductor. After struggles as a freelance conductor from 1949 to 1957, he gained a series of appointments with orchestras including the BBC Scottish Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has been associated with the London Symphony Orchestra for over 50 years, including over ten years as its principal conductor. He has also held the musical directorships of Sadler's Wells Opera and the Royal Opera House, where he was principal conductor for over fifteen years. His guest conductorships include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Dresden Staatskapelle, among many others.
  As a teacher, Davis holds posts at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and the Carl Maria von Weber High School of Music in Dresden. He made his first gramophone recordings in 1958, and his discography built up in the succeeding five decades is extensive, with a large number of studio recordings for Philips Records and a growing catalogue of live recordings for the London Symphony Orchestra's own label.
  
  wn.com/Colin_Davis
• 
  Daniel Barenboim
  Daniel Barenboim, KBE (born 15 November 1942) is an Argentine-born pianist and conductor. He has served as music director of several major symphonic and operatic orchestras and made numerous recordings.
  Currently, he is general music director of La Scala in Milan, the Berlin State Opera, and the Staatskapelle Berlin; he previously served as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris. Barenboim is also known for his work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a Sevilla-based orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians, and as an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
  Barenboim has received many awards and prizes, including an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, France's Légion d'honneur both as a Commander and Grand Officier, the German Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz and Willy Brandt Award, and, together with the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, Spain's Prince of Asturias Concord Award. He has won seven Grammy awards for his work and discography.
  
  wn.com/Daniel_Barenboim
• 
  David Chipperfield
  Sir David Alan Chipperfield CBE, RA, RDI, RIBA (born 18 December 1953) is a British architect, born in London. He has offices in London, Berlin and Milan, and a representative office in Shanghai. Uncompromisingly modernist in outlook, his practice is driven by a consistent philosophical approach, rather than a 'house style'.^{[citation needed]}
  Chipperfield studied Architecture at Kingston Polytechnic, graduating in 1976 along with the Architectural Association in London. He worked at the practices of Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, and in 1984 established his own practice, David Chipperfield Architects. The practice — which has offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai — has over 250 staff from 15 countries, working on a variety of projects in Europe, the United States and China.
  Chipperfield first made his reputation in Japan in the 1980s. Among his early projects in England that revealed his rigorous and elemental approach to design included a shop for Issey Miyake on London's Sloane Street in 1983, and a house for the fashion photographer Nick Knight. Later, Chipperfield designed the award-winning River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames using green oak cladding, concrete and glass. Chipperfield was the only British architect to be shortlisted for the commission to design Tate Modern.
  
  wn.com/David_Chipperfield
• 
  Denys Lasdun
  Sir Denys Lasdun CH (8 September 1914–11 January 2001) was an eminent English architect. Probably his best known work is the Royal National Theatre, on London's South Bank of the Thames, which is a Grade II* listed building and one of the most notable examples of Brutalist design in the United Kingdom.
  Lasdun studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and was a junior in the practice of Wells Coates. Like other Modernist architects, including Sir Basil Spence and Peter and Alison Smithson, Lasdun was much influenced by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but there was a gentler, more classical influence, too, from the likes of Nicholas Hawksmoor.
  Before and after Second World War service in the army, Lasdun worked for a while with Berthold Lubetkin's Tecton practice, becoming a partner. In this period he also completed one private house in Paddington in Le Corbusier's style. After the war Lasdun worked with Lindsay Drake on the Hallfield Estate, which had been planned by Lubetkin and Tecton in a similar patterned, tightly planned idiom to his Spa Green and Priory Green Estates. Lasdun's Hallfield School was the first clue to his mature style, in its use of bare concrete and angularity, as well as its more human scale.
  
  wn.com/Denys_Lasdun
• 
  Dimitri Mitropoulos
  Dimitri Mitropoulos (Greek: Δημήτρης Μητρόπουλος) (1 March [O.S. 18 February] 1896 – 2 November 1960), was a Greek conductor, pianist, and composer. He received international fame, in the classical music world, both as a major conductor and composer of the 20th century. Also known as Dimitris Mitropoulos.
  Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis (John) and Angelikē (Angelica) Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop at 15, St. Mark Street, in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition - a sonata for violin and piano, now lost - dates from this period.
  He studied music at the Athens Conservatoire as well as in Brussels and Berlin, with Ferruccio Busoni among his teachers. From 1921 to 1925 he assisted Erich Kleiber at the Berlin State Opera and then took a number of posts in Greece. At a 1930 concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, he played the solo part of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 and conducted the orchestra from the keyboard, becoming one of the first modern musicians to do so.
  
  wn.com/Dimitri_Mitropoulos
• 
  Dizzy Gillespie
  John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie ( /ɡɨˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer and, occasionally, singer.
  Allmusic's Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy Gillespie's contributions to jazz were huge. One of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time (some would say the best), Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis's emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy's style was successfully recreated . . . Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time."
  Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.
  In the 1940s Gillespie, together with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.
  
  wn.com/Dizzy_Gillespie
• 
  DJ Spooky
  Paul D. Miller (born 1970), known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author. He borrowed his stage name from the character The Subliminal Kid in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. He is a Professor of Music Mediated Art at the European Graduate School.
  Miller grew up in Washington DC and attended Woodrow Wilson High School and Sidwell Friends High School. His father, Paul E. Miller, was Dean of Howard University Law School, and his mother, Rosemary E. Reed Miller, owned Toast and Strawberries, a legendary boutique in Washington DC. She is the author of Threads of Time, a history of African American women designers. Spooky became interested in punk and go-go music. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, earning degrees in French literature and philosophy.
  
  wn.com/DJ_Spooky
• 
  Dmitri Shostakovich
  Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich Russian pronunciation: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ˈdmʲitrʲɪɪvʲɪt͡ɕ ʂəstɐˈkovʲɪt͡ɕ] (Russian: Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович; 25 September 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Soviet Russian composer and pianist and was one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.
  Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Leon Trotsky's chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Nevertheless, he received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947–1962) and the USSR (from 1962 until death).
  After a period influenced by Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, Shostakovich developed a hybrid style, as exemplified by Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). This single work juxtaposed a wide variety of trends, including the neo-classical style (showing the influence of Stravinsky) and post-Romanticism (after Gustav Mahler). Sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque characterize much of his music.
  
  wn.com/Dmitri_Shostakovich
• Earle Brown
  Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of open form, a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since — notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers.
  Among his most famous works are December 1952 with its use of a 'radical' (entirely graphic) score, the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, and Cross Sections and Color Fields.
  Brown was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and first devoted himself to playing jazz. He initially considered a career in engineering, and enrolled for engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944–5). Between 1946 and 1950 he was a student at Schillinger House in Boston, which is now The Berklee College of Music. Brown had private instruction in trumpet and composition. He claims to have been influenced by artists of New York School, such as Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder. John Cage invited Brown to leave Denver and join him for the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape in New York. Brown was an editor and recording engineer for Capitol Records (1955–60) and producer for Mainstream-Time Records (1960–73).
  
  wn.com/Earle_Brown
• 
  Edgard Varèse
  Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (French pronunciation: [ɛdɡaːʁ viktɔːʁ aʃil ʃaʁl vaʁɛːz]; also spelled Edgar Varèse; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States.
  Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm. He was the inventor of the term "organized sound", a phrase meaning that certain timbres and rhythms can be grouped together, sublimating into a whole new definition of music. Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognised as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. His use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the "Father of Electronic Music" while Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound".
  Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was born in Paris, but when he was only a few weeks old, he was sent to be raised by his great-uncle and other relations in the small town of Le Villars in Burgundy region of France. There he developed a very strong attachment to his maternal grandfather, Claude Cortot. Through his mother's family he was related to the pianist Alfred Cortot. His affection for his grandfather outshone anything he would ever feel for his own parents.
  
  wn.com/Edgard_Varèse
• 
  Eduardo Chillida
  Eduardo Chillida Juantegui, or Eduardo Txillida Juantegi in Basque, (10 January 1924 – 19 August 2002) was a Spanish Basque sculptor notable for his monumental abstract works.
  Born in San Sebastián to Pedro Chillida and the soprano Carmen Juantegui on 10 January 1924, Eduardo Chillida grew up near the Biarritz Hotel, which was owned by his grandparents. Chillida had been the goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, San Sebastián's football team, before studying architecture at the University of Madrid from 1943 to 1946. In 1947 he abandoned architecture for art, and the next year he moved to Paris, where he set up his first studio and began working in plaster and clay. He never finished his degree and instead began to take private art lessons. He lived in Paris from 1948 to 50 and at Villaines-sous-Bois (Seine-et-Oise) from 1950 to 1955. In 1950 Chillida married Pilar Belzunce and later returned to the San Sebastián area, first to the nearby village of Hernani and in 1959 to the city of his birth, where he remained.
  
  wn.com/Eduardo_Chillida
• 
  Elton John
  Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
  In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
  John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.
  
  wn.com/Elton_John
• Emil Paur
  Emil Paur (July 19, 1855 – June 7, 1932) was an Austrian orchestra conductor. Paur was born in Czernowitz, Austria, now Ukraine, and trained in Vienna before working as a conductor in Kassel, Königsberg and Leipzig. He then emigrated to the United States where he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony. After returning to Germany, he went on to conduct Berlin State Opera. Paur was considered a serious conductor, favouring the works of Johannes Brahms, which were at the time considered heavy listening.
  Paur died in Místek, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Emil_Paur
• 
  Ennio Morricone
  Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛnnjo morriˈkoːne], (born November 10, 1928) is an Italian composer and conductor, who has written music for more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces. Morricone is most famous for his work in the Spaghetti Westerns directed by his friend Sergio Leone, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) but his career includes a wide range of composition genres making him one of the film world's most versatile artists. He is considered as one of the most influential film music composers of the 20th century.
  Born in Rome, Italy, Morricone took up the trumpet as a child and attended the National Academy of Santa Cecilia to take lessons on the instrument at the age of nine. He formally entered a conservatory at the age of 12, enrolling in a four-year harmony programme. He received his trumpet diploma in 1946 and started working professionally, composing the music to "Il Mattino" ("The Morning"). Morricone soon gained popularity by writing his first background music for radio dramas and quickly moved into film.
  
  wn.com/Ennio_Morricone
• Eric Ericson
   Eric Ericson (help·info) (born 26 October 1918, Borås), is a Swedish choral conductor and influential choral teacher. He graduated from the Royal College of Music (Kungl. Musikhögskolan) in Stockholm in 1943 and went on to complete his studies abroad, at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Switzerland, and in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.
  Renowned for his innovative teaching methods and the wide-ranging nature of his repertoire, Ericson was the principal conductor of the Orphei Drängar choir at Uppsala University from 1951 until 1991, and choirmaster until 1982 of the Swedish Radio Choir which was established on his initiative in 1951. Also in 1951, he began his teaching career at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where he became a legendary and inspirational figure, and he was appointed to the chair of choral conducting there in 1968.
  He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1995, and in 1997 Ericson shared the Polar Music Prize with Bruce Springsteen: the citation was for "pioneering achievements as a conductor, teacher, artistic originator and inspirer in Swedish and international choral music". On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1998, Swedbank of Sweden endowed an "Eric Ericson Chair in Choral Directing" to Uppsala University.
  
  wn.com/Eric_Ericson
• Erich Leinsdorf
  Erich Leinsdorf (born Erich Landauer) (February 4, 1912 – September 11, 1993) was an Austrian-born American conductor. He performed and recorded with leading orchestras and opera companies throughout the United States and Europe, earning a reputation for exacting standards as well as an acerbic personality. He also published books and essays on musical matters.
  Leinsdorf was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, and was studying music at a local school by the age of 5. He played the cello and studied composition. In his teens, Leinsdorf worked as a piano accompanist for singers. He studied conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and later at the University of Vienna and the Vienna Academy of Music. From 1934 to 1937 he worked as an assistant to the noted conductors Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival.
  In November 1937, Leinsdorf travelled to the United States to take up a position as assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. As it turned out, his departure from Austria came a few short months ahead of the Anschluss of March 1938, when the country was taken over by Nazi Germany. With the assistance of freshman Representative from Texas Lyndon B. Johnson, he was able to stay in the United States, and became a naturalized American citizen in 1942.
  
  wn.com/Erich_Leinsdorf
• 
  Frank Gehry
  Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.
  His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as "the most important architect of our age".
  Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture" – a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years. Gehry is also the designer of the future Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial.
  
  wn.com/Frank_Gehry
• 
  Frank Zappa
  Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, recording engineer, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band The Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for percussion-based avant-garde composers such as Edgard Varèse and 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands; he later switched to electric guitar.
  He was a self-taught composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often impossible to categorize. His 1966 debut album with The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. His later albums shared this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was one of rock, jazz or classical. His lyrics—often humorously—reflected his iconoclastic view of established social and political processes, structures and movements. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship.
  
  wn.com/Frank_Zappa
• 
  Frei Otto
  Frei Paul Otto (31 May 1925) is a German architect and structural engineer.
  Otto was born in Siegmar (since 1950 a part of Chemnitz). He studied architecture in Berlin before being drafted into the Luftwaffe as a fighter pilot in the last years of World War II. It is said that he was interned in a French POW camp and, with his aviation engineering training and lack of material and an urgent need for housing, began experimenting with tents for shelter. After the war he studied briefly in the United States and visited Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright. He began a private practice in Germany in 1952. His saddle-shaped cable-net music pavilion at the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Garden Exposition) in Kassel brought him his first significant attention. He earned a doctorate about tensioned constructions in 1954.
  Otto is the world's leading authority on lightweight tensile and membrane structures,^{[citation needed]} and has pioneered advances in structural mathematics and civil engineering. Otto's career bears a similarity to Buckminster Fuller's architectural experiments: both taught at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1950s, both were architects of major pavilions at the Montreal Expo of 1967, both were concerned with space frames and structural efficiency, and both experimented with inflatable buildings. The work of both men go far beyond traditional methods of calculating structural stresses. His designs are regarded to have been heavily influenced by Australian architect Barry Patten, and his most famous design, the Myer Music Bowl (1959) in Melbourne.
  
  wn.com/Frei_Otto
• 
  Fumihiko Maki
  Fumihiko Maki (槇 文彦, Maki Fumihiko^?, born September 6, 1928 in Tokyo) is a Japanese architect who teaches at Keio University SFC. He often uses metal and glass materials for his buildings.
  After studying at the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1952, he moved to the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, graduating with a Masters degree in 1953, and then to Harvard Graduate School of Design, graduating with a Master of Architecture degree in 1954.
  In 1956, he took a post as assistant professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also was awarded his first commission: the design of Steinberg Hall (an art center) on the university's Danforth Campus. This building remained his only completed work in the United States until 1993, when he completed the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts building in San Francisco. In 2006, he returned to Washington University in St. Louis to design the new home for the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall.
  In 1960 he returned to Japan to help establish the Metabolism Group.
  
  wn.com/Fumihiko_Maki
• 
  Georg Solti
  Sir Georg Solti, KBE,  /ˈdʒɔrdʒ ˈʃɒlti/ (21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was an orchestral and operatic conductor, best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Hungary, he studied in Budapest with Béla Bartók, Leo Weiner and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis, and because he was a Jew he fled the increasingly restrictive anti-semitic laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Not permitted to conduct there, he earned a living as a pianist.
  After the war Solti was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich from 1946. In 1952 he moved to the Frankfurt Opera, where he remained in charge for nine years. He took German citizenship in 1953. In 1961 he became musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company in London. During his ten-year tenure, he introduced changes that saw standards raised to the highest international levels. Under his musical directorship the status of the company was recognised with the grant of the title "the Royal Opera". He became a British subject in 1972.
  
  wn.com/Georg_Solti
• 
  George Szell
  George Szell ( /ˈsɛl/; June 7, 1897 – July 30, 1970), originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer. He is remembered today for his long and successful tenure as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, and for the recordings of the standard classical repertoire he made in Cleveland and with other orchestras.
  Szell came to Cleveland in 1946 to take over a respected if undersized orchestra, which was struggling to recover from the disruptions of World War II. By the time of his death he was credited, to quote the critic Donal Henahan, with having built it into "what many critics regarded as the world's keenest symphonic instrument." Through his recordings, Szell has remained a presence in the classical music world long after his death, and his name remains synonymous with that of the Cleveland Orchestra. While on tour with the Orchestra in the late 1980s, then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnányi remarked, "We give a great concert, and George Szell gets a great review."
  
  wn.com/George_Szell
• George Tsontakis
  George Tsontakis (born Astoria, Queens, New York City, October 24, 1951) is an American-born composer and conductor of Greek descent.
  Tsontakis studied composition with Hugo Weisgall and Roger Sessions at the Juilliard School from 1974 to 1978, and later with Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. His music has been performed and broadcast by major orchestras, chamber ensembles, and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Japan.
  Tsontakis was honored with the "Academy Award" in 1995 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the fourth recipient of the coveted Ives Living Fellowship, in 2007. Pianist Stephen Hough's recording of Tsontakis's "Ghost Variations" on Hyperion Records was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and was the only classical recording among Time magazine's 1998 Top Ten Recordings. Tsontakis received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2002, and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2005.
  
  wn.com/George_Tsontakis
• 
  Georges Pompidou
  Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ pɔ̃pidu]; 5 July 1911 – 2 April 1974) was a French politician. He was Prime Minister of France from 1962 to 1968, holding the longest tenure in this position, and later President of the French Republic from 1969 until his death in 1974.
  He was born in the commune of Montboudif, in the department of Cantal in central France. After his khâgne at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he befriended Senegalese future poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, he graduated from the École Normale Supérieure with a degree of Agrégation in literature.
  He first taught literature at the lycée Henri IV in Paris until hired in 1953 by Guy de Rothschild to work at Rothschild. In 1956, he was appointed the bank's general manager, a position he held until 1962. Later, he was hired by Charles de Gaulle to manage the Anne de Gaulle Foundation for Down's Syndrome (de Gaulle's daughter Anne had Down's Syndrome).
  He served as prime minister under de Gaulle after Michel Debré resigned, from 16 April 1962 to 21 July 1968, and to this day is the longest serving French prime minister under the Fifth Republic. His nomination was controversial because he was not a member of the National Assembly. In October 1962, he was defeated by a vote of non-confidence, but de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly. The Gaullists won the legislative election and Pompidou was reappointed as Prime Minister. In 1964, he was faced with a miners' strike. He led the 1967 legislative campaign of the Union of Democrats for the Fifth Republic to a narrow victory. Pompidou was widely regarded as being responsible for the peaceful resolution of the student uprising of May 1968. His strategy was to break the coalition of students and workers by negotiating with the trade-unions and employers (Grenelle conference). Until this crisis, he was the Prime Minister of a quiet and prosperous France.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Pompidou
• 
  Gerhard Richter
  Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.^{[citation needed]} Richter is regarded as the Top-Selling Living Artist. In 2011, Richter's works achieved prices higher than any other living artist. His works sold for more than $200 million, topping auction result totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, and Mark Rothko combined.
  The son of a schoolteacher, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge) in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948 he terminated the higher professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, was trained there in writing as well as in stage and advertising painting.^{[citation needed]} In 1950 his application for membership in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected.^{[citation needed]} He finally began his study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann.
  
  wn.com/Gerhard_Richter
• Giancarlo De Carlo
  Giancarlo De Carlo (December 12, 1919 - June 4, 2005) was an Italian architect.
  He was born in Genoa, Liguria in 1919. He trained as an architect from 1942 to 1949, a time of political turmoil which generated his philosophy toward life and architecture. Libertarian socialism was the underlying force for all of his planning and design.
  De Carlo saw architecture as a consensus-based activity. His designs are generated as an expression of the forces that operate in a given context including human, physical, cultural, and, historical forces. His ideas linked CIAM ideals with late twentieth century reality.
  De Carlo was a member of Team 10 along with Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Jacob Bakema, among others. Although his political beliefs have limited his portfolio of buildings, his ideas remained untainted by postmodernist beliefs through his journal Spazio e Società - Space & Society, and his teaching at the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD).
  De Carlo died in Milan in 2005.
  
  wn.com/Giancarlo_De_Carlo
• Gidon Kremer
  Gidon Kremer (Latvian: Gidons Krēmers; born February 27, 1947) is a Latvian violinist and conductor. In 1980 he left the USSR and settled in Germany.
  Kremer was born in Riga to parents of German-Jewish (his father being a Holocaust survivor) and Latvian-Swedish origins. He began playing the violin at the age of four, receiving instruction from his father and his grandfather, who were both professional violinists. He went on to study at the Riga School of Music and with David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1967, he won third prize at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels; then, in 1969, second prize at the Montreal International Violin Competition (shared with Oleh Krysa) followed by first prize at the Paganini Competition in Genoa; and finally first prize again in 1970 at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
  Kremer's first concert in the West was in Germany in 1975, followed by appearances at the Salzburg Festival in 1976 and in New York City in 1977. In 1981, Kremer founded a chamber music festival in Lockenhaus, Austria, with a focus on new and unconventional programming, serving as artistic director for 30 years. In 1996 Kremer founded the Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra, composed of young players from the Baltic region. He was also among the artistic directors of the festival "Art Projekt 92" in Munich and is director of the Musiksommer Gstaad festival in Switzerland. In 2008, he and Kremerata Baltica toured with the classical musical comedy duo Igudesman & Joo. He also made regular appearances at the Verbier Festival until the summer of 2011, when he withdrew, issuing a public complaint of excessive hype.
  
  wn.com/Gidon_Kremer
• 
  Gilberto Gil
  Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira (born June 26, 1942), better known as Gilberto Gil (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒiɫˈbɛʁtu ʒiɫ]) or (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒiu̯ˈbɛɾtʊ ʒiu̯]), is a Brazilian singer, guitarist, and songwriter, known for both his musical innovation and political commitment. From 2003 to 2008, he served as Brazil's Minister of Culture in the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Gil's musical style incorporates an eclectic range of influences, including Rock music, Brazilian genres including samba, African music, and reggae.
  Gil started to play music as a child and was still a teenager when he joined his first band. He began his career as a bossa nova musician, and then grew to write songs that reflected a focus on political awareness and social activism. He was a key figure in the Música Popular Brasileira and tropicália movements of the 1960s, alongside artists such as longtime collaborator Caetano Veloso. The Brazilian military regime that took power in 1964 saw both Gil and Veloso as a threat, and the two were held for nine months in 1969 before they were told to leave the country. Gil moved to London, but returned to state of Bahia in 1972 and continued his musical career, as well as working as a politician and environmental advocate.
  
  wn.com/Gilberto_Gil
• 
  Giya Kancheli
  Giya Kancheli (Georgian: გია ყანჩელი), born 10 August 1935, in Tbilisi, is a Georgian composer resident in Belgium.
  Since 1991, Kancheli has lived in Western Europe: first in Berlin, and since 1995 in Antwerp, where he is composer-in-residence for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.
  In his symphonies, Kancheli's musical language typically consists of slow scraps of minor-mode melody against long, subdued, anguished string discords. These passages are occasionally punctuated with "battle scenes" involving martial brass and percussion. His music post-1990 has become more refined and generally more subdued and nostalgic in character. Some commentators^{[citation needed]} talk about his music in cinematic terms; one can find equivalents of the dissolve (in his ubiquitous blurred tonal transitions), zoom (such as the long crescendo a third of the way into the Sixth Symphony), abrupt cuts (jumping from very quiet to very loud, as in the opening of the Fifth Symphony), and so on. Rodion Shchedrin speaks of Kancheli as "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist; a restrained Vesuvius".
  
  wn.com/Giya_Kancheli
• 
  Gustav Mahler
  Gustav Mahler (German pronunciation: [ˈɡʊstaf ˈmaːlɐ]; 7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic. Then his family moved to nearby Iglau (now Jihlava) where Mahler grew up.
  As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
  Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/Gustav_Mahler
• György Kurtág
  György Kurtág (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˌɟørɟ ˈkurtaːɡ]; born 19 February 1926 in Lugoj) is a Hungarian composer of contemporary music.
  György Kurtág was born in Lugoj in the Banat region, Romania. In 1946, he began his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he met his wife, Márta, and also György Ligeti, who became a close friend. His piano teacher at the academy was Pál Kadosa; he studied composition with Sándor Veress and Ferenc Farkas, and chamber music with Leó Weiner. He graduated in piano and chamber music in 1951 and received his degree in composition in 1955.
  Following the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Kurtág’s time in Paris between 1957 and 1958 was of critical importance for him. Here, he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. During this time however, Kurtag was suffering from a severe depression: 'I realized to the point of despair that nothing I had believed to constitute the world was true...'. Kurtág received psychological therapy from Marianne Stein – an encounter that revivified the composer and strongly stimulated his artistic development. During this time he also discovered the works of Anton Webern and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The String Quartet he composed in 1959 after his return to Budapest marks this crucial turning point; he refers to this piece as his Opus 1. He dedicated it to his therapist, Stein.
  
  wn.com/György_Kurtág
• 
  György Ligeti
  György Sándor Ligeti (Hungarian: Ligeti György Sándor, [ˈliɡɛti ˈɟørɟ ˈʃaːndor]; May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he lived in Hungary before emigrating and becoming an Austrian citizen.
  Ligeti was born in Dicsőszentmárton, which was renamed Târnăveni in 1945, in Transylvania to a Hungarian Jewish family. Ligeti recalls that his first exposure to languages other than Hungarian came one day while listening to a conversation among the Romanian-speaking town police. Before that he hadn't known that other languages existed. He moved to Kolozsvár (Cluj) with his family when he was 6, and he was not to return to the town of his birth until the 1990s.
  Ligeti received his initial musical training in the conservatory at Kolozsvár (Cluj), and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest.
  In 1940, Northern Transylvania was occupied by Hungary following the Second Vienna Award. In 1944, Ligeti's education was interrupted when he was sent to a forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime. His brother, age 16, was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and both of his parents were sent to Auschwitz. His mother was the only other survivor of his immediate family.
  
  wn.com/György_Ligeti
• 
  Hans Knappertsbusch
  Hans Knappertsbusch (12 March 1888 – 25 October 1965) was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss.
  Knappertsbusch was born in Elberfeld, today's Wuppertal. He studied philosophy at Bonn University and conducting at the Cologne Conservatory with Fritz Steinbach. For a few summers, he assisted Siegfried Wagner and Hans Richter at Bayreuth. He began his career with conducting jobs in Elberfeld (1913-1918), Leipzig (1918-1919) and Dessau (1919-1922). When Bruno Walter left Munich for New York, Knappertsbusch succeeded him as General Music Director of the Bavarian State Orchestra and the Bavarian State Opera, with a lifelong contract. Knappertsbusch later refused to join the Nazi party.
  He incurred the wrath of Goebbels by asking a German diplomat in the Netherlands whether he was a "Muss-Nazi" (someone who was forced to join the Nazi Party for career reasons): as a result his Munich contract was revoked. Hitler himself was involved in the decision to dismiss him. In 1936 Sir Thomas Beecham invited him to Covent Garden to conduct but his permit to leave Germany was withheld. In the late 1930s he went to Vienna to conduct at the Wiener Staatsoper, thus ignoring the Nazis' policy of not allowing German artists to work in Austria. At the same time he became one of the emerging artists of the Salzburg Festival. Knappertsbusch continued to appear in Vienna and Salzburg during the German occupation of Austria.
  
  wn.com/Hans_Knappertsbusch
• Harrison Birtwistle
  Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH (born 15 July 1934) is a British contemporary composer.
  Birtwistle was born in Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have lessons with the local bandmaster. He became proficient enough to play in the local military-style band, and also played in the orchestra which accompanied Gilbert and Sullivan productions and the local choral society's performances of Messiah. Birtwistle composed from around this time, later describing his early pieces as 'sub Vaughan Williams'.
  In 1952 he entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in Manchester on a clarinet scholarship. While there he met fellow composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who, together with pianist John Ogdon and conductor Elgar Howarth, formed the New Music Manchester group, dedicated to the performances of serial and other modern works.
  
  wn.com/Harrison_Birtwistle
• 
  Hector Berlioz
  Hector Berlioz (pronounced: [ɛktɔʁ bɛʁˈljoːz]; 11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts (Requiem). Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works; as a conductor, he performed several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. He also composed around 50 songs. His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others.
  Hector Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, near Grenoble. His father, a respected provincial physician and scholar, was responsible for much of the young Berlioz's education. His father, Louis-Joseph Berlioz, was an atheist, with a liberal outlook; his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was an orthodox Roman Catholic. He had five siblings in all, three of whom did not survive to adulthood. The other two, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout his life.
  
  wn.com/Hector_Berlioz
• 
  Heinz Holliger
  Heinz Holliger (born 21 May 1939) is a Swiss oboist, composer and conductor.
  He was born in Langenthal, Switzerland, and began his musical education at the conservatories of Bern and Basel. He studied composition with Sándor Veress and Pierre Boulez. Holliger took first prize for oboe in the International Competition in Geneva in 1959.
  He has become one of the world's most celebrated oboists, and many composers (including Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Frank Martin, Hans Werner Henze, Witold Lutosławski, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Isang Yun) have written works for him. He began teaching at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany in 1966.
  In 1972 Holliger, Maurice Bourgue (oboe), Klaus Thunemann (bassoon), and Christiane Jaccottet (continuo) et al. recorded the Six Trio Sonatas for Oboe and Bassoon by Jan Dismas Zelenka. This recording is credited for the "Zelenka Renaissance".
  Holliger has also composed many works in a variety of media. Many of his works have been recorded for the ECM label.
  
  wn.com/Heinz_Holliger
• Hildegard Behrens
  Hildegard Behrens (9 February 1937 – 18 August 2009) was a German soprano with a wide repertoire including Wagner, Weber, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg roles.
  Behrens was born in Varel, Germany in 1937 and was graduated from the University of Freiburg as a junior barrister before becoming serious about her talents as a singer, studying at first with Ines Leuwen at the Freiburg Academy Of Music. Her debut was as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro in Freiburg in 1971 and the following year she became a member of the Deutsche Oper. On 15 October 1976 she made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as Giorgetta in Il tabarro.
  She began her musical career singing small roles at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf where she stayed for six years during which she graduated into bigger roles. Then in the 1975–76 season, while rehearsing Wozzeck, she was "discovered" by Herbert von Karajan, who was then looking for his new Salome. She was summoned to Berlin to audition for the role. Karajan liked what he heard and invited her to portray the role at the 1977 Salzburg Festival.
  
  wn.com/Hildegard_Behrens
• 
  Iannis Xenakis
  Iannis Xenakis (Greek pronunciation: [ˈʝanis kseˈnakis], Greek: Γιάννης Ξενάκης) (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.
  Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–4) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed alone.
  
  wn.com/Iannis_Xenakis
• 
  Igor Stravinsky
  Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (sometimes spelled Strawinsky or Stravinskii; Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, transliterated: Igorʹ Fëdorovič Stravinskij; Russian pronunciation: [ˌiɡərʲ ˌfʲjodɐrɐvʲɪtɕ strɐˈvʲinskʲɪj]; 17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian, and later French and American composer, pianist and conductor. He is acknowledged by many as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
  Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). The Rite of Spring, which provoked a riot during its premiere, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His so-called Russian phase was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassical music. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue and symphony). They frequently concealed a vein of intense emotion beneath a surface appearance of detachment or austerity and often paid tribute to the music of earlier masters, for example J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells and clarity of form, of instrumentation and of utterance.
  
  wn.com/Igor_Stravinsky
• 
  Isaac Stern
  Isaac Stern (Ukrainian: Исаак Стерн, Russian: Айзек Стерн; July 21, 1920 – September 22, 2001) was a Ukrainian-born violinist and conductor. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.
  Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenets, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco. He received his first music lessons from his mother, then in 1928 enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied until 1931 before going on to study privately with Louis Persinger. He returned to the San Francisco Conservatory to study for five years with Naoum Blinder, to whom he said he owed the most. At his public début on February 18, 1936, aged 15, he played Saint-Saëns' Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Reflecting on his background, Stern once memorably quipped that cultural exchanges between the US and Soviet Russia were simple affairs: "They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa."
  
  wn.com/Isaac_Stern
• Ivan Tcherepnin
  Ivan Alexandrovich Tcherepnin (Cyrillic: Иван Александрович Черепнин)(February 5, 1943 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France – April 11, 1998 in Boston, USA) was an experimental, then later modernist/postmodernist, composer. He was born into a highly musical family, his father and grandfather, Alexander and Nikolai, being distinguished Russian composers, and his mother Ming a well-known pianist. His elder brother, Serge is also a composer. He studied with Leon Kirchner, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Pierre Boulez. After teaching briefly at both the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford University, he became director of the Harvard University Electronic Music Studio from 1972, remaining there until his death in 1998. The Tcherepnin legacy continues with two of Ivan's sons, Stefan and Sergei.
  Tcherepnin's notable students include Curt Cacioppo.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Ivan_Tcherepnin
• 
  James Turrell
  James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater, located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, where he is turning a natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive naked-eye observatory.
  Turrell was born in Pasadena, California. His parents were Quakers. His father was an aeronautical engineer and educator. His mother trained as a medical doctor and later worked in the Peace Corps. Turrell obtained a pilot's licence when 16 years old. He subsequently flew supplies to remote mine sites and worked as an aerial cartographer. He received a BA degree from Pomona College in perceptual psychology in 1965 (including the study of the Ganzfeld effect) and also studied mathematics, geology and astronomy there. Turrell received a MA degree in art from Claremont Graduate School, University of California, Irvine in 1966.
  Main article List of James Turrell artworks
  In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel, at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence. By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to come through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections. In Shallow Space Constructions (1968) he used screened partitions, allowing a radiant effusion of concealed light to create an artificially flattened effect within the given space. That same year, he participated in the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz. In 1969, he made sky drawings with Sam Francis, using colored skywriting smoke and cloud-seeding materials.
  
  wn.com/James_Turrell
• Janet Baker
  Dame Janet Abbott Baker, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.
  She was particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which spanned the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus Les Troyens. As a concert performer, Baker was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in the Gramophone, described her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder as "intimate, almost self-communing."
  Baker was born in Hatfield, South Yorkshire, northern England. Her father was an engineer who sang in a male voice choir. Members of her family worked at Bentley pit, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire.^{[citation needed]} She attended York College for Girls and then Wintringham Girls' Grammar School in Grimsby. The death of her elder brother, Peter, when she was 10 years old, from a heart condition, was a formative moment that made her take responsibility for the rest of her life, she revealed in a BBC Radio 3 Lebrecht Interview in September 2011.
  
  wn.com/Janet_Baker
• Jasper Johns
  Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.
  Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing art ever since.
  Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.
  
  wn.com/Jasper_Johns
• 
  Jean Nouvel
  Jean Nouvel (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ nu.vɛl]) (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work.
  Nouvel was born August 12, 1945, in Fumel, Lot-et-Garonne, France, the son of Renée and Roger Nouvel who were teachers. His family moved often when his father became the county's chief school superintendent. His parents encouraged Nouvel to study mathematics and language, but when he was 16 years old he was captivated by art when a teacher taught him drawing. Although he later said he thought that his parents were guiding him to pursue a career in education or engineering, the family reached a compromise that he could study architecture which they thought was less risky than art.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Nouvel
• Jiří Bělohlávek
  Jiří Bělohlávek CBE (born 24 February 1946) is a Czech conductor. His father was a barrister and judge. In his youth Bělohlávek studied cello with Miloš Sádlo and was later a graduate of the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. After graduation he studied conducting, for two years, with Sergiu Celibidache.
  Bělohlávek won the Czech National Conducting Competition in 1970. He later served for two years as an assistant conductor at the Czech Philharmonic. From 1972 to 1978 he was associated with the Brno Philharmonic, taking it on tours of Austria, Germany and the United States. From 1977 to 1989, he was chief conductor of the Prague Symphony Orchestra.
  Bělohlávek became chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic in 1990. However, in 1991, the orchestra reorganized and controversially voted to appoint Gerd Albrecht its new principal conductor to replace Bělohlávek. Instead of remaining until Albrecht's accession, Bělohlávek resigned from the Czech Philharmonic in 1992. He subsequently founded the Prague Philharmonia (Pražskou komorní filharmonii) in 1993, after the Czech Ministry of Defence had offered funding for training 40 young musicians. Bělohlávek had auditioned musicians for the orchestra, but the ministry withdrew its funding the next year. He subsequently secured private funding for the orchestra, and served as its first music director. Since the orchestra's public debut in 1994, he has recorded and performed in concerts worldwide with the orchestra. He conducted the Prague Philharmonia at its first BBC Proms appearance in 2004, in a televised performance. In 2005, he relinquished his post with the Prague Philharmonia, and now is the orchestra's conductor laureate.
  
  wn.com/Jiří_Bělohlávek
• Joan Peyser
  Joan Peyser (June 12, 1930 – April 24, 2011) was an American musicologist and writer, particularly known for her writing on 20th century music and for her biographies of George Gershwin, Pierre Boulez, and Leonard Bernstein. Her biography of Bernstein was, according to Leon Botstein, the first attempt at a critical account of his life and work.
  Born Joan Gilbert in New York City, Peyser began studying piano when she was 5 and gave her first recital at the age of 13 in New York's Town Hall. When she enrolled at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, she continued to study piano and took up the viola as well. After graduating from high school, she attended Smith College from 1947 to 1949 and then went to Barnard College where she majored in music and received her BA in 1951. She earned her MA in musicology in 1956 from Columbia University studying under Paul Henry Lang. She was one of the winners of ASCAP's first annual Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing with her 1966 article on the American composer Marc Blitzstein ("The Troubled Times of Marc Blitzstein" published in the Columbia University Forum).
  
  wn.com/Joan_Peyser
• Joan Tower
  Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York) is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by the New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, two string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely-performed Petroushskates.
  Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, Tower moved to the South American nation of Bolivia when she was nine years old, an experience which she credits for making rhythm an integral part of her work. For the next decade Tower's talent in music, particularly on the piano, grew rapidly due to her father's insistence that she benefit from consistent musical training. Tower's relationship with her mineralogist father is visible in many aspects of her work, most specifically her "mineral works" (including Black Topaz(1976) and Silver Ladders (1986). She returned to the United States as a young woman to study music, first at Bennington College, in Vermont, and then at Columbia University where she studied under Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Vladimir Ussachevsky and was awarded her doctorate in composition in 1968.
  
  wn.com/Joan_Tower
• 
  John Barbirolli
  Sir John Barbirolli, CH (2 December 1899 – 29 July 1970), né Giovanni Battista Barbirolli, was an English conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all of which he made recordings.
  Born in London of Italian and French parentage, Barbirolli grew up in a family of professional musicians. After starting out as a cellist, he was given the chance to conduct, from 1926 with the British National Opera Company, and then with Covent Garden's touring company. On taking up the conductorship of the Hallé he had less opportunity to work in the opera house, but in the 1950s he conducted productions of works by Verdi, Wagner, Gluck, and Puccini at Covent Garden with such success that he was invited to become the company's permanent musical director, an invitation he declined. Late in his career he made several recordings of operas, of which his 1967 set of Puccini's Madama Butterfly for EMI is probably the best known.
  
  wn.com/John_Barbirolli
• 
  John Cage
  John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
  Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
  
  wn.com/John_Cage
• John Corigliano
  John Corigliano (born 16 February 1938, New York City, New York) is an American composer of classical music and a teacher of music. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College in the City University of New York.
  Italian American Corigliano was born to a musical family. His father, John Corigliano Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 23 years, and his mother, Rose Buzen, is an accomplished educator and pianist. He is a former student of Otto Luening,Vittorio Giannini and Paul Creston. Corigliano attended P.S. 241 and Midwood High School in Brooklyn. He studied composition at Columbia University (BA 1959) and at the Manhattan School of Music. Before achieving success as composer, Corigliano worked as assistant to the producer on the Leonard Bernstein Young People's Concerts, and as a session producer for classical artists such as André Watts.
  Most of Corigliano's work has been for symphony orchestra. He employs a wide variety of styles, sometimes even within the same work, but aims to make his work accessible to a relatively large audience. He has written symphonies, as well as works for string orchestra, and wind band. Additionally, Corigliano has written concerti for clarinet, flute, violin, oboe, and piano; film scores; various chamber and solo instrument works, and the opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, which enjoyed a success at the premiere.
  
  wn.com/John_Corigliano
• 
  John Eliot Gardiner
  Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE FKC (born 20 April 1943, Fontmell Magna, Dorset, England) is an English conductor. He founded the Monteverdi Choir (1964), the English Baroque Soloists (1975) and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1989). Gardiner has recorded over 250 albums with these and other musical ensembles, most of which have been published by Deutsche Grammophon and Philips Classics. Gardiner is most famous for his interpretations of Baroque music on period instruments with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, but his repertoire and discography are not limited to early music. With the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique Gardiner has performed a wide range of Classical and Romantic music, including many works of Hector Berlioz and all of Beethoven's symphonies. A recording of the third symphony of the latter was used in a dramatisation by the BBC of Beethoven's writing of that symphony. Gardiner has served as chief conductor of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as guest conductor with such major orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Vienna Philharmonic.
  
  wn.com/John_Eliot_Gardiner
• Jonathan Nott
  Jonathan Nott (born 25 December 1962, Solihull, England) is an English conductor, the son of a priest at Worcester Cathedral. He was a music student and choral scholar at the University of Cambridge, and also studied singing and flute in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music. Nott was also a conducting student in London. He left London to develop his conducting career in Germany via the traditional Kapellmeister system.
  Nott made his conducting debut in 1988 at the Opera Festival in Battignano, Italy. In 1989, he was appointed Kapellmeister at the Frankfurt Opera. In 1991, he was appointed Erster Kapellmeister at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, and became interim chief conductor for the 1995–96 season. He later became music director at the Lucerne Theatre and served as principal conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2002.
  With the Berlin Philharmonic, Nott recorded several orchestral works of György Ligeti as part of the Teldec contribution to the complete recorded works of Ligeti. Nott became music director of the Ensemble InterContemporain (EIC) in 2000. He relinquished this post in 2003, and immediately took up the position of principal guest conductor of the EIC. He has held that title since then.
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Nott
• 
  Joni Mitchell
  Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto. In 1965 she moved to the United States and, touring constantly, began to be recognized when her original songs ("Urge for Going," "Chelsea Morning," "Both Sides, Now," "The Circle Game") were covered by notable folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her own debut album in 1968. Settling in Southern California, Mitchell and her popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock" helped define an era and a generation. Her more starkly personal 1971 recording Blue has been called one of the best albums ever made. Musically restless, Mitchell switched labels and began moving toward jazz rhythms by way of lush pop textures on 1974's Court and Spark, her best-selling LP, featuring her radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris."
  
  wn.com/Joni_Mitchell
• 
  Jordi Savall
  Jordi Savall i Bernadet (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈʒɔrði səˈβaʎ]; born January 14, 1942, in Igualada, Catalonia) is a Catalan viol player, conductor and composer. He has been one of the major figures in the field of Western early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for bringing the viol (viola da gamba) back to life on the stage. His characteristic repertory ranges from Medieval to Renaissance and Baroque music, though he has occasionally ventured into the classical or even the romantic period.
  Savall's musical training started at the age of six in the school choir of his native town (1947–55). After completion of training at the Barcelona Conservatory of Music (1959–65), he specialised in early music, collaborating with Ars Musicae Barcelona of Enric Gispert and studying under August Wenzinger at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland (1968–70). In 1974 he succeeded Wenzinger as professor of viola da gamba at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.
  In 1974 he formed the ensemble Hespèrion XX (known since 2000 as Hespèrion XXI), together with the soprano Montserrat Figueras (his wife, who died in 2011), Lorenzo Alpert and Hopkinson Smith. Hespèrion XX favoured a style of interpretation characterised by great musical vitality and, at the same time, ultimate historical accuracy.
  
  wn.com/Jordi_Savall
• 
  Josef Stránský
  Josef (or Joseph) Stransky (September 9, 1872 – March 6, 1936) was a Czech conductor, composer, and art collector/dealer who moved to the United States and conducted the New York Philharmonic from 1911 to 1923.
  Born in Humpolec (Bohemia), he worked as a conductor in Prague and Berlin before being selected by the New York Philharmonic to replace Gustav Mahler on Mahler's death in 1911. Some commentators did not see Stransky as a worthy successor to Mahler: the periodical Musical America wrote:
  An article in the New York Times about the appointment began, "The financial backers of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra will be interested to learn that the German artistic world is filled with astonishment over the engagement of Josef Stransky of Berlin as the successor to the late Gustav Mahler.", before going on to allege that Stransky was chosen over other candidates such as Oskar Fried and Bruno Walter because of his low financial demands.
  During his tenure with the Phiharmonic, Stransky received praise for his interpretations of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss by the prominent critic Henry T. Finck of the New York Evening Post. However, Daniel Gregory Mason expressed his dissatisfaction with what he referred to as "the Wagnerian, Lisztian and Tschaikowskian pap ladled out to us by ... Stransky of the Phihamonic Society", and went as far as to call the conductor "a total musical incompetent". In an even more biting critique published in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury Magazine, critic D. W. Sinclair wrote
  
  wn.com/Josef_Stránský
• 
  Josef Tal
  Josef Tal (Hebrew: יוסף טל), (September 18, 1910 – August 25, 2008) was an Israeli composer. He wrote three Hebrew operas; four German operas; dramatic scenes; six symphonies; thirteen concerti; chamber music, including three string quartets; instrumental works; and electronic compositions. He is considered one of the founding fathers of Israeli art music
  Josef Tal was born Joseph Grünthal in the town of Pinne (now Pniewy), near Poznań, German Empire (present-day Poland). Soon after his birth his family (parents Ottilie and Rabbi Julius Grünthal, and his elder sister Grete), moved to Berlin, where the family managed a private orphanage. Rabbi Julius Grünthal was a docent in the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums), specializing in the philology of ancient languages.[3]
  Tal's first encounter with music was at the synagogue, where there was a choir and his grandfather served as a non-professional cantor. After attending his first concert, he began to take piano lessons. Tal was admitted to the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and studied with Max Trapp (piano and composition), Heinz Tiessen (theory), Max Saal (harp), Curt Sachs (instrumentation), Fritz Flemming (oboe), Georg Schünemann (history of music), Charlotte Pfeffer and Siegfried Borris (ear training), Siegfried Ochs (choir singing), Leonid Kreutzer (piano methodology), and Julius Prüwer (conducting). Paul Hindemith —his composition and theory teacher— introduced him to Friedrich Trautwein, who directed the electronic music studio in the building cellar. Tal completed his studies in the academy in 1931, and married dancer Rosie Löwenthal one year later. He worked giving piano lessons and accompanying dancers, singers, and silent movies.
  
  wn.com/Josef_Tal
• 
  José Antonio Abreu
  José Antonio Abreu (born May 7, 1939 in Valera) is a Venezuelan pianist, economist, educator, activist, and politician.
  Born in the city of Valera in 1939, Abreu graduated ¨Summa Cum Laude¨ as an Economist at Universidad Católica Andres Bello and he was awarded a PhD degree in Petroleum Economics from the same university in 1961. Abreu also did some graduate work at the University of Michigan. He served as a Deputy at the Chamber of Deputies in the Congress of Venezuela. After his political career, he also worked as a professor of economics and law at Universidad Simón Bolívar and his Alma Mater. He would return to politics briefly in 1983 to serve as Minister of Culture.
  Abreu began to study music with Doralisa Jiménez de Medina in Barquisimeto. Later, he attended the Caracas Musical Declamation Academy in 1957, where he studied piano with Moisés Moleiro, organ and harpsichord with Evencio Castellanos, and composition with Vicente Emilio Sojo. In 1967, he received the Symphonic Music National Prize for his musical ability. It was in 1975 that he founded El Sistema, formally known as the Foundation for the National Network of Youth and Children Orchestras of Venezuela.
  
  wn.com/José_Antonio_Abreu
• 
  Jørn Utzon
  Jørn Oberg Utzon, (Danish pronunciation: [jɶɐ̯n ˈud̥sʌn]), AC (9 April 1918 – 29 November 2008) was a Danish architect, most notable for designing the Sydney Opera House in Australia. When it was declared a World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007, Utzon became only the second person to have received such recognition for one of his works during his lifetime. Other noteworthy works include Bagsværd Church near Copenhagen and the National Assembly Building in Kuwait. He also made important contributions to housing design, especially with his Kingo Houses near Helsingør.
  Utzon was born in Copenhagen, the son of a naval engineer, and grew up in Aalborg, Denmark, where he became interested in ships and a possible naval career. As a result of his family's interest in art, from 1937 he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under Kay Fisker and Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Following his graduation in 1942, he joined Gunnar Asplund in Stockholm where he worked together with Arne Jacobsen and Poul Henningsen. He took a particular interest in the works of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. After the end of World War II and the German Occupation of Denmark, he returned to Copenhagen.
  
  wn.com/Jørn_Utzon
• Kaija Saariaho
  Kaija Saariaho (Finnish pronunciation: [ˈkɑi̯jɑ ˈsɑːriɑho]) (née Laakkonen, born 14 October 1952) is a Finnish composer.
  Kaija Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the opera L’amour de loin, premiered at the 2000 Salzburg Festival (with a US premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2002), and Oltra mar for chorus and orchestra, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. Her second opera, Adriana Mater, was commissioned for the Opéra National de Paris’ 2006 season. Her second string quartet, Terra Memoria, was commissioned for the Emerson Quartet by Carnegie Hall for a June 2007 premiere. The third opera, Émilie, has the life and death of Émilie du Châtelet as its topic. The librettist of all of the three operas is Amin Maalouf.
  
  wn.com/Kaija_Saariaho
• Karel Husa
  Karel Husa (born August 7, 1921 in Prague) is a Czech-born classical composer and conductor, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and 1993 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition. In 1954 he came to the United States and became an American citizen in 1959.
  Husa learned to play the violin and the piano in early childhood and, after passing his final examination at high school, he enrolled in the Prague Conservatory in 1941 where he studied in a class of Jaroslav Řídký, and attended courses in conducting led by Metod Doležil and Pavel Dědeček.
  After the end of the Second World War, Husa was admitted to the graduate school of the Prague Academy, where he attended courses led by Řídký and graduated in 1947. At the same time, he decided to continue his studies of composition and conducting in Paris. In 1947 he studied with Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. He studied conducting with Jean Fournet, Eugène Bigot and André Cluytens. After finishing his courses in conducting at École Normale de Musique de Paris and at Conservatoire de Paris he embarked on a career during which he has conducted the world's leading orchestras and participated in many major projects. He divided his time between composing and conducting, taking an ever more active part in Parisian and international musical life.
  
  wn.com/Karel_Husa
• 
  Karol Szymanowski
  Karol Maciej Szymanowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˌkarɔl ˌmat͡ɕɛj ʃɨmaˈnɔfskʲi]; 3 October 1882 – 28 March 1937) was a Polish composer and pianist.
  Szymanowski was born into a wealthy land-owning Polish gentry family (of the Korwin/Ślepowron coat-of-arms) in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus' Elisavetgrad School of Music from 1892. From 1901 he attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw, of which he was later director from 1926 until retiring in 1930. Musical opportunities in Russian-occupied Poland being quite limited at the time, he travelled widely throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. These travels, especially those to the Mediterranean area, provided much inspiration to the composer and esthete.
  The fruits of these trips included not only musical works, but poetry and his novel on Greek love Efebos, parts of which were subsequently lost in a fire in 1939. The central chapter was translated by him into Russian and given as a gift in 1919 to Boris Kochno, who was his beloved at the time. Szymanowski also wrote a number of love poems, in French, to the 15-year-old boy. Among these are Ganymède, Baedecker, N'importe, and Vagabond.
  
  wn.com/Karol_Szymanowski
• 
  Keith Jarrett
  Keith Jarrett (born May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania) is an American pianist and composer who performs both jazz and classical music.
  Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey, moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music; as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisations draw not only from the traditions of jazz, but from other genres as well, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
  In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first (and to this day only) recipient not to share the prize with a co-recipient, and in 2004 he received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize.
  In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame in the magazine's 73rd Annual Readers' Poll.
  Jarrett grew up in suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania, with significant early exposure to music. He possessed absolute pitch, and he displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons just before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program hosted by the swing bandleader Paul Whiteman. The young Jarrett gave his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions. Encouraged especially by his mother, Jarrett took intensive classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute.
  
  wn.com/Keith_Jarrett
• 
  Krystian Zimerman
  Krystian Zimerman (born December 5, 1956) is a Polish classical pianist who has been hailed as one of the finest living pianists.
  Zimerman was born in Zabrze, Poland, and studied at the University of Music in Katowice under Andrzej Jasiński. His career was launched when he won the 1975 Warsaw International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition. He performed with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan in 1976 and he made his debut in the United States with the New York Philharmonic in 1979. He has toured widely and made a number of recordings. Since 1996 he has taught piano at the Academy of Music in Basel, Switzerland.
  Zimerman is best known for his interpretations of Romantic music, but has performed a wide variety of classical pieces as well. He has also been a supporter of contemporary music. For example, Witold Lutosławski wrote his piano concerto for Zimerman, who later recorded it. Amongst his best-known recordings are the piano concerti of Edvard Grieg and Robert Schumann with conductor Herbert von Karajan; the Brahms concerti with Leonard Bernstein, the piano concerti of Frédéric Chopin, one recording conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini and a later one conducted by himself at the keyboard; the Third, Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos of Beethoven under Bernstein (Zimerman himself led the accompaniment of the Vienna Philharmonic from the keyboard in Beethoven's First and Second Concertos); the first and second piano concerti of Rachmaninoff; the piano concerti of Franz Liszt with Seiji Ozawa, the piano concerti of Maurice Ravel with Pierre Boulez, and solo piano works by Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy and Franz Schubert. In 2006, Zimerman recorded Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 with Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle (DG 477 5413; Limited Edition DG 477 6021).
  
  wn.com/Krystian_Zimerman
• 
  Krzysztof Penderecki
  Krzysztof Penderecki (Polish pronunciation: [ˈkʂɨʂtɔf pɛndɛˈrɛt͡skʲi] (Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki), born November 23, 1933 in Dębica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has changed to encompass a post-Romantic idiom.
  He has won prestigious awards including Grammy Awards in 1987 and 1998 and 2001, and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1992. He has been called Poland's greatest living composer.
  As well as the works already mentioned, his compositions include four operas, eight symphonies and other orchestral pieces, a variety of instrumental concertos, choral settings of mainly religious texts, as well as chamber and instrumental works.
  
  wn.com/Krzysztof_Penderecki
• 
  Kurt Masur
  Kurt Masur (born 18 July 1927) is a German conductor, particularly noted for his interpretation of German Romantic music.
  Masur was born in Brieg, Lower Silesia, Germany (now Brzeg in Poland) and studied piano, composition and conducting in Leipzig, Saxony. Masur has been married three times. His second wife, with whom he had a daughter, died in 1972 in a car accident in which Masur was severely injured. He and his third wife, Tomoko Sakurai, have a son, Ken-David, a classical singer and conductor.
  Masur conducted the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra for three years ending in 1958 and again from 1967 to 1972. He also worked with the Komische Oper of East Berlin. In 1970, he became Kapellmeister of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, serving in that post until 1996.
  In 1991, Masur succeeded Zubin Mehta as music director of the New York Philharmonic (NYP). During his tenure, there were reports of tension between Masur and the NYP's Executive Director at the time, Deborah Borda, which eventually contributed to his contract not being renewed beyond 2002. In a television interview with Charlie Rose, Masur stated that regarding his leaving the NYP, "it was not my wish". The root of the problem was a fundamental discordance in status between the Americas and Germany regarding employed personalities of standing. In the former case, the hired beneficiary is expected "to report" to the benefactor, in the latter, he expects a free hand to execute his tasks as he feels best on account of his (to be) recognized experience. Masur stepped down as the NYP's Music Director in 2002, and was named its Music Director Emeritus, a new title created for him. The critical consensus is that Masur improved the playing of the orchestra compared to his more pliable and forbearing predecessor.
  
  wn.com/Kurt_Masur
• Lars Ulrik Mortensen
  Lars Ulrik Mortensen is a Danish harpsichordist and conductor.
  He studied with Karen Englund (harpsichord) and Jesper Bøje Christensen (figured bass) at The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and with Trevor Pinnock in London.
  He has a career as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe, North and South America and Japan. From 1988 to 1990 he was harpsichordist in London Baroque, and from 1990 to 1993 he was a member of Collegium Musicum 90. He appears regularly with singer Emma Kirkby, violinist John Holloway and cellist and gambist Jaap ter Linden. He has recorded for Archiv Produktion (3rd harpsichord in Bach's 3- and 4-harpsichord concerti with The English Concert), harmonia mundi, Kontrapunkt and da capo and his recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations won him a Diapason d'Or. He is the artistic director of Concerto Copenhagen, and appears regularly directing opera at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. He is also the artistic director of the European Union Baroque Orchestra since 2004.
  
  wn.com/Lars_Ulrik_Mortensen
• 
  Leonard Bernstein
  Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
  His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.
  Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
  As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Bernstein
• 
  Leonard Cohen
  Leonard Norman Cohen, CC GOQ (born 21 September 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour.
  While giving the speech at Cohen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 10 March 2008, Lou Reed described Cohen as belonging to the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters."
  Cohen was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Montreal, Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family. He attended Roslyn Elementary School. His mother, Marsha Klinitsky, of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, emigrated from Lithuania while his great-grandfather emigrated from Poland. He grew up in Westmount on the Island of Montreal. His grandfather was Lyon Cohen, founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. His father, Nathan Cohen, who owned a substantial Montreal clothing store, died when Cohen was nine years old. On the topic of being a Kohen, Cohen has said that, "I had a very Messianic childhood." He told Richard Goldstein in 1967. "I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest." Cohen attended Westmount High School, beginning in 1948 where he was involved with the Student Council and studied music and poetry. He became especially interested in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. Although he initially played a regular acoustic guitar as a teenager, he soon switched to playing a classical guitar after meeting a young Spanish flamenco guitar player who taught him "a few chords and some flamenco."
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Cohen
• 
  Leonard Slatkin
  Leonard Edward Slatkin (born September 1, 1944) is an American conductor and composer.
  Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father Felix Slatkin was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet, and his mother Eleanor Aller was cellist with the quartet. His brother Frederick, now a cellist, traced the family's original name as Zlotkin, and adopted that form of the family surname for himself professionally. Frederick Zlotkin has spoken of the family lineage as follows:
  "The Zlotkin/Slatkin lineage is Russian-Jewish. The first Zlotkin arrival to the US was Felix's father, grandpa Chaim Peretz Zlotkin, who came to settle with relatives in St. Louis in 1904; he (or the clerk at Ellis Island) changed the name. He probably came from the town of Mogilev [now Mohyliv-Podilskyi], from a shtetl (the Russians forced most Jews to live in villages outside of the major cities)...The Altschuler [Aller] side of the family is really rife with musicians. Grisha's uncle, Modest Altschuler, was a cellist (making me 4th generation) and he had quite a career. Among other things, he did the St. Petersburg premiere of Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence Sextet. When he came to America he formed the Russian Symphony Orchestra (early 1900's)."
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Slatkin
• 
  Leopold Damrosch
  Leopold Damrosch (October 22, 1832 – February 15, 1885) was a German American orchestral conductor.
  Damrosch was born in Posen (Poznań), Kingdom of Prussia, the son of Heinrich Damrosch. His father was Jewish and his mother was Lutheran. Leopold Damrosch was baptized a Lutheran when marrying his wife, former opera singer Helene von Heimburg.
  Damrosch began his musical education at the age of nine, learning the violin against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to become a doctor. Capitulating to the wishes of his parents he entered the University of Berlin and completed his PhD in medicine but during his spare time he studied violin under Ries, and thorough bass with Dehn and Bohmer. After he completed his degree Damrosch decided to dedicate his life and energy to music. He gained fame as a violinist and began to play to large audiences in many major German cities including Berlin and Hamburg. He went to Weimar, and was received by Franz Liszt, who appointed him solo-violinist in the Ducal orchestra.
  
  wn.com/Leopold_Damrosch
• 
  Leopold Stokowski
  Leopold Anthony Stokowski (April 18, 1882 – September 13, 1977) was a British orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.
  In America, Stokowski performed with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony of the Air and many others. He was also the founder of the All-American Youth Orchestra, the New York City Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the music for and appeared in Disney's Fantasia and was a lifelong champion of contemporary composers, giving many premieres of new music during his 60-year conducting career. Stokowski, who made his official conducting debut in 1909, appeared in public for the last time in 1975 but continued making recordings until June 1977, a few months before his death at the age of 95.
  
  wn.com/Leopold_Stokowski
• 
  Leoš Janáček
  Leoš Janáček (Czech pronunciation: [ˈlɛoʃ ˈjanaːtʃɛk] ( listen), baptised Leo Eugen Janáček, 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera") at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorio Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, string quartets, other chamber works and operas. He is considered to rank with Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, as one of the most important Czech composers.
  
  wn.com/Leoš_Janáček
• 
  Lorin Maazel
  Lorin Varencove Maazel (born March 6, 1930) is an American conductor, violinist and composer.
  Maazel was born to Jewish-American parents of Russian origin in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and brought up in the United States, primarily at his parents' home in Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood. His father, Lincoln Maazel (1903–2009), was a singer, teacher of voice and piano, and an actor (he co-starred in George A. Romero's 1977 horror movie Martin); and his mother, Marion "Marie" Shulman Maazel (1894–1992), founded the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra. His grandfather Isaac was a violinist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for twenty years. Both Lincoln and Marie gave interviews for the Oral History Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, Lincoln’s in 1994, and Marie’s in 1974. These can be heard online.
  Lorin Maazel was a child prodigy, taking his first conducting lesson at age seven with Vladimir Bakaleinikov and making his debut at age eight. At the age of eleven, he guest conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra on the radio. At twelve he toured America to conduct major orchestras. He made his violin debut at the age of fifteen. He later studied at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  wn.com/Lorin_Maazel
• 
  Louis Andriessen
  Louis Andriessen (born 6 June 1939) is a Dutch composer and pianist based in Amsterdam. He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He was recipient of the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1959.
  Andriessen was born in Utrecht into a musical family, the son of the composer Hendrik Andriessen (1892–1981), brother of composers Jurriaan Andriessen (1925–1996) and Caecilia Andriessen (1931-), and nephew of Willem Andriessen (1887–1964).
  Andriessen originally studied with his father and Kees van Baaren at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, before embarking upon two years of study with Italian composer Luciano Berio in Milan and Berlin. He later joined the faculty of the Royal Conservatory where his notable students included Michael Zev Gordon, Steve Martland, Richard Ayres, Richard Baker, Jeff Hamburg, Ivana Kiš, Koji Nakano, Damien Ricketson, Patrick Saint-Denis, Juan Sebastian Lach, Michel van der Aa, Víctor Varela, Sinta Wullur and Jasna Veličković.
  In 1969 Andriessen co-founded STEIM in Amsterdam. He also helped found the instrumental groups Orkest de Volharding and Hoketus, both of which performed compositions of the same names. He later became closely involved in the ongoing Schonberg and Asko ensembles and inspired the formation of the British ensemble Icebreaker.
  
  wn.com/Louis_Andriessen
• 
  Louise Bourgeois
  Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French pronunciation: [lwiz buʁʒwa]; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010), was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman. In 2011 one of her Spider works sold for $10.7 million, a new record price for the artist at auction, and the highest price paid for a work by a woman artist.
  She is recognized today as the founder of confessional art.
  In the late 1940s, after moving to New York City with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, she turned to sculpture. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness. Her work was wholly autobiographical, inspired by her childhood trauma of discovering that her English governess was also her father’s mistress.
  Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France. She was the middle child of three born to parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration below their apartment in Choisy-le-Roi, for which Bourgeois filled in the designs where they had become worn.
  
  wn.com/Louise_Bourgeois
• Luciano Berio
  Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia for voices and orchestra and his series of numbered solo pieces titled Sequenza) and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.
  Berio was born at Oneglia (now part of Imperia). He was taught the piano by his father and grandfather who were both organists. During World War II he was conscripted into the army, but on his first day he injured his hand while learning how a gun worked, and spent time in a military hospital. Following the war, Berio studied at the Milan Conservatory under Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Giorgio Federico Ghedini. He was unable to continue studying the piano because of his injured hand, so instead concentrated on composition. In 1947 came the first public performance of one of his works, a suite for piano. Berio made a living at this time accompanying singing classes, and it was in doing this that he met American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, whom he married shortly after graduating (they divorced in 1964). Berio would write many pieces aimed at exploiting her very distinctive voice.
  
  wn.com/Luciano_Berio
• 
  Ludwig van Beethoven
  Ludwig van Beethoven (ⁱ/ˈlʊdvɪɡ væn ˈbeɪt.hoʊvən/; German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç fan ˈbeːt.hoːfən] ( listen); baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers.
  Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven moved to Vienna in his early 20s, studying with Joseph Haydn and quickly gaining a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. His hearing began to deteriorate in his late twenties, yet he continued to compose, conduct, and perform, even after becoming completely deaf.
  Beethoven was the grandson of a musician of Flemish origin named Lodewijk van Beethoven (1712–73) who moved at the age of twenty to Bonn. Lodewijk (Ludwig is the German cognate of Dutch Lodewijk) was employed as a bass singer at the court of the Elector of Cologne, eventually rising to become Kapellmeister (music director). Lodewijk had one son, Johann (1740–1792), who worked as a tenor in the same musical establishment, and gave lessons on piano and violin to supplement his income. Johann married Maria Magdalena Keverich in 1767; she was the daughter of Johann Heinrich Keverich, who had been the head chef at the court of the Archbishopric of Trier.
  
  wn.com/Ludwig_van_Beethoven
• 
  Malcolm Sargent
  Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent (29 April 1895 – 3 October 1967) was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy. Despite this, he was co-founder of the London Philharmonic, was the first conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic as a full-time ensemble, and played an important part in saving the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from disbandment in the 1960s.
  As chief conductor of London's internationally famous summer music festival the Proms from 1948 to 1967, Sargent was one of the best-known English conductors. When he took over the Proms from their founder, Sir Henry Wood, he and two assistants conducted the two-month season between them. By the time he died, he was assisted by a large international roster of guest conductors.
  
  wn.com/Malcolm_Sargent
• 
  Marc Chagall
  Marc Chagall (/ʃəˈɡɑːl/ shə-GAHL;Russian: Марк Заха́рович Шага́л; (7 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian-French artist associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
  Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century". According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
  
  wn.com/Marc_Chagall
• 
  Maurice Ravel
  Joseph-Maurice Ravel (March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937) was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire.
  Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation.
  Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work Boléro (1928), which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music".
  According to SACEM, Ravel's estate earns more royalties than that of any other French composer. According to the law of most countries (including all members of the World Trade Organization), Ravel's works have been in the public domain since January 1, 2008, in most countries.
  
  wn.com/Maurice_Ravel
• Michala Petri
  Michala Petri (born 7 July 1958 in Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish recorder player. Petri is sought after as a soloist with many noted orchestras, including the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. She has released 34 recordings, toured extensively over four continents, and has had dozens of pieces written for her. Her debut as a soloist was in 1969.
  Petri, who began playing the recorder at the age of three, is noted for her virtuosity and versatility across a wide range of styles, from the baroque repertoire of the height of the instrument's popularity to contemporary works written particularly for her. She has premiered dozens of works, by composers Malcolm Arnold, Gordon Jacob and Richard Harvey, as well as Daniel Börtz, Erik Haumann, Hans Kunstovny, Erling Bjerno, Thomas Koppel, Ove Benzen, Vagn Holmboe, Piers Hellawell, Gary Kulesha, Asger Lund Christiansen, Egil Harder, Michael Berkeley, Butch Lacy, Miklos Maros, Ezra Laderman, Jens Bjerre, Henning Christiansen, Niels Viggo Bentzon, Axel Borup Jørgensen, and Gunnar Berg.
  
  wn.com/Michala_Petri
• 
  Miles Davis
  Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion.
  Miles Dewey Davis was born on May 26, 1926, to an affluent African American family in Alton, Illinois. His father, Dr. Miles Henry Davis, was a dentist. In 1927 the family moved to East St. Louis, Illinois. They also owned a substantial ranch in northern Arkansas, where Davis learned to ride horses as a boy.
  Davis' mother, Cleota Mae (Henry) Davis, wanted her son to learn the piano; she was a capable blues pianist but kept this fact hidden from her son. His musical studies began at 13, when his father gave him a trumpet and arranged lessons with local musician Elwood Buchanan. Davis later suggested that his father's instrument choice was made largely to irk his wife, who disliked the trumpet's sound. Against the fashion of the time, Buchanan stressed the importance of playing without vibrato; he was reported to have slapped Davis' knuckles every time he started using heavy vibrato. Davis would carry his clear signature tone throughout his career. He once remarked on its importance to him, saying, "I prefer a round sound with no attitude in it, like a round voice with not too much tremolo and not too much bass. Just right in the middle. If I can’t get that sound I can’t play anything."Clark Terry was another important early influence.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Miles_Davis
• 
  Miriam Makeba
  Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 10 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a Grammy Award winning South African singer and civil rights activist.
  In the 1960s she was the first artist from Africa to popularize African music in the U.S. and around the world. She is best known for the song "Pata Pata", first recorded in 1957 and released in the U.S. in 1967. She recorded and toured with many popular artists, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, and her former husband Hugh Masekela.
  She actively campaigned against the South African system of apartheid. As a result, the South African government revoked her citizenship and right of return. After the end of apartheid she returned home. She died on 10 November 2008 after performing in a concert organized to support writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a mafia-like organisation local to the Region of Campania.
  Zenzile Miriam Makeba was born in Johannesburg in 1932. Her mother was a Swazi sangoma (traditional healer-herbalist). Her father, who died when she was six years old, was a Xhosa. When she was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested for selling umqombothi, an African homemade beer brewed from malt and cornmeal. Her mother was sentenced to a six-month prison term, so Miriam spent her first six months of life in jail. As a child, she sang in the choir of the Kilmerton Training Institute in Pretoria, a primary school that she attended for eight years.
  
  wn.com/Miriam_Makeba
• Mogens Wöldike
  Mogens Wöldike (5 July 1897, Copenhagen – 20 October 1988, Copenhagen) was a Danish conductor, choirmaster, organist, and scholar known for his interpretation of music from the Baroque and Classical periods. His son-in-law was the Haydn scholar Jens Peter Larsen.
  He studied under Carl Nielsen and Thomas Laub and graduated from Copenhagen University in 1920. He was organist at the Marine church in 1924 and the Christiansborg Palace Church from 1931; from 1959 to 1972 he was organist at Copenhagen Cathedral.
  After the war he conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and from 1950-67 worked regularly with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
  He composed sets of organ chorales published in 1943, 1960 and 1972.
  He was the founder of the Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir.
  He is the 1976 laureate of the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, the most prestigious musical award in Denmark.
  He left many recordings. After a series of mainly baroque records in the 1930s, he recorded Saul, the St Matthew Passion, Mass in time of War, a number of Haydn symphonies, Nielsen concertos and choral works.
  
  wn.com/Mogens_Wöldike
• Nikolai Sokoloff
  Nikolai Sokoloff (28 May 1886 – 25 September 1965), was a Russia-American conductor and violinist. He was born in Kiev, and studied music at Yale. From 1916 to 1917 he was musical director of the San Francisco People's Philharmonic Orchestra, where he insisted on including women in his orchestra and paying them the same as men. Sokoloff was the founding conductor and music director of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1918 where he remained until 1932. Between 1935 and 1938 he directed the Federal Music Project, a New Deal program that employed musicians to perform and educate the public about music. From 1938 to 1941 he directed the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Nikolai_Sokoloff
• Nikolaus Harnoncourt
  Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt) (born 6 December 1929) is an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier. Starting out as a classical cellist, he founded his own period instrument ensemble in the 1950s, and became a pioneer of the Early Music movement. Around 1970, Harnoncourt started to conduct opera and concert performances, soon leading renowned international symphony orchestras, and appearing at leading concert halls, operatic venues and festivals. His repertoire has since widened to include composers of the 19th and 20th century. In 2001 and 2003, he conducted the Vienna New Year's Concert. Harnoncourt is also the author of several books, mostly on questions of performance history and musical aesthetics.
  Harnoncourt was born in Berlin, Germany. He was raised in Graz, Austria and studied music in Vienna. His mother, Ladislaja Gräfin von Meran, Freiin von Brandhoven, was the granddaughter of the Habsburg Archduke Johann, the 13th child of the Emperor Leopold II. He is thus descended from various Holy Roman Emperors and other European royalty. His father, Eberhard de la Fontaine Graf d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt, was an engineer working in Berlin who had two children from a previous marriage. Two years after Nikolaus's birth, his brother Philipp was born. The family eventually moved to Graz, where Eberhard had obtained a post in the state-government (Landesregierung) of Styria.
  
  wn.com/Nikolaus_Harnoncourt
• 
  Olivier Messiaen
  Olivier Messiaen (French pronunciation: [ɔlivje mɛsjɑ̃]; December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992) was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources); harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations. Many of his compositions depict what he termed "the marvellous aspects of the faith", and drew on his deeply held Roman Catholicism.
  He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences such as Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He said he perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords, particularly those built from his modes (a phenomenon known as synaesthesia); combinations of these colours, he said, were important in his compositional process. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many exotic musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works). He was one of the first composers to use an electronic keyboard—in this case, the ondes Martenot—in an orchestral work.
  
  wn.com/Olivier_Messiaen
• 
  Oscar Peterson
  Oscar Emmanuel Peterson CC CQ OOnt (August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007) was a Canadian jazz pianist and composer. He was called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, "O.P." by his friends. He released over 200 recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, and received other numerous awards and honours over the course of his career. He is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, having played thousands of live concerts to audiences worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years.
  Peterson was born to immigrants from the West Indies; his father worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railway. Peterson grew up in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Quebec. It was in this predominantly black neighbourhood that he found himself surrounded by the jazz culture that flourished in the early 20th century. At the age of five, Peterson began honing his skills with the trumpet and piano. However, a bout of tuberculosis at age seven prevented him from playing the trumpet again, and so he directed all his attention to the piano. His father, Daniel Peterson, an amateur trumpeter and pianist, was one of his first music teachers, and his sister Daisy taught young Oscar classical piano. Young Oscar was persistent at practising scales and classical etudes daily, and thanks to such arduous practice he developed his astonishing virtuosity.
  
  wn.com/Oscar_Peterson
• 
  Patrice Chéreau
  Patrice Chéreau (pronounced: [pa.tʁis ʃe.ʁo]; born 2 November 1944) is a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor, and producer.
  Patrice Chéreau was born in Lézigné, Maine-et-Loire, and went to school in Paris. At a young age he became well-known to Parisian critics as director, actor, and stage manager of his high-school theatre (lycée Louis-le-Grand). At 15, he was enthusiastically celebrated as a theatre prodigy. In 1964, at the age of 19, he began directing for the professional theatre. In 1966 he created a very busy Public-Theatre at the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville. In 1969, he staged his first opera. The following year he established a close relationship with the leadership of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. In 1975 he worked in Germany for the first time directing Edward Bond's Lear. He often collaborated with Claude Stratz. He began his relationship with his lover and favorite actor Pascal Greggory in 1987.
  Chereau's most discussed production was his 1976 centennial staging of Richard Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Polarizing fans and critics, Chereau chose to set the operas during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, and was thought to have emphasized the dramatic rather than the musical elements of the works.
  
  wn.com/Patrice_Chéreau
• 
  Patti Smith
  Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
  Called the "Godmother of Punk", her work was a fusion of rock and poetry. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.
  
  wn.com/Patti_Smith
• 
  Paul McCartney
  Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of the Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), he has been described by Guinness World Records as "The Most Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time", with 60 gold discs and sales of over 100 million albums and 100 million singles. With John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, he gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and with Lennon formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. After leaving the Beatles, he began a solo career and later formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine.
  According to the BBC, his Beatles song "Yesterday" has been covered by over 2,200 artists—more than any other song. Wings' 1977 release, "Mull of Kintyre", became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK, and he is "the most successful songwriter" in UK chart history, according to Guinness. As a songwriter or co-writer, he is included on thirty-one number one titles on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2012 he has sold over 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the United States.
  
  wn.com/Paul_McCartney
• Per Nørgård
  Per Nørgård (pronounced [ˈpʰeɐ̯ ˈnɶɐ̯ɡ̊ɒːˀ]) (born July 13, 1932) is a Danish composer.
  Nørgård was born in Gentofte, Denmark. He studied with Vagn Holmboe at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and subsequently with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. To begin with, he was strongly influenced by the Nordic styles of Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen and Vagn Holmboe. In the 1960s, Nørgård began exploring the modernist techniques of central Europe, eventually developing a serial compositional system based on the "infinity series" (Nørgård 1975), which he used in his Voyage into the Golden Screen, the Second and Third Symphonies, I Ching, and other works of the late 1960s and 70s (Mortensen [n.d.]). Later he became interested in the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli, who inspired many of Nørgård's works (Anon [n.d.]), including the 4th symphony, the opera Det Guddommelige Tivoli and Papalagi for solo guitar.
  Nørgård has composed works in all major genres: six operas, two ballets, seven symphonies and other pieces for orchestra, several concertos, choral and vocal works, an enormous number of chamber works (among them ten string quartets) and several solo instrumental works. These include a number of works for the guitar, mostly written for the Danish guitarist Erling Møldrup: In Memory Of... (1978), Papalagi (1981), a series of suites called Tales from a Hand (1985–2001), Early Morn (1997–98) and Rondino Amorino (1999). One of his most important works for percussion solo is I Ching (1982) for the Danish percussionist Gert Mortensen. He has also composed music for several films, including The Red Cloak (1966), Babette's Feast (1987), and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1993).
  
  wn.com/Per_Nørgård
• 
  Peter Eisenman
  Peter Eisenman (born August 11, 1932 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc. A certain fragmenting of forms visible in some of Eisenman's projects has been identified as characteristic of an eclectic group of architects that were (self-)labeled as deconstructivists, and who were featured in an exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Modern Art. The heading also refers to the storied relationship and collaborations between Peter Eisenman and post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Eisenman
• 
  Peter Gabriel
  Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer, musician, and songwriter who rose to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career. His 1986 album, So, is his most commercially successful, and the album's biggest hit, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, and the song is the most played music video in the history of the station.
  More recently, Gabriel has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. He has also been involved in various humanitarian efforts. Gabriel has won numerous music awards throughout his career, including three Brit Awards—winning Best British Male in 1987, six Grammy Awards, thirteen MTV Video Music Awards, and in 2007 he was honoured as a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his “influence on generations of music makers.” Gabriel was also awarded the Polar Music Prize in 2009, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Gabriel
• Peter Lieberson
  Peter Lieberson (October 25, 1946, New York City  – April 23, 2011, Tel Aviv, Israel) was an American composer. He was the son of ballerina and choreographer Vera Zorina (née Eva Brigitta Hartwig) and Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records.
  He studied composition with Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, and Martin Boykan. After completing his musical studies at Columbia University, he left New York in 1976 for Boulder, Colorado to continue his studies with Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master. It was there he met and married Ellen Kearney, a fellow student of Chogyam Trungpa. At the request of their teacher, the Liebersons moved from Boulder to Boston, Massachusetts to co-direct Shambhala Training, a meditation and cultural program.
  He attended Brandeis University, from which he received a Ph.D. From 1984-88 he taught at Harvard University. He then became international director of Shambhala Training in Halifax, Nova Scotia.^{[citation needed]}
  Since 1994, Lieberson devoted his time entirely to composition. He met his second wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in 1997 during the Santa Fe Opera production of his work Ashoka's Dream and they married in 1999 after he and his first wife were divorced. He wrote his song cycles Rilke Songs and Neruda Songs for Hunt Lieberson. The Neruda Songs were co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony; the world premiere was given on May 20, 2005, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Hunt Lieberson as soloist.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Lieberson
• 
  Peter Schreier
  Peter Schreier (born 29 July 1935) is a German tenor and conductor.
  Schreier was born in Meissen, Saxony, and spent his first years in the small village of Gauernitz, near Meissen, where his father was a teacher, cantor and organist. In June 1945, when Schreier was almost ten years old, and just a few months after the destruction of Dresden, he entered the boarding school of the famous Dresden boys' choir, the Dresdner Kreuzchor (Choir of the Kreuzkirche or Church of the Cross). The choir had just been re-established. The young Peter and the few other choir members and teachers lived in a cellar in the outskirts of Dresden.
  The conductor of the Kreuzchor, Rudolf Mauersberger, soon recognized Peter Schreier's great talent. He let him sing many solo alto parts and also created compositions that perfectly fitted Peter's boy voice. Solo recordings of Peter Schreier were made at the time (1948-1951) and are obtainable on compact disc even today.
  Schreier was 16 years old when his voice broke, and he became a tenor, as he had passionately wished, because of the several Evangelists - all tenors - in J.S. Bach's Passions and in his Christmas Oratorio. After he had decided to become a professional singer he took lessons, at first privately, then later on at the Dresden Academy of Music. He had enough time to also study choral and orchestral conducting.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Schreier
• 
  Pierre Boulez
  Pierre Boulez (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ bu.lɛːz]) (born 26 March 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.
  Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics. He pursued the latter at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and the wife of Arthur Honegger, Andrée Vaurabourg.
  Through Messiaen, Boulez discovered twelve-tone technique — which he would later study privately with René Leibowitz — and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead.
  The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le visage nuptial and Le soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Boulez
• 
  Pina Bausch
  Philippina "Pina" Bausch (27 July 1940 – 30 June 2009) was a German performer of modern dance, choreographer, dance teacher and ballet director. With her unique style, a blend of movements, sounds and prominent stage sets, and with her elaborate cooperation with performers during the composition of a piece (a style now known as Tanztheater), she became a leading influence since the 1970s in the world of modern dance.
  Bausch was born in Solingen, near Düsseldorf, the third and youngest child of August and Anita Bausch, who owned a restaurant with guest rooms.
  Bausch began dancing at a young age. In 1955 at the age of 14 she entered the Folkwangschule in Essen then directed by Germany's most influential choreographer Kurt Jooss, one of the founders of German Expressionist dance.
  After graduation in 1959, Bausch left Germany with a scholarship to continue her studies at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1960, where her teachers included Antony Tudor, José Limón, and Paul Taylor. Bausch was soon performing with Tudor at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, and with Paul Taylor at New American Ballet. When in 1960 Taylor was invited to premiere a new work named Tablet in Spoleto, Italy, he took Bausch with him. In New York she also performed with the Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer Dance Company, with which she collaborated on two pieces in 1961.
  
  wn.com/Pina_Bausch
• 
  Plácido Domingo
  Plácido Domingo (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈplaθiðo ðoˈmiŋɡo]; born 21 January 1941), born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range. In March 2008, he debuted in his 128th opera role, and as of July 2011, his 136 roles give Domingo more roles than any other tenor.
  One of The Three Tenors, he has also taken on conducting opera and concert performances, and he is the General Director of the Los Angeles Opera in California.
  Plácido Domingo was born on January 21, 1941, in the distrito de Retiro section of Madrid, Spain, and in 1949 moved to Mexico with his family, who ran a zarzuela company. He studied piano at first privately and later at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City.
  In 1957, Domingo made his first professional appearance, performing with his mother in a concert at Mérida, Yucatán. He made his opera debut performing in Manuel Fernández Caballero's zarzuela, Gigantes y cabezudos, singing a baritone role. At that time, he was working with his parents' zarzuela company, taking baritone roles and as an accompanist for other singers. Among his first performances was a minor role in the first Mexican production of My Fair Lady where he was also the assistant conductor and assistant coach. The company gave 185 performances, which included a production of Lehár's The Merry Widow in which he performed alternately as either Camille or Danilo.
  
  wn.com/Plácido_Domingo
• 
  Péter Eötvös
  Péter Eötvös (pronounced [ˈpeːtɛr ˈøtvøʃ]; Hungarian: Eötvös Péter) (born January 2, 1944) is a Hungarian composer and conductor.
  Eötvös was born in Odorheiu Secuiesc/Székelyudvarhely, Szeklerland, Transylvania (then part of Hungary, now in Romania). He studied composition in Budapest and Cologne. From 1962, he composed for film in Hungary. Eötvös played regularly with the Stockhausen Ensemble between 1968 and 1976. From 1979 to 1991, he was Musical Director and conductor of the Ensemble InterContemporain (EIC). From 1985 to 1988, he was principal guest conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He is principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra since 2003. The recording of Berio’s Sinfonia with Peter Eötvös and London Voices (DG) received the BBC Music Magazine’s Award for “Technical excellence in recording” in 2006.
  Eötvös's music shows the influence of a variety of composers. As director of the Ensemble InterContemporain, he was exposed to many exotic and respected samples of concert music, as is evidenced in the variety of timbres and sound-worlds within his music. Extended techniques such as over-pressure bowings coexist with lyrical folk songs, and synthesized sounds. Eötvös also is technologically competent, and provides detailed instructions on how to mix instruments for electronic manipulation or amplification. His first large scale compositions were for film. This often reflects on his later pieces in moments of atmospheric airiness. Two of his compositions for orchestra and voice, Atlantis and Ima, were inspired by Sándor Weöres' poem Néma zene.
  
  wn.com/Péter_Eötvös
• 
  Quincy Jones
  Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American record producer, conductor, arranger, film composer, television producer, and trumpeter. His career spans five decades in the entertainment industry and a record 79 Grammy Award nominations, 27 Grammys, including a Grammy Legend Award in 1991. He is particularly recognized as the producer of the album Thriller, by pop icon Michael Jackson, which has sold more than 110 million copies worldwide, and as the producer and conductor of the charity song “We Are the World”.
  In 1968, Jones and his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song "The Eyes of Love" from the Universal Pictures film Banning. That same year, he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year when he was nominated for Best Original Score for his work on the music of the 1967 film In Cold Blood. In 1971, Jones would receive the honor of becoming the first African American to be named musical director/conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony. He was the first African American to win the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 1995. He is tied with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African American, each of them having seven nominations. At the 2008 BET Awards, Quincy Jones was presented with the Humanitarian Award. He was played by Larenz Tate in the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles, Ray.
  
  wn.com/Quincy_Jones
• Rafael Kubelík
  Rafael Jeroným Kubelík (29 June 1914 – 11 August 1996) was a Czech conductor and composer.
  Kubelík was born in Býchory, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, today's Czech Republic. He was the sixth child of the Bohemian violinist Jan Kubelík, whom the younger Kubelík described as "a kind of god to me". His mother was a Hungarian countess, Anna Julie Marie Széll von Bessenyö. Kubelík studied violin with his father, and later violin, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory. He graduated from the conservatory in 1933, at the age of 19; at his graduation concert he played a Paganini concerto and a composition of his own for violin and orchestra. Kubelík was also an accomplished pianist, and served as his father's piano accompanist on a tour of the United States in 1935.
  In 1939, Kubelík became music director of the Brno Opera, a position he held until the Nazis shut the company down on 12 November 1941. The Nazis allowed the Czech Philharmonic to continue operating, and Kubelík became its principal conductor. (He had first conducted the Czech Philharmonic in 1934 when he was 20 years old.) In 1944, after various incidents, including one in which he declined to greet the Nazi Reichsprotektor Karl Hermann Frank with a Hitler salute — along with his refusal to conduct Wagner during the War — Kubelík "deemed it advisable to disappear from Prague and to spend a few months undercover in the countryside so as not to fall into the clutches of the SS or Gestapo".
  
  wn.com/Rafael_Kubelík
• 
  Ravi Shankar
  Ravi Shankar (Bengali: রবি শংকর; born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7 April 1920), often referred to with the title Pandit, is an Indian musician and composer who plays the plucked string instrument sitar. He has been described as the most known contemporary Indian musician by Hans Neuhoff in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
  Shankar was born in Varanasi and spent his youth touring Europe and India with the dance group of his brother Uday Shankar. He gave up dancing in 1938 to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin Khan. After finishing his studies in 1944, Shankar worked as a composer, creating the music for the Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray, and was music director of All India Radio, New Delhi, from 1949 to 1956.
  In 1956, he began to tour Europe and America playing Indian classical music and increased its popularity there in the 1960s through teaching, performance, and his association with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison of The Beatles. Shankar engaged Western music by writing concerti for sitar and orchestra and toured the world in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1986 to 1992 he served as a nominated member of the upper chamber of the Parliament of India. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999, and received three Grammy Awards. He continues to perform in the 2000s, often with his daughter Anoushka.
  
  wn.com/Ravi_Shankar
• 
  Ray Charles
  Ray Charles Robinson (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004), known by his shortened stage name Ray Charles, was an American musician. He was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings with Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. While with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.Frank Sinatra called Charles “the only true genius in show business.”
  The influences upon his music were mainly jazz, blues, rhythm and blues and country artists of the day such as Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Charles Brown, Louis Armstrong. His playing reflected influences from country blues and barrelhouse, and stride piano styles.
  Rolling Stone ranked Charles number ten on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004, and number two on their November 2008 list of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In honoring Charles, Billy Joel noted: "This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things . . . Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work?"
  
  wn.com/Ray_Charles
• René Leibowitz
  René Leibowitz (17 February 1913 – 29 August 1972) was a French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher born in Warsaw, Poland.
  During the early 1930s, Leibowitz studied composition and orchestration with Maurice Ravel in Paris, where he was introduced to Arnold Schoenberg's Twelve-note technique by the German pianist and composer Erich Itor Kahn. He subsequently studied with Schoenberg's pupil Anton Webern. Many of the works of the Second Viennese School were first heard in France at the International Festival of Chamber Music established by Leibowitz in Paris in 1947. Leibowitz was highly influential in establishing the reputation of the Second Viennese School, both through activity as a teacher in Paris after WWII and through his book Schoenberg et son ecole, published in 1947 and translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and his School (US and UK editions 1949). This was among the earliest theoretical treatises written on Schoenberg's 12-tone method of composition. Leibowitz's advocacy of the Schoenberg school was taken further by his two most gifted pupils, each taking different paths in promoting the musics of Schoenberg, Webern and the development of serialism, namely Pierre Boulez and Jacques-Louis Monod. His American students include the composers Will Ogdon, Janet Maguire, the conductor David Montgomery, and the avant-garde film director-animator John Whitney.
  
  wn.com/René_Leibowitz
• 
  Renée Fleming
  Renée Fleming (born February 14, 1959) is an American soprano specializing in opera and lieder. Fleming has a full lyric soprano voice. Fleming has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano repertoires. She has sung roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. She also speaks fluent German and French, along with limited Italian. Her signature roles include Countess Almaviva in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, the title role in Dvořák's Rusalka, the title role in Massenet's Manon, the title role in Massenet's Thaïs, the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and the title role in Arabella.
  A Richard Tucker Award winner, she regularly performs in opera houses and concert halls worldwide. In 2008 she was awarded the Swedish Polar Music Prize for her services in music.
  Conductor Sir Georg Solti said of Fleming, "In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing; the other was Renata Tebaldi."
  
  wn.com/Renée_Fleming
• 
  Riccardo Muti
  Riccardo Muti, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [rikˈkardo ˈmuːti]; born 28 July 1941) is an Italian conductor and music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
  Muti was born in Naples but spent his early childhood in Molfetta, near Bari, in the long region of Apulia on Italy's southern Adriatic coast. His father was a doctor in Molfetta and an amateur singer; his mother, a Neapolitan, was a professional singer. As wryly explained in the conductor's 2010 autobiography, it was a family pattern for the children to be born in Naples.
  Muti graduated from Liceo classico (Classical Lyceum) Vittorio Emanuele II in Naples, then studied piano at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella under Vincenzo Vitale; here Muti was awarded a diploma cum laude. He was subsequently awarded a diploma in Composition and Conducting by the Conservatory "Giuseppe Verdi", Milan, where he studied with the composer Bruno Bettinelli and the conductor Antonino Votto. He has also studied composition with Nino Rota, whom he considers a mentor. He was unanimously awarded first place by the jury of the "Guido Cantelli" competition for conductors in Milan in 1967 and became, the next year, principal conductor and music director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, a post he held for eleven years.
  
  wn.com/Riccardo_Muti
• 
  Richard Wagner
  Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( /ˈvɑːɡnər/; German pronunciation: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.
  Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Wagner
• 
  Robert Moog
  Robert Arthur "Bob" Moog (/ˈmoʊɡ/ MOHG; May 23, 1934 – August 21, 2005), founder of Moog Music, was an American pioneer of electronic music, best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
  Bob Moog's innovative electronic design is employed in numerous synthesizers including the Minimoog Model D, Minimoog Voyager, Little Phatty, Moog Taurus Bass Pedals, Moog Minitaur, and the Moogerfooger line of effects pedals.
  A native of New York City, Moog attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1952. Moog earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Queens College, New York in 1957, another in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell University. Moog's awards include honorary doctorates from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (New York City) and Lycoming College (Williamsport, Pennsylvania).
  During his lifetime, Moog founded two companies for manufacturing electronic musical instruments. He also worked as a consultant and vice president for new product research at Kurzweil Music Systems from 1984 to 1988, helping to develop the Kurzweil K2000. He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Moog
• 
  Robert Schumann
  Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law to return to music, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.
  Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder (songs for voice and piano); four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Works such as Kinderszenen, Album für die Jugend, Blumenstück and Albumblätter are among his most famous. His writings about music appeared mostly in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication which he jointly founded.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Schumann
• 
  Rosemarie Trockel
  Rosemarie Trockel (born November 13, 1952 in Schwerte, North Rhine-Westphalia) is a German Artist, and an important figure in the international contemporary art movement.
  From 1970–1978, Trockel addressed contemporary concerns, particularly women and their place in the art world. Her work challenged concepts of sexuality, culture, and artistic production. In the 1980s she had important solo shows in the United States, for example at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
  Trockel's "knitting pictures", produced in 1985, consist of lengths of machine-knitted, woollen material stretched on to frames. The material is patterned with computer-generated geometrical motifs, or with recognizable logos, such as the hammer and sickle motif of the Soviet Union superimposed on a background of red and white stripes reminiscent of the US flag. Another of Trockel's pieces consists of a steel cube fitted with six hot plates in two parallel, diagonal lines, meant to establish a bridge between the feminine domain of cooking and the masculine domain of industrial production. Aside from the knitted and patterned logos, she has also made a series of pictures of webs made by spiders under the influence of LSD, hashish, or mescaline. She says it depicts their loneliness and their weak figures, because their webs would not be strong enough to catch prey to survive. They would eventually die. The spider web series can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  
  wn.com/Rosemarie_Trockel
• Rudolf Kempe
  Rudolf Kempe (born 14 June 1910 in Dresden, died 12 May 1976 in Zürich) was a German conductor.
  Kempe was born in Dresden, where from the age of fourteen he studied at the Dresden State Opera School. He played oboe in the opera orchestra of Dortmund and then in the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, from 1929. In addition to oboe, he played the piano regularly, as a soloist, in chamber music or accompanying, as a result of which, in 1933, the new Director of the Leipzig Opera invited Kempe to become a répétiteur, and later a conductor, for the opera.
  During the Second World War Kempe was conscripted into the army, but instead of active service was directed into musical activities, playing for the troops and later taking over the chief conductorship of the Chemnitz opera house.
  Kempe directed the Dresden Opera and the Dresden Staatskapelle from 1949 to 1952, making his first records, including Der Rosenkavalier, Die Meistersinger and Der Freischütz. ‘He obtains some superlative playing from the Dresden orchestra,’ commented The Record Guide. He maintained a relationship with the Dresden orchestra for the rest of his life, making some of his best-known records with them during the stereo era.
  
  wn.com/Rudolf_Kempe
• Sebastian Currier
  Sebastian Currier (born March 16, 1959) is an American composer of music for chamber groups and orchestras. He was also a professor of music at Columbia University from 1999 to 2007.
  Currier was raised in Providence, RI, in a family of talented musicians, including his brother Nathan Currier, also a noted composer. Sebastian Currier received degrees from the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music. His compositions include Crossfade, written for two harps, and Microsymph, described as a "30-minute symphony compressed into 10 minutes."
  In October 2005, members of the Berlin Philharmonic performed an entire evening of his works, including the premiere of Remix.
  Currier completed the orchestration of Stephen Albert's Symphony No. 2, half of which was unfinished at the time of Albert's death. It was subsequently recorded on Naxos Records along with Albert's Symphony No. 1 Riverrun, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
  Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter has recorded Currier's Aftersong, which the composer dedicated to her. On June 2, 2011, she also premiered his "Time Machines" (composed in 2007 and reworked by the composer in 2011) with the Slovak Roman Patkoló playing the contrabasso and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Alan Gilbert. His Piano Concerto was premiered in April 2007 by Emma Tahmizian.
  
  wn.com/Sebastian_Currier
• 
  Sergiu Celibidache
  Sergiu Celibidache (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈserd͡ʒju t͡ʃelibiˈdake]; 28 June 1912 – 14 August 1996) was a Romanian conductor.
  Celibidache was born in Roman, Romania, and began his studies in music with the piano, after which he studied music, philosophy and mathematics in Bucharest, Romania and then in Paris. One of the most important influences in his life was his introduction to Martin Steinke, who, being knowledgeable about Buddhism, heavily affected Celibidache's outlook for the rest of his life.
  Sergiu Celibidache studied in Berlin and, from 1945 to 1952, he was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. He later worked with radio orchestras in Stockholm, Stuttgart and Paris. He also worked in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, due partly to the promotional efforts of the pianist Eileen Joyce and her partner, an artists' agent. Joyce said that Celibidache was the greatest conductor she had ever worked with - "he was the only one who got inside my soul". In 1970 he was awarded Denmark's Sonning Award. From 1979 until his death he was music director of the Munich Philharmonic. He regularly taught at Mainz University in Germany and in 1984 taught at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Teaching was a major focus throughout his life and his courses were frequently open to all without fee. Among his notable students are Françoys Bernier, Jordi Mora, Peter Perret, and Markand Thakar.
  
  wn.com/Sergiu_Celibidache
• Simon Bainbridge
  Simon Bainbridge (born 30 August 1952 in London) is a British composer, and a professor and former head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music,London, and visiting professor at the University of Louisville, Kentucky in the United States.
  Simon Bainbridge had his first major break with Spirogyra, written in 1970 while he was still a student. This work displays a passion for intricate and sensuous textures that remain the hallmark of Bainbridge’s style today. He was educated at Highgate School and the Royal College of Music. After graduating from the Royal College of Music, he studied with Schuller at Tanglewood; his fondness for American culture is occasionally portrayed in works such as Concerto in Moto Perpetuo (1983), which contains echoes of American minimalism, and the be-bop inspired For Miles (1994). In the 1990s his work took on a new expressive dimension such as in Ad Ora Incerta (1994) which earned him the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 1997.
  Bainbridge was Head of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1999 to 2007, and was one of the first four Professors to be appointed in 2000 with the Academy's status as a constituent college of the University of London.
  
  wn.com/Simon_Bainbridge
• 
  Simon Rattle
  Sir Simon Denis Rattle, CBE (born 19 January 1955) is an English conductor. He rose to international prominence as conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and since 2002 has been principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO).
  Rattle was born in Liverpool, the son of Pauline Lila Violet (Greening) and Denis Guttridge Rattle, a Commander in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Liverpool College. Although Rattle studied piano and violin, his early work with orchestras was as a percussionist. He entered the Royal Academy of Music, University of London in 1971. There, his teachers included John Carewe. In 1974, his graduation year, Rattle won the John Player Conductor Competition. After organising and conducting a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony whilst still at the Academy, he was talent-spotted by the music agent Martin Campbell-White, of Harold Holt Ltd. (now Askonas Holt Ltd.), who has since managed Rattle's career. He spent the academic year 1980/81 at St Anne's College, Oxford studying English Language and Literature. He had been attracted to the college by the reputation of Dorothy Bednarowska, Fellow and Tutor in English. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St Anne's in 1991. He was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Music honoris causa of the University of Oxford in 1999.
  
  wn.com/Simon_Rattle
• 
  Sofia Gubaidulina
  Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, (Russian: Софи́я Асгатовна Губайду́лина, Tatar Cyrillic: София Әсгать кызы Гобәйдуллина, Latin: Sofia Äsğät qızı Ğöbäydullina) (born October 24, 1931) is a Russian composer of half Russian, half Tatar ethnicity.
  Gubaidulina's music is marked by the use of unusual instrumental combinations. In Erwartung combines percussion (bongos, güiros, temple blocks, cymbals and tam-tams among others), bayan and saxophone quartet.
  Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol, in the Tatar ASSR. She studied composition and piano at the Kazan Conservatory, graduating in 1954. In Moscow she undertook further studies at the Conservatory with Nikolay Peyko until 1959, and then with Shebalin until 1963. She was awarded with Stalin-fellowship. Her music was deemed "irresponsible" during her studies in Soviet Russia, due to its exploration of alternative tunings. She was supported, however, by Dmitri Shostakovich, who in evaluating her final examination encouraged her to continue down her "mistaken path". However, she was allowed to express her modernism in various scores she composed for documentary films, including the 1968 production, On Submarine Scooters, a 70mm film shot in the unique Kinopanorama widescreen format.
  
  wn.com/Sofia_Gubaidulina
• 
  Sonny Rollins
  Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Rollins is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards.
  Although Rollins was born in New York City, his parents were born in the United States Virgin Islands. Rollins received his first saxophone at age 13. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. He said that a concert by Frank Sinatra there, accompanied by a plea for racial harmony, changed his life.
  Rollins started as a pianist, changed to alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor in 1946. During his high-school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor. He was first recorded in 1949 with Babs Gonzales ( J. J. Johnson was the arranger of the group). In his recordings through 1954, he played with performers such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.
  
  wn.com/Sonny_Rollins
• Stanley Sadie
  Stanley Sadie CBE (30 October 1930 – 21 March 2005) was a leading British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
  Sadie was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read music under Thurston Dart (BA, MusB 1953, MA 1957, PhD 1958). His doctoral dissertation was on mid-eighteenth-century British chamber music. After Cambridge, he taught at Trinity College of Music, London (1957-1965).
  Sadie then turned to music journalism, becoming music critic for The Times (1964-1981), and contributing reviews to the Financial Times after 1981, when he had to leave his position and The Times because of his commitments to the Grove and other scholarly work. He was editor of The Musical Times 1967-1987.
  From 1970 Sadie was editor of what was planned to be the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980). Sadie oversaw major changes to the Dictionary, which grew from nine volumes to 20, and was published as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New Grove), and is now referred to as the first edition under that name. He was also an important force behind the second edition of New Grove (2001), which grew further to 29 volumes. Sadie also oversaw a major expansion of the Grove franchise, editing the one-volume Grove Concise Dictionary of Music (1988), and several spinoff dictionaries, such as the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (three volumes, 1984), the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, (with H. Wiley Hitchcock, four volumes, 1986), and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (four volumes, 1992). He also edited composer biographies based on the entries in Grove.
  
  wn.com/Stanley_Sadie
• 
  Steve Reich
  Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich ( /ˈraɪʃ/; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who is one of the pioneering composers of minimal music along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass.
  His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out"), and the use of simple, audible processes to explore musical concepts (for instance, "Pendulum Music" and "Four Organs"). These compositions, marked by their use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm and canons, have significantly influenced contemporary music, especially in the US. Reich's work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably the Grammy Award-winning Different Trains.
  Reich's style of composition influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described, in The Guardian by music critic Andrew Clements, as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich "may...be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer."
  
  wn.com/Steve_Reich
• 
  Stevie Wonder
  Stevland Hardaway Morris (born May 13, 1950 as Stevland Hardaway Judkins), known by his stage name Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, a child prodigy who developed into one of the most creative musical figures of the late 20th century. Blind since shortly after birth, Wonder signed with Motown's Tamla label at the age of eleven, and continues to perform and record for Motown to this day.
  Among Wonder's best known works are singles such as "Superstition", "Sir Duke", "I Wish" and "I Just Called to Say I Love You". Well known albums also include Talking Book, Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life. He has recorded more than thirty U.S. top ten hits and received twenty-two Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist. Wonder is also noted for his work as an activist for political causes, including his 1980 campaign to make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a holiday in the United States. In 2009, Wonder was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's fiftieth anniversary, with Wonder at number five.
  
  wn.com/Stevie_Wonder
• 
  Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé (pronounced [ste.fan ma.laʁ.me]) (18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.
  Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris. He worked as an English teacher and spent much of his life in relative poverty; but was famed for his salons, occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house on the rue de Rome for discussions of poetry, art, philosophy. The group became known as les Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays (in French, mardi), and through it Mallarmé exerted considerable influence on the work of a generation of writers. For many years, those sessions, where Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life. Regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many others.
  
  wn.com/Stéphane_Mallarmé
• 
  Susanna Mälkki
  Susanna Mälkki (born Helsinki, Finland, 13 March 1969) is a Finnish conductor. Trained as a cellist as a pupil of Hannu Kiiski, she later studied conducting with Jorma Panula, as well as Eri Klas and Leif Segerstam, at the Sibelius Academy. She has also studied at London's Royal Academy of Music. She participated in a Sibelius Academy Conductor's Workshop at Carnegie Hall in 1998, under the supervision of Panula and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
  From 1995 to 1998, she was first cellist in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO). She left her position with the GSO to devote herself to conducting^[2]. From 2002–2005, she was the music director of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Her debut with the Ensemble InterContemporain (EIC) was in August 2004, in a program of Harrison Birtwistle at the Lucerne Festival. She became the EIC's Music Director in 2006.
  Her other work in contemporary music includes opera productions. Mälkki conducted the Finnish premiere of Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face in 1999, which led to Adès inviting Mälkki to be his assistant for further performances of this opera in the UK, at the Almeida Theatre, where, as she noted, "I ended up conducting some of the performances". She has also conducted Neither by Morton Feldman (text of Samuel Beckett) in Copenhagen in 2004, and Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin at the Finnish National Opera. Her guest conducting engagements have included work with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). In 2006, she conducted Kaija Saariaho's La Passion de Simone at Peter Sellars' New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna.
  
  wn.com/Susanna_Mälkki
• 
  Sviatoslav Richter
  Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter (Russian: Святослав Теофилович Рихтер Sviatosláv Teofílovich Ríkhter, Russian pronunciation: [svʲjətəsˈlaf tʲɪəˈfʲiləvʲɪtɕ ˈrʲixtər], Ukrainian: Святослав Теофілович Ріхтер; March 20 [O.S. March 7] 1915 – August 1, 1997) was a Soviet pianist well known for the depth of his interpretations, virtuoso technique, and vast repertoire. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.
  Richter was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter (1872–1941), was a German expatriate pianist, organist, and composer who had studied in Vienna. His mother, Anna Pavlovna (née Moskaleva; 1892–1963), was from a landowning Russian family, and at one point had been a pupil of her future husband. In 1918, when Richter's parents were in Odessa, the Civil War separated them from their son, and Richter moved in with his aunt Tamara. He lived with her from 1918 to 1921, and it was then that his interest in art first manifested itself, although he first became interested in painting, which his aunt taught him.
  
  wn.com/Sviatoslav_Richter
• 
  Tan Dun
  Tan Dun (simplified Chinese: 谭盾; traditional Chinese: 譚盾; pinyin: Tán Dùn, Mandarin pronunciation: [tʰǎn tu̯ə̂n]) (born August 15, 1957, Si Mao, Hunan) is a Chinese contemporary classical composer, most widely known for his scores for the movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.
  Tan Dun was born in the village of Simaonae, Changsha in the Hunan province of China. As a child, he was fascinated by the role of the shaman in his village, who conducted rituals and ceremonies, often set to music made with organic objects such as rocks and water. However, as a child in the midst of China's cultural revolution, he found this kind of "backward thinking" frowned upon, and he was sent to work as a rice planter on a government commune.
  That, however, had little effect on his affinity for music. He created his own musical group, utilizing peasants in the village playing whatever they could, sometimes just banging on pots and pans. It was from these peasants that he began to learn to play traditional Chinese string instruments. He went on to play the viola for the Beijing Opera Orchestra.
  
  wn.com/Tan_Dun
• Theodore Eisfeld
  Theodore Eisfeld (April 11, 1816, Wolfenbüttel, Braunschweig, Germany – 16 September 1882, Wiesbaden) was a conductor, most notably of the New York Philharmonic Society, which became the New York Philharmonic.
  Eisfeld's chief instructor in musical composition was Carl Gottlieb Reissiger, of Dresden. Between 1839 and 1843 he served as Kapellmeister of the Court Theatre at Wiesbaden. He came to New York in 1848, and in 1849 was the first man chosen to by the New York Philharmonic Society to be sole conductor for an entire season (prior to this time it had been customary for several musicians to share the conducting duties). He began the custom of giving an annual Christmas performance of Handel's Messiah. He also introduced the first regular concerts of chamber music in New York.
  From 1849 through the 1865/1866 season, when he resigned, Eisfeld often served as conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society. In this period it was customary for the conductor to change from season to season, sometimes with two men sharing the duties. On 18 February 1851, he began a series of quartet concerts, the first being given at Hope Chapel. Eisfeld was also the first conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society, which was founded in 1857. He continued in this position, alternating with Theodore Thomas between 1862 and 1865, before Thomas took over.
  
  wn.com/Theodore_Eisfeld
• Thomas Adès
  Thomas Adès (born in London, 1 March 1971) is a British composer, pianist and conductor.
  Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. After attending University College School, he achieved a double starred first in 1992 at King's College, Cambridge, studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. He was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2004 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex.
  In 2007 a retrospective festival of his work was presented at the Barbican Arts Centre in London and he was the focus of Radio France's annual contemporary music festival, "Présences" and Helsinki's "Ultimo" festival. The Barbican festival, "Traced Overhead: The Musical World of Thomas Adès", included the UK premiere of a new work for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Tevot. In Spring 2007, The Tempest returned to the Royal Opera House. In 2009, he was the focus of Stockholm Concert Hall's annual Composer Festival and was in 2010 appointed foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Adès
• Toru Takemitsu
  Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru^?, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre. He drew from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.
  His 1957 Requiem for strings attracted international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and established his reputation as one of the leading 20th century Japanese composers. Takemitsu was the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honours. He composed over 100 film scores and about 130 concert works for ensembles of various sizes and combinations. He also wrote a detective novel and appeared frequently on Japanese television as a celebrity chef.
  In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu's writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: "I am very proud of my friend Toru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition."
  
  wn.com/Toru_Takemitsu
• Unsuk Chin
  Unsuk Chin (born July 14, 1961), is a South Korean composer of classical music, based in Berlin, Germany. She was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in 2004, the Arnold Schönberg Prize in 2005 and the Music Composition Prize of the Prince Pierre Foundation in 2010.
  Unsuk Chin was born in Seoul, Korea. She studied composition with Sukhi Kang at Seoul National University and won several international prizes in her early 20s. She studied with György Ligeti in Hamburg 1985-1988. Ligeti dismissed Chin's early pieces as unoriginal, which led her to stop composing for a few years. In 1988 Unsuk Chin moved to Berlin, where she worked for years as a freelance composer at the Electronic music studio of the Technical University of Berlin, realizing seven works. Her first large orchestral piece, Troerinnen, was premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in 1990. In 1991, her breakthrough work Acrostic Wordplay was premiered by the Nieuw Ensemble - since then it has been performed in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Chin's collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which has led to several commissions from the latter, started in 1994 with Fantaisie mecanique. Since 1995, Unsuk Chin is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. In 1999, Chin began an artistic collaboration with Kent Nagano, who has since premiered five of her works.
  
  wn.com/Unsuk_Chin
• 
  Ureli Corelli Hill
  Ureli Corelli Hill (born New York, 1802 - died Paterson, New Jersey, September 2, 1875) was an American conductor, and the first president and conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society. His grandfather, Frederick Hill, was a fifer in the Revolutionary army. His father, Uri Keeler Hill, was a music teacher and composer. Ureli’s only sibling, George Handel “Yankee” Hill, was a writer and actor noted for his depiction of Yankee characters.
  Hill served alternately as conductor and violinist with the New York Sacred Music Society between 1828 and 1835. In 1838 he directed the first American performance of Mendelssohn's cantata St. Paul. He studied in Germany for two years with the composer, conductor, and violinist Louis Spohr. After returning to New York, Hill organized the meeting on April 2, 1842, at which the New York Philharmonic Society was founded. At the meeting, Hill was named the first President of the Society.
  Hill opened the Society's inaugural concert on December 7, 1842 by conducting Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. As was typical of this era, the concert featured several different conductors and a mixture of opera excerpts, full orchestral works, and chamber music. Later during the same concert, Hill played violin in a performance of a Hummel Piano Quintet. For the Orchestra’s third season, Hill invited both Spohr and Felix Mendelssohn to conduct, however neither could accept, sending letters of acknowledgement instead. Both were later made honorary members of the Philharmonic. Hill continued to conduct the Society, in alternation with six others, until 1849.
  
  wn.com/Ureli_Corelli_Hill
• 
  Valery Gergiev
  Valery Abisalovich Gergiev PAR (Russian: Валерий Абисалович Гергиев, Ossetic: Гергиты Абисалы фырт Валери/Gergity Abisaly Fyrt Valeri; born 2 May 1953) is a Russian conductor and opera company director. He is general director and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director of the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg.
  Gergiev, born in Moscow, is the son of Tamara Tatarkanovna and Abisal Zaurbekovich. He and his siblings were raised in Vladikavkaz in their native North Ossetia in the Caucasus. He began piano at secondary school, before going on to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Leningrad from 1972 to 1977. His principal conducting teacher was Prof. Ilya Musin (Илья Мусин), one of the greatest conductor-makers in Russian musical history. His sister, Larissa Gergieva, is a pianist and director of the Mariinsky's singers' academy.
  In 1978, he became assistant conductor at the Kirov Opera, now the Mariinsky Opera, under Yuri Temirkanov, where he made his debut conducting Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. He was chief conductor of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra from 1981 until 1985 – the year he made his debut in the United Kingdom, along with pianist Evgeny Kissin, and violinists Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin, at The Lichfield Festival.
  
  wn.com/Valery_Gergiev
• 
  Vasily Safonov
  Vasily Ilyich Safonov (Russian: Васи́лий Ильи́ч Сафо́нов, Vasi'lij Ilji'č Safo'nov, also known as Wassily Safonoff; 6 February 1852 – 27 February 1918) was a Russian pianist, teacher, conductor and composer.
  Safonov, or Safonoff as he was known in the West during his lifetime, was born at Itschory, Russian Caucasus, the son of a Russian officer of Cossacks. He was educated at the Imperial Alexandra Lyceum, Saint Petersburg, and at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Music 1881-1885 under Louis Brassin. He graduated as Bachelor of Laws, and won the gold medal as a pianist of the Conservatory. He was also a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and Nikolai Zaremba.
  Safonov was never a particularly successful composer in his own right, but was a master music educator, becoming Director of the Moscow Conservatory in 1889. He was also the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He was the teacher of some of the best Russian pianists, notably Alexander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, Josef Lhévinne and Rosina Bessie (later Lhévinne).
  
  wn.com/Vasily_Safonov
• 
  Vladimir Horowitz
  Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (Russian: Владимир Самойлович Горовиц, Vladimir Samojlovich Gorovitz)   (October 1 [O.S. September 18] 1903 – November 5, 1989) was a Russian-born American classical pianist and composer. His technique and use of tone color and the excitement of his playing were legendary. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.
  Vladimir Horowitz was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire (now the capital of Ukraine). There are unsubstantiated claims that Horowitz was born in Berdychiv; however, his birth certificate unequivocally states Kiev as his birthplace.
  Horowitz was the youngest of four children of Samuil Horowitz and Sophia Bodik, who were assimilated Jews. Samuil was a well-to-do electrical engineer and a distributor of electric motors for German manufacturers. Horowitz's grandfather Joachim was a merchant (and an arts-supporter), belonging to the 1st Guild. This status gave exemption from having to reside in the Pale of Settlement. Horowitz was born in 1903, but in order to make him appear too young for military service so as not to risk damaging his hands, his father took a year off his son's age by claiming he was born in 1904. The 1904 date appeared in many reference works during the pianist's lifetime.
  
  wn.com/Vladimir_Horowitz
• 
  Walter Damrosch
  Walter Johannes Damrosch (January 30, 1862 – December 22, 1950) was a German-born American conductor and composer. He is best remembered today as long-time director of the New York Symphony Orchestra and for conducting the world premiere performances of George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F (1925), and An American in Paris (1928).
  Damrosch was born in Breslau, Silesia, a son of Helene von Heimburg, a former opera singer, and the conductor Leopold Damrosch, and brother of conductor Frank Damrosch and music teacher Clara Mannes. His parents were Lutheran (his paternal grandfather was Jewish). He exhibited an interest in music at an early age and was instructed by his father in harmony and also studied under Wilhelm Albert Rischbieter and Felix Draeseke at the Dresden Conservatory. He emigrated with his parents in 1871 to the United States.
  During the great music festival given by his father in May 1881, he first acted as conductor in drilling several sections of the large chorus, one in New York City, and another in Newark, New Jersey. The latter, consisting chiefly of members of the Harmonic Society, elected him to be their conductor. During this time a series of concerts was given in which such works as Anton Rubinstein's Tower of Babel, Hector Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, and Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem were performed. He was then only 19 years of age, but showed marked ability in drilling large masses.
  
  wn.com/Walter_Damrosch
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• 
  Willem Mengelberg
  Joseph Willem Mengelberg (28 March 1871 – 21 March 1951) was a Dutch conductor, famous for his performances of Mahler and Strauss with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
  Mengelberg was the fourth of fifteen children of German-born parents in Utrecht, Netherlands. His father was the well-known Dutch-German sculptor Friedrich Wilhelm Mengelberg. After studies in Utrecht with the composer and conductor Richard Hol, the composer Anton Averkamp (1861–1934) and the violinist Henri Wilhelm Petri (1856–1914), he went on to study piano and composition at the Cologne conservatory (now the Hochschule für Musik Köln ), where his principal teachers were Franz Wüllner and Adolf Jensen.
  In 1891, when he was 20, he was chosen as General Music Director of the city of Lucerne Switzerland, where he conducted an orchestra and a choir, directed a music school, taught piano lessons and continued to compose.
  Four years later, in 1895, when he was 24, Mengelberg was appointed principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a position he held until 1945.
  
  wn.com/Willem_Mengelberg
• 
  Witold Lutosławski
  Witold Lutosławski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈvitɔld lutɔsˈwafski]; January 25, 1913 – February 7, 1994) was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the preeminent Polish musicians during his last three decades. He earned many international awards and prizes, including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour.
  During his youth, Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw. His early works were influenced by Polish folk music. His style demonstrates a wide range of rich atmospheric textures. He began to develop his own characteristic composition techniques in the late 1950s. His music from this period onwards incorporates his own methods of building harmonies from small groups of musical intervals. It also uses aleatoric processes, in which the rhythmic coordination of parts is subject to an element of chance. His compositions (of which he was a notable conductor) include four symphonies, a Concerto for Orchestra, a string quartet, several instrumental concertos and orchestral song cycles.
  
  wn.com/Witold_Lutosławski
• 
  Yehudi Menuhin
  Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, OM, KBE (22 April 1916 – 12 March 1999) was an American violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in the United Kingdom. He was born to Russian Jewish parents in the United States, but became a citizen of Switzerland in 1970, and of the United Kingdom in 1985. He is often considered to be one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.
  Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York City, United States, to Bielorussian Jewish parents from what is now Belarus. His sisters were the concert pianist and human rights worker Hephzibah Menuhin and the pianist, painter, and poet Yaltah Menuhin. Through his father Moshe Menuhin, a former rabbinical student and anti-Zionist writer, Menuhin was descended from a distinguished rabbinical dynasty.
  Menuhin began violin instruction at age four under violinist Sigmund Anker; his parents had wanted Louis Persinger to be his teacher, but Persinger refused. Menuhin displayed extraordinary talents at an early age. His first solo violin performance was at the age of seven with the San Francisco Symphony in 1923. Persinger then agreed to take Menuhin as a student. When the Menuhins went to Paris, Persinger suggested Yehudi go to his own teacher, Eugène Ysaÿe. He did have one lesson with Ysaÿe, but did not like his method or the fact that he was very old. Instead, he went to the Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, after which he made several recordings with his sister Hephzibah. He was also a student of Adolf Busch. In 1929 he played in Berlin, under Bruno Walter's baton, three concerti by Bach, Brahms and Beethoven. In 1932 he recorded Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor for HMV in London, with the composer himself conducting, and between 1934 and 1936 he made the first integral recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.
  
  wn.com/Yehudi_Menuhin
• York Höller
  York Höller (German pronunciation: [ˌjɔʁk ˈhœlɐ]; born 11 January 1944 in Leverkusen) is a German composer and Professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Köln.
  Between 1963 and 1970 Höller studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule: composition with Joachim Blume and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, piano with Else Schmitz-Gohr and Alfons Kontarsky, and orchestral conducting with Wolfgang von der Nahmer. In parallel to this he studied musicology and philosophy at the University of Cologne. He did further musical studies at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt with Pierre Boulez, and in 1967 sat his examination in music education.
  Höller was active for a short time as a répétiteur at the Staatstheater Bonn. At the electronic studio of WDR in 1971–72, he "continued his studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen" (Stenzl 1991, 12) or, alternatively, "was given the chance, at Stockhausen’s invitation, to realize works of his own" (Lichtenfeld 2001). In any case, the technique he developed at this time—a form of extended serialism which he calls "Gestalt composition"—bears a resemblance to the older composer’s formula composition (Stenzl 1991, 12–15; O'Súilleabháin 1992), and in 1982 Höller dedicated his orchestral work Schwarze Halbinseln to Stockhausen (Blumröder 1983, 15/30). He quickly gained international recognition with his works. From the mid-1970s Höller also composed at the Paris research institute IRCAM, where Pierre Boulez had invited him, and in 1989 his opera Der Meister und Margarita (after the novel of the same name by Mikhail Bulgakov) was premièred at the Grand Opéra.
  
  wn.com/York_Höller
• 
  Yuri Bashmet
  Yuri Abramovich Bashmet (Russian: Юрий Абрамович Башмет, Ukrainian: Юрій Башмет; born 24 January 1953) is a Russian conductor, violinist and violist.
  He is a direct patrilineal descendant of Besht.
  Yuri Bashmet was born on 24 January 1953 in Rostov-on-Don in the family of Abram Borisovich Bashmet and Maya Zinovyeva Bashmet (née Krichever). "Father's mother, Tsilya Efimovna, studied singing at the conservatory for two years in her youth. Mother's mother, Darya Axentyevna, interpreted wonderfully her native Huzul songs" (http://yanko.lib.ru/books/music/bashmet_vokzal_mechtu.htm#_Toc34416664).
  In 1971, he graduated from the Lviv secondary special music school. From 1971 till 1976, he studied at the Moscow Conservatory. His first viola teacher was Professor Vadim Borisovsky; after whose death in 1972 was succeeded by Professor Fyodor Druzhinin. Druzhinin was also the tutor of Yuri Bashmet for the probation period and for his postgraduate study at the Moscow Conservatory (1976–1978).
  In 1972, Bashmet purchased a 1758 viola made by Milanese luthier Paolo Testore, which he uses for his performances to date. When he was a student, he was granted the Second Award at the International Contest of Violists in Budapest (1975) and Grand Prix at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich (1976), attaining worldwide recognition.
  
  wn.com/Yuri_Bashmet
• 
  Zubin Mehta
  Zubin Mehta (ज़ुबिन मेहता); pronounced [ˈzuːbɪn ˈmeːɦt̪aː] (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of western classical music. He is the Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
  Zubin Mehta was born into a Parsi family in Bombay, British India, the son of Mehli and Tehmina Mehta. His father Mehli Mehta was a violinist and founding conductor of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Mehta is an alumnus of St. Mary's School, Mumbai, and St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. Mehta initially intended to study medicine, but eventually became a music student in Vienna at the age of 18, under Hans Swarowsky. Also at the same academy along with Mehta were conductor Claudio Abbado and conductor–pianist Daniel Barenboim.
  Mehta's first marriage was to Canadian soprano Carmen Lasky in 1958. They have a son, Mervon and a daughter, Zarina. In 1964, they divorced. Two years after the divorce, Carmen married Zubin's brother, Zarin Mehta, now the Executive Director of the New York Philharmonic. In July 1969, Mehta married Nancy Kovack, a former American film and television actress. Mehta is a permanent resident of the United States, but retains his Indian citizenship.
  
  wn.com/Zubin_Mehta
• 
  Álvaro Siza Vieira
  Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira, GOSE, GCIH, is a Portuguese architect, born 25 June 1933 in Matosinhos a small coastal town by Porto. He is internationally known as Álvaro Siza (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈaɫvɐɾu ˈsizɐ]).
  He graduated in architecture in 1955, at the former School of Fine Arts from the University of Porto, the current FAUP - Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto. He completed his first built work (four houses in Matosinhos) even before ending his studies in 1954, the same year that he first opened his private practice in Porto. Siza Vieira taught at the school from 1966 to 1969, returning in 1976. In addition to his teaching there, he has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the University of Pennsylvania; Los Andes University of Bogota; and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
  Along with Fernando Távora, he is one of the references of the Porto School of Architecture where both were teachers. Both architects worked together between 1955 and 1958. Another architect he has collaborated with is Eduardo Souto de Moura, e.g. on Portugal's flagship pavilions at Expo '98 in Lisbon and Expo 2000 in Hannover, as well as on the Serpentine Pavillon 2005. Siza's work is often described as "poetic modernism"; he himself has contributed to publications on Luis Barragán.
  
  wn.com/Álvaro_Siza_Vieira

• Sequenza VIII
• À Paganini
• Anthemes

• Etude Concrete
• Nr 5 Zeitmasse (Time-measures) foor five woodwinds
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): Avant "L'artisanat furieux"
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): Commentaire I de "Bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): "L'artisanat furieux" (text by Rene Char)
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): Commentaire Il de "Borreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): "Bel edifice et les pressentiments", version premiere (text by Rene Char)
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): "Borreaux de solitude" (text by Rene Char)
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): Apres "L'artisanat furieux"
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): Commentaire Ill de "Bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau Sans Maitre (The Hammer Without a Master): "Bel edifice et les pressentiments", double (text by Rene Char)
• Klavierstuck XI: XI/1
• Klavierstuck XI: XI/2
• Klavierstuck XI: XI/3
• Klavierstuck XI: XI/4

• Act 2: Scene 1. Was die Steine glänzen?
• Act 2: Scene 2. Wohin so eilig, geehrtester Herr Sargnagei?
• Act 2: Scene 3. Guten Tag, Franz
• Act 2: Scene 4. Ich hab'ein Hemdlein an, das ist nicht mein
• Act 2: Scene 5. Andres! Andres! Ich kann nicht schlafen
• Act 3: Scene 1. Und ist kein Betrug in seinem Munce erfunden worden
• Act 3: Scene 2. Dort links geht's in die Stadt
• Act 3: Scene 3. Tanzt Alle; tanzt nur zu, springt, schwitzt un stinkt
• Act 3: Scene 4. Das Messer? Wo ist das Messer?
• Orchester-Epilog - Act 3: Scene 5. Ringel, Ringel, Rozenkranz, Ringelreih'n

• Premiére Sonate pour piano: Lent
• Premiére Sonate pour piano: Assez large
• Deuxiéme Sonate pour piano: Extrêmement rapide
• Deuxiéme Sonate pour piano: Lent
• Deuxiéme Sonate pour piano: Modéré, presque vif
• Deuxiéme Sonate pour piano: Très librement, avec de brusques oppositions de mouvement et de nuances
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 2, Trope - Parenthèse
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 2, Trope - Glose
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 2, Trope - Commentaire
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 2, Trope - Text
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Mélange points et blocs
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Points 3
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Blocs II
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Points 2
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Blocs I
• Troisième Sonate pour piano: Formant 3, Constellation - Miroir, Points 1

• Pli selon pli: Don
• Pli selon pli: Improvisation I.Sur Mallarmé
• Pli selon pli: Improvisation: II.Sur Mallarmé
• Pli selon pli: Improvisation: III.Sur Mallarmé
• Pli selon pli: Tombeau

• Le marteau sans maître: I. Avant l'Artisanat furieux. Rapide
• Le marteau sans maître: II. Commentaire I de Bourreaux de solitude. Lent
• Le marteau sans maître: III. L'Artisanat furieux. Modéré sans riguer
• Le marteau sans maître: IV. Commentaire II de Bourreaux de solitude. Rapide
• Le marteau sans maître: V. Bel édifice et les pressentiments - version première. Assez vif
• Le marteau sans maître: VI. Bourreaux de solitude. Assez lent
• Le marteau sans maître: VII. Après l'Artisanat furieux. Rapide
• Le marteau sans maître: VIII. Commentaire III de Bourreaux de solitude. Assez lent
• Le marteau sans maître: IX. Bel édifice et les pressentiments - double. Tempo libre de rècit
• Dérive 1
• Dérive 2

• Notations: I. Fantasque - Modéré
• Notations: II. Très vif
• Notations: III. Assez lent
• Notations: IV. Rythmique
• Notations: V. Doux et improvisé
• Notations: VI. Rapide
• Notations: VII. Hiératique
• Notations: VIII. Modéré jusqu'à très vif
• Notations: IX. Lointain - Calme
• Notations: X. Mécanique er très sec
• Notations: XI. Scintillant
• Notations: XII. Lent - Puissant et âpre
• Structures pour deux pianos: Chapitre I
• Structures pour deux pianos: Chapitre II (Pièces 1-2, Encarts 1-4, Textes 1-6)
• ...explosante-fixe...

• Rituel in memoriam Maderna 1974-1975 pour orchestre en huit groupes
• Notations I 1980
• Notations VII 1980
• Notations IV 1980
• Notations III 1980
• Notations II 1980
• Figures-Doubles-Prismes 1963-1968

• Overture
• Part I: Garden Scene - Du kanntest mich, o kleiner Engel, wieder
• Part I: Gretchen in Front of the Image of the Mater Dolorosa - Ach neige, Du Schmerzensreiche
• Part I: Cathedral Scene - Wie anders, Gretchen, war dir's
• Part II: Ariel. Sunrise - Die ihr dies Haupt umschwebt im luft'gen Kreise
• Part II: Midnight - Ich heiße der Mangel
• Part II: Faust's Death - Herbei, herbei! Herein, herein!

• Pli selon Pli: I. Don [du poème]: Je t'apporte l'enfant d'une nuit d'Idumée!
• Pli selon Pli: II. Improvisation sur Mallarmé I: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
• Pli selon Pli: III. Improvisation sur Mallarmé II: Une dentelle s'abolit
• Pli selon Pli: IV. Improvisation sur Mallarmé III: À la nue accablante tu
• Pli selon Pli: V. Tombeau: Un peu profond ruisseau colmnié la mort

• Das Lied von der Erde: I. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde
• Das Lied von der Erde: II. Der Einsam im Herbst
• Das Lied von der Erde: III. Von der Jugend
• Das Lied von der Erde: IV. Von der Schonheit
• Das Lied von der Erde: V. Der Trunkene um Fruhling
• Das Lied von der Erde: VI. Der Abschied

• Répons: I. Introduction
• Répons: II. Section 1
• Répons: III. Section 2
• Répons: IV. Section 3
• Répons: V. Section 4
• Répons: VI. Section 5
• Répons: VII. Section 6
• Répons: VIII. Section 7
• Répons: IX. Section 8
• Répons: X. Coda
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: I. Sigle initial
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: II. Strophe 1
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: III. Transition 1 & II
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: IV. Strophe II
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: V. Transition II & III
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: VI. Strophe III
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: VII. Transition III & IV
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: VIII. Strophe IV
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: IX. Transition IV & V
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: X. Strophe V
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: XI. Transition V & VI
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: XII. Strophe VI
• Dialogue de l'ombre double: XIII. Sigle Final

• Premiere Sonate: Lent - Beaucoup plus allant
• Premiere Sonate: Assez - Rapide
• Deuxieme Sonate: Extremement rapide - Encore plus vif
• Deuxieme Sonate: Lent
• Deuxieme Sonate: Modere, presque vif
• Deuxieme Sonate: Vif - Tres modere... Tres librement...
• Troisieme Sonate: Formant 2: Trope: Glose
• Troisieme Sonate: Formant 2: Trope: Texte
• Troisieme Sonate: Formant 2: Trope: Parenthese
• Troisieme Sonate: Formant 2: Trope: Commentaire
• Troisieme Sonate: Formant 3: Constellation - Miroir

• Sonatine
• Première Sonate - Lent
• Première Sonate - Assez Large
• Dérive
• Mémoriale (...explosante-fixe...Originel)
• Dialogue de L'Ombre Double
• Cummings ist der Richter

• Le Marteau sans maître: I. Avant "l'artisanat furieux"
• Le Marteau sans maître: II. Commentaire I de "bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau sans maître: III. "l'artisanat furieux"
• Le Marteau sans maître: IV. Commentaire II de "bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau sans maître: V. "Bel édifice et les pressentiments", version première
• Le Marteau sans maître: VI. "Bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau sans maître: VII. Après "l'artisanat furieux"
• Le Marteau sans maître: VIII. Commentaire III de "bourreaux de solitude"
• Le Marteau sans maître: IX. "Bel édifice et les pressentiments", double
• Sonatine
• 7 Haïkaï: I. Introduction
• 7 Haïkaï: II. Le parc de Nara et les lanternes de pierre
• 7 Haïkaï: III. Yamanaka-Cadenza
• 7 Haïkaï: IV. Gagaku
• 7 Haïkaï: V. Miyajima et le Torii dans la mer
• 7 Haïkaï: VI. Les oiseaux de Karuizawa
• 7 Haïkaï: VII. Coda

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

• Première Partie
• Seconde Partie

• Messages de Feu Demoiselle R. V. Troussova
• ...AGM...
• Modulations

• Don
• Improvisation I - Sur Mallarmé: 'Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui'
• Improvisation II - Sur Mallarmé: 'Une dentelle s'abolit'
• Improvisation III - Sur Mallarmé
• Tombeau

• Première Partie
• Seconde Partie

• Sur Incises: Moment I
• Sur Incises: Moment II
• Messagesquisse: Très lent
• Messagesquisse: Très rapide
• Messagesquisse: Sans tempo, libre
• Messagesquisse: Aussi rapide que possible
• Anthèmes 2: Libre
• Anthèmes 2: I. Très lent, avec beaucoup de flexibilité. Libre
• Anthèmes 2: II. Rapide, dynamique, très rythmique, rigide. Libre
• Anthèmes 2: III. Lent, régulier. Nerveux, irrégulier. Libre
• Anthèmes 2: IV. Agité,instable. Libre
• Anthèmes 2: V. Très lent, avec beaucoup de flexibilité. Subitement nerveux et extrêmement irrégulier. Libre
• Anthèmes 2: VI-I. Allant, assez serré dans le tempo
• Anthèmes 2: VI-II. Calme, régulier. Agité. Brusque
• Anthèmes 2: VI-III. Calme, sans traîner, d'un mouvement trèsrégulier. Libre

• Three Movements from "Pétrouchka": I. Danse russe. Allegro guisto
• Three Movements from "Pétrouchka": II. Chez Petrouchka
• Three Movements from "Pétrouchka": III. La semaine grasse. Con moto - Allegretto - Tempo giusto - Agitato
• Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, Op. 83: I. Allegro inquieto - Andantino
• Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, Op. 83: II. Andante caloroso
• Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat major, Op. 83: III. Precipitato
• Variations for Piano, Op. 27: I. Sehr mäßig
• Variations for Piano, Op. 27: II. Sehr schnell
• Variations for Piano, Op. 27: III. Ruhig fließend
• Second sonata for Piano: I. Extrêmement rapide
• Second sonata for Piano: II. Lent
• Second sonata for Piano: III. Modéré, presque vif
• Second sonata for Piano: IV. Vif