(Juliette) Nadia Boulanger ([ʒy.ljɛt na.dja bu.lɑ̃.ʒe]; 16 September 1887 – 22 October 1979) was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century.

From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but believing that her talent as a composer was inferior to that of her younger sister Lili, she gave up composing and became a teacher. In that capacity she influenced generations of young composers, including many from the U.S., beginning with Aaron Copland. Among her other students were those who became leading soloists and conductors, including John Eliot Gardiner, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch and Ástor Piazzolla.

Boulanger taught in the U.S. and in England, working with music academies including the Juilliard School, the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Longy School, the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, but her principal base for most of her life was her family's flat in Paris, where she taught for most of the seven decades from the start of her career until her death at the age of 92.

Bruno Monsaingeon (French pronunciation: [bʁyno mɔ̃sɛ̃ʒɔ̃]) (born 5 December 1943) is a French filmmaker, writer, and violinist. He has made a number of documentary films about great twentieth-century musicians, including Glenn Gould, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Piotr Anderszewski, Yehudi Menuhin and Grigory Sokolov. His interviews with Richter and with Nadia Boulanger have been published as books.

Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Shapero and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band.

He was more interested in classical music, though. In his teens he studied with some famous teachers, including Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936, and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he was ready to attend Harvard, where he studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938, and Paul Hindemith in 1940.

Tanglewood, a now cherished musical institution, was founded in the 1940s, and Shapero was one of its first students. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture.^{[citation needed]} Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood in the summer of that year, but Hindemith ordered that no student compositions would be played that season. Fortunately, Aaron Copland hastily put together an Orchestra just to play student compositions deemed worthy, including Shapero's Overture.^{[citation needed]} Shapero was awarded the Rome Prize in 1941 for his Nine-Minute Overture, but World War II prevented him from taking residency in Italy.

David Conte (1955-) is an American composer.Born in Denver Colorado of musical parents, Conte studied piano and choral singing in the Lakewood (OH) public schools with B. Neil Davis before attending Bowling Green State University (OH), majoring in composition. After graduation from Bowling Green (Bachelor of Music, 1978), where he studied with Wallace DePue, he attended Cornell University (MFA; 1981, DMA; 1983), where he studied with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky. Conte worked with Aaron Copland in 1982 preparing a thesis on his manuscript sketches.

Conte has been honored as a Fulbright Scholar in Paris (where he studied with Nadia Boulanger), a Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellow and an Aspen Music Festival Conducting Fellow. He has served on the faculties of Cornell University, Colgate University, and the Interlochen Center for the Arts. While at Cornell, he served as both the assistant director and acting director of the Cornell University Glee Club, for whom he composed numerous works. Since 1985 has been Professor of Composition and Conservatory Chorus conductor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Composer-in-Residence with the theater company Thick Description since 1990. In 2010 he joined the composition faculty of the European American Musical Alliance in Paris.

Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudjo monteˈverdi]; 15 May 1567 (baptized) – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.

Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the heritage of Renaissance polyphony and the new basso continuo technique of the Baroque. Monteverdi wrote one of the earliest operas, L'Orfeo, an innovative work that is still regularly performed. He was recognized as an innovative composer and enjoyed considerable fame in his lifetime.

Claudio Monteverdi was born in 1567 in Cremona, a town in Northern Italy. His father was Baldassare Monteverdi, a doctor, apothecary and surgeon. He was the oldest of five children. During his childhood, he was taught by Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, the maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of Cremona. The Maestro di capella’s job was to conduct important worship services in accordance with the liturgy books of the Catholic Church. Monteverdi learned about music by being part of the cathedral choir. He also studied at the University of Cremona. His first music was written for publication, including some motets and sacred madrigals, in 1582 and 1583. His first five publications were: Sacrae cantiunculae, 1582 (collection of miniature motets); Madrigali Spirituali, 1583 (a volume of which only the bass partbook is extant); Canzonette a tre voci, 1584 (a collection of three-voice canzonettes); and the five-part madrigals Book I, 1587, and Book II, 1590. Monteverdi worked for the court of Mantua first as a singer and violist, then as music director. He worked at the court of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga in Mantua as a vocalist and viol player. In 1602, he was working as the court conductor.