Eclecticism is used to describe a composer's conscious use of styles alien to his nature, or from one or more historical styles. The term is also used pejoratively to describe music whose composer, thought to be lacking originality, appears to have freely drawn on other models (Kennedy and Bourne 2006).

Christopher Scott Thile ( /ˈθiːliː/ THEE-lee; born February 20, 1981) is an American musician, best known as the mandolinist and a singer for the progressive acoustic trio Nickel Creek.

The three members of Nickel Creek met in Carlsbad, California at That Pizza Place in 1989, listening to weekly bluegrass shows with their parents. Soon they were taking lessons and then playing festivals, and even recording albums. Their first, Little Cowpoke, was released in 1994. Nickel Creek has gone on to record several more albums, including their self-titled debut album and This Side, which went platinum and won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 2005, Nickel Creek released Why Should the Fire Die?, which received massive critical acclaim and sold 250,000 units.

Thile has released other solo albums, including Not All Who Wander Are Lost, released in 2001, and Deceiver in 2004 (in which he wrote, composed, sang, and played every part). In 2008, Thile released a collaboration album with bassist Edgar Meyer, and also plans to release a collaborative album with Hilary Hahn.

Nico Muhly /ˈniːkoʊ ˈmjuːli/ (born August 26, 1981, in Vermont) is a contemporary classical music composer, who has worked and recorded with classical and pop/rock musicians. He currently lives in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan in New York City.

Muhly was born in Vermont and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Bunny Harvey, is a painter and teacher at Wellesley College, and his father, Frank Muhly, is a documentary filmmaker.

As a child, Muhly sang in the choir at Grace Episcopal Church in Providence, and he started to study piano at 10.

Muhly went on to study at The Wheeler School in Providence, then moved on to Columbia University where he got his undergraduate degree in English and to the Juilliard School where he graduated with his Master's degree in Music and studied composition with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse.

In 2005, Muhly was commissioned by Colorado Academy, a private school in Colorado, to write a song for the opening of their new Fine Arts building.

Casey Spooner (born February 2, 1970) is an American artist and musician. He was born in Athens, Georgia and resides in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Spooner is openly gay. While attending the Art Institute of Chicago he met Warren Fischer. The two went on to cofound Fischerspooner in New York in 1998.

Spooner has submitted works for Deitch Projects and an album by R.E.M. A promotion for Fischerspooner's second album included an art Salon/Art Exhibition of all the images used in making of the album, this has since been linked to Warhol.

Spooner has contributed and worked on shows with Doorika, a performance arts collective based in Chicago and New York City.

Casey joined experimental New York performance ensemble The Wooster Group in 2007, taking on the role of Ophelia's brother Laertes in their production of Hamlet (which featured two Fischerspooner songs that were composed for the show). During this time, he also began work on a third Fischerspooner album (with Warren Fischer).Entertainment was released in North America via the band's own label FS Studios on May 4, 2009, produced by Jeff Saltzman (The Killers, The Black Keys, The Sounds). An American and European Tour, known as Between Worlds, continued all through 2009. Like in other Fischerspooner's performances, Spooner was the main figure of the show.

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (born 29 March 1936, Broadstairs, Kent) is an English composer renowned for his film scores and his jazz performance as much as for his challenging concert works. He has lived in New York City since 1979.

Richard Rodney Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School, the Quaker school in Reading, studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. During this time, he attended some of the Darmstadt summer courses, where he was exposed to serialism. He later spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez.

Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, United States from 1970 to 1971, and was later International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music between 1994 and the year 2000. He received a CBE in 1977, and was knighted in 1998.

As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Bennett has produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Studies with Boulez in the 1950s immersed him in the techniques of the European avant-garde, though he subsequently developed his own distinctive dramato-abstract style. In recent years, he has adopted an increasingly tonal idiom.