Year 1587 (MDLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Sunday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar.

Francesca Caccini (18 September 1587–after 1641) was an Italian composer, singer, lutenist, poet, and music teacher of the early Baroque era. She was the daughter of Giulio Caccini, and was one of the best-known and most influential female European composers between Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century and the 19th century. Her stage work, La liberazione di Ruggiero, has been widely considered the first opera by a woman composer.

Caccini was born in Florence, and received a humanistic education (Latin, some Greek, as well as modern languages and literature, mathematics) in addition to early musical training with her father. Her first recorded appearance in public is as a singer in the all-sung stage works her father composed for the wedding of Henry IV of France and Maria de Medici in 1600. In 1604 when the entire Caccini family visited France: Henry praised her singing effusively—"you are the best singer in all of France"—and asked her to stay at his court; however the Florentine officials denied his request, and she returned to Italy, where she taught, performed and composed from her father's home. In 1607 her composition of a Carnival entertainment entitled La stiava seems to have led to her hiring as a musician in the service of the Medici court. That same year she married fellow court musician Giovanni Battista Signorini, with whom she would have one child, Margherita, born in 1622.

Guillaume Bouzignac (ca. 1587–ca. 1643) was a French composer.

Bouzignac was probably born in 1587 in Saint-Nazaire-d'Aude. He studied at the Cathedral of Narbonne until 1604, and was choirmaster at the Cathedrals of Angoulême, Bourges, Tours, and Clermont-Ferrand.

His motets are preserved in two manuscripts. His motets are highly distinctive: "Simply stated, there is no other music of the time that looks the same on the page or sounds the same as the motets of Bouzignac." "One name in this period rises above those of his contemporaries for all sacred music, including Masses: that of Guillaume Bouzignac." His dialogue motets, such as Unus ex vobis and Dum silentium, are small scale oratorios which anticipate Giacomo Carissimi, and then Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) two generations later.

Samuel Scheidt (baptized 3 November 1587 – 24 March 1654) was a German composer, organist and teacher of the early Baroque era.

Scheidt was born in Halle, and after early studies there, he went to Amsterdam to study with Sweelinck, the distinguished Dutch composer, whose work had a clear influence on Scheidt's style. On his return to Halle, Scheidt became court organist, and later Kapellmeister, to the Margrave of Brandenburg. Unlike many German musicians, for example Heinrich Schütz, he remained in Germany during the Thirty Years' War, managing to survive by teaching and by taking a succession of smaller jobs until the restoration of stability allowed him to resume his post as Kapellmeister. When Samuel Scheidt lost his job because of Wallenstein, he was appointed in 1628 as musical director over three churches in Halle, including the Market Church.

Scheidt was the first internationally significant German composer for the organ, and represents the flowering of the new north German style, which occurred largely as a result of the Protestant Reformation. In south Germany and some other countries of Europe, the spiritual and artistic influence of Rome remained strong, so most music continued to be derivative of Italian models. Cut off from Rome, musicians in the newly Protestant areas readily developed styles that were much different from those of their neighbors.

Stefano Landi (baptized 26 February 1587 – 28 October 1639) was an Italian composer and teacher of the early Baroque Roman School. He was an influential early composer of opera, and wrote the earliest opera on a historical subject: Sant'Alessio (1632).

Landi was born in Rome, the capital of the Papal States.

In 1595 he joined the Collegio Germanico in Rome as a boy soprano, and he may have studied with Asprilio Pacelli. Landi took minor orders in 1599 and began studying at the Seminario Romano in 1602. He is mentioned in the Seminary's records as being the composer and director of a Carnival pastoral in 1607; and in 1611 his name appears as an organist and a singer, though he was already maestro di cappella at S Maria della Consolazione in 1614. Agostino Agazzari was maestro di cappella at the Seminario Romano, and he may have been one of Landi's teachers as well.

In 1618 he had moved to the north of Italy, and published a book of five-voice madrigals at Venice; apparently he had acquired a post as maestro di cappella at Padua. In addition he wrote his first opera in Padua, La morte d'Orfeo. Most likely it was used as part of the festivities for a wedding. His experience in Padua and Venice was essential for developing his style, since there he made contact with the work of the progressive Venetian School composers, whose music was generally avoided in conservative Rome.