Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".
Milton Byron Babbitt was an American composer, music theorist, mathematician, and teacher. He was a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, recognized for his serial and electronic music.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Charles Peter Wuorinen was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas, such as Brokeback Mountain. His work was termed serialist but he came to disparage that idea as meaningless. Time's Encomium, his only purely electronic piece, received the Pulitzer Prize. Wuorinen taught at several institutions, including Columbia University, Rutgers University and the Manhattan School of Music.
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is an American music theorist and composer. Best known for his work on musical grammar, cognition, rhythmic theory and pitch space, he and the linguist Ray Jackendoff developed the Chomsky-inspired generative theory of tonal music.
Jan (Janice) DeGaetani was an American mezzo-soprano known for her performances of contemporary classical vocal compositions.
Joel Krosnick is an American cellist who has performed as a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician throughout the world for over 40 years. As a member of the Juilliard String Quartet from 1974 to 2016, he performed the great quartet literature throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Johannes Hendrikus Philip Kindler was a Dutch American cellist and conductor who founded the National Symphony Orchestra. He was married to painter Alice Kindler and Persis Chase Myers.
Rudolf Kolisch was a Viennese violinist and leader of string quartets, including the Kolisch Quartet and the Pro Arte Quartet.
Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17, is a one-act monodrama in four scenes by Arnold Schoenberg to a libretto by Marie Pappenheim. Composed in 1909, it was not premiered until 6 June 1924 in Prague conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as the soprano. The opera takes the unusual form of a monologue for solo soprano accompanied by a large orchestra. In performance, it lasts for about half an hour. It is sometimes paired with Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911), as the two works were roughly contemporary and share similar psychological themes. Schoenberg described Erwartung, saying "the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour."
Jacques-Louis Monod was a French composer, pianist and conductor of 20th century and contemporary music, particularly in the advancement of the music of Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and uptown music; and was active primarily in New York City and London during the second half of the twentieth century.
The Group for Contemporary Music is an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in New York City in 1962 by Joel Krosnick, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen and gave its first concert on October 22, 1962 in Columbia University's MacMillin Theatre. Krosnik left the ensemble in 1963. It was the first contemporary music ensemble based at a university and run by composers.
Dial Records was an American record company and label that specialized first in bebop jazz and then in contemporary classical music. It was founded in 1946 by Ross Russell. Notable artists who recorded for Dial include Charlie Parker, who signed an exclusive one-year recording contract with Russell on 26 February 1946, as well as Miles Davis, Max Roach, and Milt Jackson. Dial Records initially pressed its music for the Tempo Music Shop of Hollywood, California, but soon relocated to New York City.
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.
Philomel, a serial composition written in 1964, combines synthesizer with both live and recorded soprano voice. It is Milton Babbitt's best-known work. Planned for performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was funded by the Ford Foundation and commissioned for soprano Bethany Beardslee. Babbitt created it in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, of which he was a founding member.
The Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9 is a composition by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Robert Miller was an American pianist and attorney.
Leonard David Stein was an American musicologist, pianist, conductor and university teacher. He was influential in promoting contemporary music on the American West Coast. He was for years Arnold Schoenberg's assistant, music director of the Schoenberg Institute at USC, and among the foremost authorities on Schoenberg's music. He was also an influential teacher in the lives of many younger composers, such as the influential minimalist La Monte Young.
Elizabeth Laurence is a classical mezzo-soprano singer. She is best known for her performances of 20th century operatic repertoire, and has created several operatic roles.
