Hayden Wayne (born March 2, 1949) is a modern American composer and librettist. Due to his background in popular music, his style is an amalgamation of classical music influenced by popular idioms. Wayne also has several film scores and award-winning commercials for television to his credit.
His study of the piano began at the age of four, played tenor drum in the orchestra pit of The King And I at the age of five which his father was conducting, and performed his first composition in concert at the age of eleven. He won a second prize medal for piano solo from the New York State Music Awards at fifteen and subsequently toured with a series of rock 'n' roll bands including Man on CBS Records and Jobriath on Elektra Records.
As a composer, Wayne opened a new theater for the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles with his metaphorical circus Wire, won national first place (1987) from the National Institute for Music Theater with NEON (A Street Opera). In 2002, NEON won a 25,000 DM prize in the Prague Opera Competition. He was commissioned to write In Memoriam: A Celebration by the Interfaith Concert of Holocaust Remembrance, which premiered at Saint John the Divine in New York in 1993. Subsequently linked with Sinfonietta No. 1: The Klezmer and An Elegy Into Madness, specifically commissioned for the Fiftieth Anniversary of Israel, and titled A Triptych, had its world première at Mandel Hall, the University of Chicago in January 1998.
To date, Wayne has written over 400 compositions including: The Symphony of Friends, the ballet Cirque de la Lune, Dracula (Opera Erotica), Piano Concerto #1 (The Rock 'n' Roll) and Cello Concerto #1 which are paired as a diptych: Sinfonietta #2 (It's a Boy) and #3 (The Emerald) and Symphony #5 Africa (A Tone Poem) (also recorded by the State Philharmonic of Brno); the string quartets The Rosenberger Variations and The Romantic, The Nuzerov Quartets 3, 4, and 5, Nuzerov Quartets 6, 7, and 8, and Nuzerov Quartets 9 and 10 performed by the Wallinger String Quartet which were all released on New Millennium Records.
In recent times, most of his performances have taken place in the Czech Republic. Wayne calls his style "The New Classicism." He lives in Duchess County, New York with his wife and son. He has provided the music for the Randolph School's Circus show in May 2007.
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
John Paul Corigliano is an American composer of classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School.
Thomas Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).
Grażyna Bacewicz was a Polish composer and violinist. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.
Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin was a Soviet composer.
Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born American classical composer and concert pianist.
Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer.
Lev Konstantinovich Knipper was a Soviet Russian composer of partial German descent and an active OGPU/NKVD agent.
Nikolai Petrovich Rakov, was a Soviet violinist, composer, conductor, and academic at the Moscow Conservatory where he had studied. He composed mostly instrumental works, for orchestra, chamber music and piano music, especially pedagogic works. In 1946, he received the Stalin Prize for his first violin concerto, which became known internationally.
Olli Mustonen is a Finnish pianist, conductor and composer.
Huw Watkins is a British composer and pianist. Born in South Wales, he studied piano and composition at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, where he received piano lessons from Peter Lawson. He then went on to read Music at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and completed an MMus in composition at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Julian Anderson. Huw Watkins was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he used to teach composition. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music.
Steven Gellman is a Canadian composer and pianist. He has been commissioned to write works for the Besançon International Music Festival, the CBC Symphony Orchestra, the Hamilton Philharmonic, McGill University, Musica Camerata, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, Opera Lyra, the Pierrot Ensemble, the Stratford Festival, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra among others. Since 1976 he has taught music composition and theory at the University of Ottawa.
Huang Ruo is a Chinese-born composer, pianist and vocalist who now lives in the United States.
Nikolay Ivanovich Peyko or Peiko was a Russian composer and professor of composition.
Jerzy Fitelberg was a Polish-American composer.
Fredrick Kaufman (1936) is an American composer.
Doron Toister is a Cellist, Pianist, Composer and Classical music arranger. He leads the Cello group of the Israeli Rishon Lezion Symphony Orchestra and Israeli Opera Orchestra.
Thomas Ludwig is an American composer of classical music and a symphony conductor. His works have been performed and recorded with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and the New York City Symphony, and have won prizes at the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards in Washington, D.C. and the Indiana State University Contemporary Music Festival.
