(Achille) Claude Debussy was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship and United States citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.
Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor known today primarily for his work promoting musical nationalism and his encouragement of more famous Russian composers, notably Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He began his career as a pivotal figure, extending the fusion of traditional folk music and experimental classical music practices begun by composer Mikhail Glinka. In the process, Balakirev developed musical patterns that could express overt nationalistic feeling. After a nervous breakdown and consequent sabbatical, he returned to classical music but did not wield the same level of influence as before.
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Vaslav Nijinsky with stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.
An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. However, the term most often refers to the ancohemitonic symmetric scale composed of alternating whole and half steps, as shown at right. In classical theory, this symmetrical scale is commonly called the octatonic scale, although there are a total of 43 enharmonically non-equivalent, transpositionally non-equivalent eight-note sets.
Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was a Russian composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Russian Romantic period. He was director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928 and was instrumental in the reorganization of the institute into the Petrograd Conservatory, then the Leningrad Conservatory, following the Bolshevik Revolution. He continued as head of the Conservatory until 1930, though he had left the Soviet Union in 1928 and did not return. The best-known student under his tenure during the early Soviet years was Dmitri Shostakovich.
Edison Vasilievich Denisov was a Russian composer in the so-called "Underground", "alternative" or "nonconformist" division of Soviet music.
The Firebird is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Michel Fokine, who collaborated with Alexandre Benois and others on a scenario based on the Russian fairy tales of the Firebird and the blessing and curse it possesses for its owner. It was first performed at the Opéra de Paris on 25 June 1910 and was an immediate success, catapulting Stravinsky to international fame and leading to future Diaghilev–Stravinsky collaborations including Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913).
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.
The Petrushka chord is a recurring polytonal device used in Igor Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka and in later music. These two major triads, C major and F♯ major – a tritone apart – clash, "horribly with each other", when sounded together and create a dissonant chord.
Les cinq doigts is a 1921 piano composition by Igor Stravinsky. Subtitled 8 mélodies très faciles sur 5 notes, the work comprises eight short pieces in which the right hand generally plays only five notes, remaining in essentially the same position at the keyboard throughout the work. The movements of the work have these tempo markings:
In mid- to late-19th-century Russia, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and a group of composers known as The Five had differing opinions as to whether Russian classical music should be composed following Western or native practices. Tchaikovsky wanted to write professional compositions of such quality that they would stand up to Western scrutiny and thus transcend national barriers, yet remain distinctively Russian in melody, rhythm and other compositional characteristics. The Five, made up of composers Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, sought to produce a specifically Russian kind of art music, rather than one that imitated older European music or relied on European-style conservatory training. While Tchaikovsky himself used folk songs in some of his works, for the most part he tried to follow Western practices of composition, especially in terms of tonality and tonal progression. Also, unlike Tchaikovsky, none of The Five were academically trained in composition; in fact, their leader, Balakirev, considered academicism a threat to musical imagination. Along with critic Vladimir Stasov, who supported The Five, Balakirev attacked relentlessly both the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which Tchaikovsky had graduated, and its founder Anton Rubinstein, orally and in print.
Dream on the Volga is an opera in four acts composed by Anton Arensky. The libretto was adapted by Arensky from Alexander Ostrovsky's melodrama Voyevoda. The opera premiered on January 2, 1891 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow with Arensky conducting.
Pribaoutki is a cycle of four songs composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1914 to Russian texts by Alexander Afanasyev. Its Russian title has no direct English equivalent, although Richard Taruskin suggests "nonsense rhymes" or "jingles." Pribaoutki takes about four minutes to perform.
Scherzo, sometimes also referred to as Scherzo in G minor, is one of Igor Stravinsky's earliest works for piano. It was composed in 1902.
Lied ohne Name, sometimes also entitled Lied ohne Namen and Duet for Two Bassons, is a composition for two bassoons by Igor Stravinsky.
