In Kurtág's tiny fragments lies music of unflinching emotional and existential rawness, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: Benjamin's latest opera features cannibalism, suicide, sex and murder, and could be a watershed moment – unleashing the expressivity of one of Britain's most essential composers

In tribute to John Tavener, who has died aged 69, here's a brief guide to his music, in a piece originally published earlier this year

Takemitsu's understated and crystalline compositions combine elements of his own Japanese traditions with the western modernism he loved so much, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: The composer James Dillon has created some of the most inventive and thrillingly expressive contemporary music around

Tom Service: His composition In C was a minimalist masterpiece, but these days Terry Riley takes in life, the universe and everything

Tom Service: The Frenchman has transformed his astonishing compositional refinement and willingness to take inspiration from other art forms and experiences into works of real emotional immediacy, writes Tom Service

He denied the influence of Poland's turbulent 20th-century history but Lutosławski's music, with its unique textures and vivid harmonies, was always dynamic, eloquent and coherent

Tom Service: The Irish composer's work is distinctive in its diamond-like hardness, its humour and, sometimes, its violence

Tom Service: This classically trained avant-garde tearaway brought hard-left politics into his music and was possibly assassinated for it

Tom Service looks at the Italian composer whose labyrinthine music admits as much of the world as he can cram into it

Some of his later music makes my toes curl, but there's no denying the huge importance of Glass's compositions with their unique combination of experimentalism and listener-friendliness, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: Few composers have understood as keenly as Nono did that every musical decision also has social and political ramifications, but there is more to his work than the overtly political

Monk's deeply personal compositions sound at once ancient and modern, like a folk music for the whole world, says Tom Service

Rebecca Saunders' compositions focus the ear on minute gradations of timbre and intonation, and turn her performers into Zen masters of attention and focus, writes Tom Service

Henze's artistic credo was that music ought to have something to say about human emotion and to contribute to contemporary society, writes Tom Service

Without Steve Reich's rhythms, pulses and phasing, contemporary culture would be a much poorer place, writes Tom Service

This former enfant terrible of Dutch music has spent his career attempting to make the classical political, writes Tom Service

Widmann's essential project is to reveal the continuing vitality of Mozart or Schubert – and he brings it kicking and screaming into the present day, writes Tom Service

His enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds make Rihm a true original, and worth getting to know

This week, Tom Service looks at a composer whose mind is always on higher matters

His compositions are the ultimate in complexity. So how to approach the works of this philosophically demanding musician? By Tom Service

His operas boldly tackle politics, terrorism and terror itself. One of our most important contemporary voices, his music is both more radical and more conservative than his minimalist forebears. Tom Service on John Adams

A composer who refused to play by the rules – and whose work has infiltrated popular consciousness –
Ligeti's music is both richer and darker than what Stanley Kubrick heard in it