Florence Beatrice Price was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in her abandoned summer home.
Norman Dello Joio was an American composer active for over half a century. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.
Richard Danielpour is an American composer and academic, currently affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov was a Russian-British composer and academic teacher, who also published as Dmitri N. Smirnov and D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. He wrote operas, symphonies, string quartets and other chamber music, and vocal music from song to oratorio. Many of his works were inspired by the art of William Blake.
Margaret Allison Bonds was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. One of the first Black composers and performers to gain recognition in the United States, she is best remembered today for her popular arrangements of African-American spirituals and frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes.
Paul William Whear was an American composer, conductor, music educator, and double-bassist.
Garrett Byrnes is an American composer.
Ofer Ben-Amots is an Israeli-American composer and teacher of music composition and theory at Colorado College. His music is inspired by Jewish folklore of Eastern-European Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish Ladino traditions. The interweaving of folk elements with contemporary textures creates the dynamic tension that permeates and defines Ben-Amots' musical language.
Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra is a 1977 song cycle by Leonard Bernstein. The cycle consists of 12 settings of 13 American poems, performed by six singers in solos, duets, a trio, and three sextets.
Carl Wilhelm Kern was an American composer, pianist and organist, theorist, and editor. Many of his works were published under the pseudonyms Dudley Ryder, Ludwig Renk, and J. Douglas Martin.
Zenobia Powell Perry was an American composer, professor and civil rights activist. She taught in a number of historically black colleges and universities and composed in a style that writer Jeannie Gayle Pool called "music with clear, classic melodies." Her work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Detroit Symphony and West Virginia University Band and Orchestra.
Richard Collins St. Clair is an American composer, pedagogue, poet and pianist.
Roger John Goeb was an American composer.
William Doerrfeld is an American classical and jazz pianist and composer.
Han Lash is an American composer of concert music who has taught at Yale School of Music, Mannes School of Music, and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Jake Runestad is an American composer and conductor of classical music based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has composed music for a wide variety of musical genres and ensembles, but has achieved greatest acclaim for his work in the genres of opera, orchestral music, choral music, and wind ensemble. One of his principal collaborators for musical texts has been Todd Boss.
Charles Clement Fussell is an American composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. He has composed six symphonies and three operas. His symphony Wilde for solo baritone and orchestra, based on the life of Oscar Wilde and premiered by the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the baritone Sanford Sylvan in 1990, was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He received a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.
Larry Thomas Bell is an American composer, pianist and music professor.
