Ruth Crawford Seeger was an American composer and musicologist. Her music heralded the emerging modernist aesthetic, and she became a central member of a group of American composers known as the "ultramoderns". She composed primarily during the 1920s and 1930s, turning towards studies on folk music from the late 1930s until her death. Her music influenced later composers including Elliott Carter.
Annea Lockwood is a New Zealand-born American composer and academic musician. She taught electronic music at Vassar College. Her range is vast and often includes microtonal, electro-acoustic soundscapes and vocal music, as well as recordings of natural found sounds. She has also recorded Fluxus-inspired pieces involving burning or drowning pianos.
Gordon Mumma is an American composer. He is known most for his work with electronics, many devices of which he builds himself, and for his performances on horn.
Louise Juliette Talma was an American composer, academic, and pianist. After studies in New York and in France, piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, she focused on composition from 1935. She taught at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and at Hunter College. Her opera The Alcestiad was the first full-scale opera by an American woman staged in Europe. She was the first woman in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the first woman awarded the Sibelius Medal for Composition.
Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Austrian-American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist.
Wallingford Constantine Riegger was an American modernist composer and pianist, best known for his orchestral and modern dance music. He was born in Albany, Georgia, but spent most of his career in New York City, helping elevate the status of other American composers such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Riegger is noted for being one of the first American composers to use a form of serialism and the twelve-tone technique.
Alice Theresa Hildagard Swanson Esty was an American actress, soprano and arts patron who commissioned works by members of Les Six and other French composers, and American composers such as Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson. Claire Brook, and Marc Blitzstein, among others.
Douglas Allanbrook was an American composer, concert pianist and harpsichordist. He was associated with a group of mid-twentieth century Boston composers who were students of Nadia Boulanger. His compositions are described by the Kennedy Center as "smooth, showing astute sense, assertiveness, and originality."
Julia Amanda Perry was an American classical composer and teacher who combined European classical and neo-classical training with her African-American heritage.
Alla Yevgenyevna Pavlova is a Russian composer. Pavlova was born and initially raised in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. She and her family moved to Moscow in 1961, and she then moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1990, where she has settled. She is best known for her symphonic work.
Pamela Ashley Brown is an American television reporter and newscaster. She is currently CNN's chief investigative correspondent. She formerly worked for ABC Washington, D.C., affiliate WJLA-TV, and she is also fill-in and substitute anchor for CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Erin Burnett OutFront. Brown occasionally provided the lead-in to "Politico's Video Playback"—a daily recap of the previous night's U.S. late-night talk shows.
Molissa Fenley (1954-) is an American dancer and choreographer who represents a tradition and continuing lineage of contemporary dance. Her choreographic work is reflective of our times. Fenley’s choreography has most often been defined as being rooted in an abstract, conceptual idiom; a combination of compositional skill, clearly defined movement quality mixed with dynamic lyricism and physical strength, as such representing a continuation of a major thread in the history of American modern and contemporary dance. As a choreographer, teacher and director of Molissa Fenley and Company, Molissa has had an important impact on the dance world.
Adele aus der Ohe was a German concert pianist and composer. Her compositions were published by G. Schirmer Inc.
Lucia Dlugoszewski was a Polish-American composer, poet, choreographer, performer, and inventor. She developed a unique approach to the grand piano called the "timbre piano," which involved using objects on the strings and playing the piano’s interior with percussion mallets, hands, or other methods. She also invented many percussion instruments, including Unsheltered Rattles, Tangent Rattles, Square Drums, and Ladder Harps. She is known for her long association with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, for which she first composed in 1951. She served as the company's music director until Hawkins's death in 1994, after which she became its artistic director.
Elinor Remick Warren was an American composer of contemporary classical music and pianist. Her mother had been a student of a pupil of Franz Liszt, and introduced her daughter to art music. Warren's father was considered a fine amateur singer who had once considered singing professionally. Warren trained as a pianist with Kathryn Cocke through high school and took composition lessons from Gertrude Ross starting her second year in high school. She sent an early composition to the Schirmer music publishing company and received her first contract to publish with them before she graduated from high school. Between high school and college, Warren studied piano with Harold Bauer and Leopold Godowsky. After attending Mills College for a year, she moved to New York, where she studied privately with composers Frank La Forge and Clarence Dickinson, both of whom were known for their art songs. Warren supported herself as an accompanist for singers and went on tour with contralto Margaret Matzenauer.
Sorrel Hays was an American pianist, composer, filmmaker and artist.
Judith Lang Zaimont is an American composer and pianist.
Betty Ann Wong is an American author, composer, and multi-media musician. She received the 1988 Hollywood Dramalogue Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement for Original Music Theater for her work on Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions. She has also composed film scores for Academy Award-winning movie producers Allie Light and Irving Saraf.
Margaret Ferrell Vardell Sandresky is an American composer, organist and teacher. She was still composing on her 100th birthday. She was a founding member of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) as well as its first female contibutor.
