John Harris Harbison is an American composer and academic.
Aaron Jay Kernis is a Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning American composer serving as a member of the Yale School of Music faculty. Kernis spent 15 years as the music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and as director of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composers' Institute, and is currently the workshop director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab. He has received numerous awards and honors throughout his thirty-five-year career. He lives in New York City with his wife, pianist Evelyne Luest, and their two children.
Pamela Frank is an American violinist, with an active international career across a varied range of performing activity. Her musicianship was recognized in 1999 with the Avery Fisher Prize, one of the highest honors given to American instrumentalists. In addition to her career as a performer, Frank holds the Herbert R. and Evelyn Axelrod Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she has taught since 1996, and is also an Adjunct Professor of Violin at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music since 2018.
James Ehnes, is a Canadian concert violinist and violist.
Richard Anthony Sayer Arnell was an English composer of classical music. Arnell composed in all the established genres for the concert stage, and his list of works includes six completed symphonies and six string quartets. At the Trinity College of Music, he "promoted a pioneering interest in film scores and electronic music" and jazz.
Jef "Joseph" Maes was a Belgian composer and violist.
Josef Suk was a Czech violinist, violist, chamber musician and conductor. In his home country he carried the title of National Artist.
John Dalley is an American violinist. He was raised in a musical family. His father was an orchestra conductor, violinist, composer, instrumental teacher, and music educator. His mother, from Bloomington, Illinois, was a cellist, music teacher, and music publisher.
Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.
Géza Frid was a Hungarian–Dutch composer and pianist.
The London String Quartet was a string quartet founded in London in 1908 which remained one of the leading English chamber groups into the 1930s, and made several well-known recordings.
Zdeněk Lukáš was a Czech composer. He authored over 330 works.
Niels Erling Emmanuel Brene was a Danish composer. He was born and died in Copenhagen. In 1948, he won a bronze medal in the art competitions of the Olympic Games for his orchestral composition Vigeur (Vigour).
Marcelo Koc was an Argentinian composer.
String Quartet No. 2, Musica Instrumentalis (1997) is a string quartet by Aaron Jay Kernis, inspired by renaissance and baroque dances, composed for the Lark Quartet and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, with a special citation to George Gershwin. His first quartet being named Musica celestis:
My new string quartet started off because I wanted to deal with baroque dance forms and medieval dance rhythms. There wasn't an image—it developed from purely musical ideas. This was a case where the piece turned out to be formally very different from what I first expected. I thought it would be five movements, but I started cannibalizing one movement into another and wound up with three. The first movement is like a dance medley, with a first big A section and a closing A section that is a development of the opening medley. Stuck in the middle of these two A's is a minuet and trio that originally was an entirely separate movement. While working on the first movement, I decided that the relaxation that I needed between those A sections was one of the smaller movements I'd already conceived. So I took one and squashed it in. That's one way that a piece can become significantly transformed during the act of composition.
Herbert Blendinger was an Austrian composer and viola player of German origin.
Terry Lowry is an American composer, conductor and pianist. He is the Conductor and Music Director of the Carroll Symphony Orchestra. His compositions include symphonies, concertos, oratorios, works for chamber ensembles and soloists, choral works and along with Dennis Blackmon, composed the musical Montgomery, based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Patrick Zimmerli is an American saxophonist, composer, arranger, and record producer.
Philip Dukes is a British classical viola soloist.
