MILTON BYRON BABBITT BELA BARTOK

SAMUEL BARBER LUCIANO BERIO

LEONARD BERNSTEIN ERNEST BLOCH

BENJAMIN BRITTEN FERRUCCIO BUSONI

JOHN CAGE TERESA CARREÑO

ELLIOTT CARTER
 Igor Stravinsky Dmitri Shostakovich

Sergei Prokofiev Claude Debussy

Sergei Rachmaninoff Arvo Pärt

Maurice Ravel Benjamin Britten

Alban Berg George Gershwin

Gustav Holst
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
(The Art Archive/Alamy)

“It would be inconceivable,” said Schoenberg, “to attack the heroes who make daring
flights over the ocean or to the North Pole, for their achievement is obvious to everyone.
But although experience has shown that many a pioneer trod his path [with] absolute
certainty at a time when he was still held to be wandering half-demented, most people
invariably turn against those who strike out into unknown regions of the spirit… New music
is never beautiful on first acquaintance.” Often forced onto the defensive like this,
Schoenberg plunged fearlessly – and often beautifully – into the unknown, shattering the
seemingly unbreakable rules of Western tonality that had prevailed for centuries. In
reimagining harmony in so-called ‘tone rows’ he altered the course of classical music
forever.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

(Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)

His breakthrough work was The Firebird, produced in 1900 by Diaghilev’s Les Ballets
Russes; thirteen years later, a full-scale riot legendarily broke out at the premiere of The
Rite of Spring, his ballet of pagan sacrifice (which historian Barbara Tuchman aptly
describes as "the 20th Century incarnate"). The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross
masterfully captures the work’s ominous energy, it raw, spooky power and explains how
this is achieved both harmonically and rhythmically. "You have these two chords slammed
together," Ross explains. "These are two adjacent chords. They're dissonant. They're
being jammed together. And that's a harsh sound, and he keeps insisting on it. That chord
repeats and repeats and repeats, pounding away." Rhythmically, Ross says, "It seems as
though at first he's just going to have this regular pulse. But then these accents start
landing in unexpected places, and you can't quite get the pattern of it…It's as if you're in a
boxing ring, and this sort of brilliant fighter is coming at you from all directions with these
jabs."

Stravinsky’s brilliance had a seismic impact on the rest of the century – not only on
classical music, but on jazz, rock, modernist literature, painting, and even movies. Without
Stravinsky, as Ross points out, where would the dinosaurs of Walt Disney’s Fantasia be?
Thank goodness we need never find out.

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

(enato Toppo/Getty Images)

Gerschwin was jazz-age prophet whose Rhapsody in Blue (1924) destabilised aesthetic
categories and gave listeners a taste of things to come, and whose controversial 1935
opera Porgy & Bess came to define an epoch. But Gershwin was caught in the cross-fire
between “those who see mass culture as the most valid expression of our time, and those
who see it as the end of Western civilization”, as Gershwin scholar David Schiff puts it.
Many of his fellow composers, including the likes of Aaron Copland, were scathing of
Gershwin’s populism. But an enthusiastic public, deaf to such finicky debate, has lovingly
listened on, through booms and busts, wars and peace; to say nothing of countless shifts
in taste and fashion.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

(Keystone/Getty Images)
Ellington was the most prolific composer of the century. A spectacular innovator, he wrote
music for all kinds of settings, from the ballroom to the nightclub; the comedy stage to the
movie house; the concert hall to the cathedral. The essence of his genius lay in his
uncanny knack of synthesizing apparently disparate elements of music, including ragtime,
minstrel songs, the blues, and the sounds of everything from Tin Pan Alley to the
European music tradition. Always directly expressive and deceptively simple, his blues
writing exploded received notions of form, harmony, and melody; he broke our hearts with
the ultimate romantic ballads; he provided vehicle after vehicle for the greatest jazz singers
of the age; and, of course, he made us all swing.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

(Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)

Persecuted by Stalin and declared an ‘enemy of the people’ in 1936, having previously
been the golden boy of the Soviet music scene, Shostakovich is a figure who has gripped
the public imagination as much for political as musical reasons. Forced to keep the
authorities happy with his symphonic writing – at least until Stalin’s death – it was in his
smaller works, such as the fifteen astonishing string quartets, that he could really push the
limits of his musical voice and conjure a complete emotional world. Alex Ross, once again,
is en exemplary field guide when it comes to exploring the psychological limits” of his
music. “Shostakovich is a master manipulator of mood,” he writes. “He can show panicky
happiness slipping into inchoate rage, and then crumbling into lethargic despair.”

John Cage (1912-1992)

(Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)

Cage, according to his fellow avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, was the first
composer in the history of music “who raised the question by implication that maybe music
could be an art form rather than a music form.” Recalling the premiere of his legendary
work of ‘silence’, 4’33”, Cage said: “There’s no such thing as silence. You could hear the
wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began
pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting
sounds as they talked or walked out.” Cage had an inspiring and insatiable appetite for
cultural adventure: he implored us to wake up to the life we are living. “Art is a sort of
experimental station,” he said, “in which one tries out living.”

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

(Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)

Musically speaking, Britten was more conservative than many of the other titans of the
century, but his influence and vision is inestimable, particularly in the field of opera. The
landmark Peter Grimes (1945) radically placed an unlovable anti-hero at its centre, and is
a musically breathtaking voyage to the darkest nooks of both individual and group
psychology. Britten’s conviction that opera needed to reach parts of the country beyond
fancy metropolitan theatres led to the emergence of chamber or ‘pocket’ opera, which
continues to transform an often lumbering art form into something nimble, dynamic and
thrilling to this day. His compositional philosophy, says leading tenor Ian Bostridge, was
“resolutely workaday and practical, concerned with usefulness to the community”. We owe
him much.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

(Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Bernstein was a populist: he unapologetically and urgently wanted to share the music he
loved. And as a composer, conductor, broadcaster, writer and educator, he sought to
make it accessible to as wide a public as possible. He grew up hearing everything, making
no distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, and an utter lack of pretension is evident in his
music, among which works such as West Side Story, Candide and the Chichester Psalms
must rank as among the finest in the entire century. One of Bernstein’s proteges, the
American conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, says many of his “perfect and iconic” songs
“stake out a territory that we recognize as important to our inner lives.” Speaking to
the Washington Post he described Bernstein’s as “music that haunts all of us. Talk about
building large structures – it’s woven into the structure of your entire life.” Lenny also
created the model, says Tilson Thomas, “for the socially responsible, inclusive, generous
maestro, as opposed to the remote, preoccupied, professorial... He wasn’t the kind of high-
priest conductor, or professor conductor, or inspector-general conductor, or reign of terror
conductor. He was like, ‘Hey, we’re all in this together; let’s explore together.’”

Pierre Boulez (born 1925)

(Erich Auerbach/Getty Images)

The French firebrand composer defines the idea of what music today is, how it should
sound, and how it could yet be. He is in his mid-80s, still unerringly gracious and dignified
in person, and shows no sign of slowing down. He can still be seen regularly conducting
from the podium, he is ferocious in his commitment to educating younger artists– and he
still continually pushes boundaries in his own music. A living legend.

(Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy)

The most imitated composer in the world is also one of the smartest and most
ominovorously curious. A supposedly ‘minimalist’ composer, his decidedly maximalist
output has seen him compose something like 30 operas; 10 symphonies; chamber music;
concertos for violin, piano, timpani and saxophones; and many award-winning film
soundtracks including The Hours, The Thin Blue Line and The Truman Show. Glass has
collaborated with everyone from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, Woody Allen to David Bowie
and his music appeals to listeners of all generations and backgrounds; genuinely bridging
a gap between musical worlds which can often seem disconnected.