Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña was a Spanish virtuoso classical guitarist. Many professional classical guitarists were either students of Segovia or students of Segovia's students. Segovia's contribution to the modern-romantic repertoire included not only commissions but also his own transcriptions of classical or baroque works. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive musical personality, phrasing and style.
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He is particularly noted for his serial and electronic music.
A guitar solo is a melodic passage, instrumental section, or entire piece of music, pre-written to be played on a classical guitar, electric guitar or an acoustic guitar. In 20th and 21st century traditional music and popular music such as blues, swing, jazz, jazz fusion, rock and metal, guitar solos often contain virtuoso techniques and varying degrees of improvisation. Guitar solos on classical guitar, which are typically written in musical notation, are also used in classical music forms such as chamber music and concertos.
John William Duarte was a British composer, guitarist and writer.
Dušan Bogdanović is a Serbian-born American composer and classical guitarist. He has explored musical languages which are reflected in his style today: a synthesis of classical, jazz, and ethnic music. As a soloist and in collaboration with other artists, he has toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, and the U.S. He has taught at the University of Southern California, San Francisco Conservatory, and the Geneva University of Music.
Richard Leslie Stoltzman is an American clarinetist. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he spent his early years in San Francisco, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, graduating from Woodward High School in 1960. Today, Stoltzman is part of the faculty list at the New England Conservatory and Boston University.
Norbert Kraft is a Canadian guitarist, music teacher, producer and arranger.
Dimitri Illarionov is a Russian classical guitarist. He is a winner of the Guitar Foundation of America Competition and Francisco Tárrega Guitar Competition.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Sérgio Assad is a Brazilian guitarist, composer, and arranger who often performs with his brother, Odair in the guitar duo Sérgio and Odair Assad, commonly referred to as the Assad Brothers or Duo Assad. Their younger sister Badi is also a guitarist. Assad is the father of composer/singer/pianist Clarice Assad. He is married to Angela Olinto.
Robert Phillips is an American classical guitarist.
Sean Hickey is an American composer and record label executive, born in 1970 in Detroit, Michigan, and currently based in New York. In 2022, he was appointed Managing Director of Pentatone.
David Flynn is an Irish composer and musician with a number of major awards and commissions to his name. He is the founder and artistic director of the Irish Memory Orchestra. Many of his works music merge the influence of traditional Irish music with contemporary classical music and jazz. He is also a multi-instrumentalist who works across many genres including classical, jazz, rock and traditional Irish music, with guitar being his main instrument.
Ernesto Cordero is a Puerto Rican composer and classical guitarist.
James Edwin Ferguson is an American guitarist, composer, journalist, and educator.
Nicholas Goluses is a professor of classical guitar at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Goluses has held the Andrés Segovia Chair at the Manhattan School of Music, as the founder and chair of that school's guitar department. He has recorded seven albums for Naxos including "Bach: Sonatas Transcribed for Guitar" and "Sor: Fantaisies / Progressive Studies." He is one of the only guitarists to have transcribed and recorded all three of Bach's violin sonatas. James Jolly in the Gramophone Classical Music Guide 2010 wrote that Goluses' Guitar Collection: Sor set "a benchmark for present-day guitarists.”
David Froom was an American composer and college professor. Froom taught at the University of Utah, the Peabody Institute, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and he was on the faculty at St. Mary's College of Maryland from 1989 until his death in 2022. He has received awards and honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters,, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Barlow Foundation, and was a five-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the State of Maryland.
Vladimir Gorbach is a Russian classical guitarist.
Ann Moss is an American operatic soprano. She is best known for her commitment to contemporary music, having premiered and recorded works by many living composers including Vartan Aghababian, Nancy Bachmann, Weslie Brown, David Conte, Kenneth Froelich, Keiko Fujiie, Heather Gilligan, Jake Heggie, Miriam Miller, Miya Masaoka, Kirk O'Riordan, Wayne Peterson, Eric Sawyer, Allen Shearer, John Thow and Liam Wade, among others.
Touches: Chorale, Eight Variations and Coda, often shortened as Touches, is a composition by American composer Leonard Bernstein. Composed in 1980, it is one of Bernstein's last compositions for solo piano.
