This is a list of notable events in music that took place in 1931.
Paul Creston was an Italian American composer of classical music.
Leevi Antti Madetoja was a Finnish composer, music critic, conductor, and teacher of the late-Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant Finnish contemporaries of Jean Sibelius, under whom he studied privately from 1908 to 1910.
Ahmet Adnan Saygun was a Turkish composer, musicologist and writer on music.
Selim Gustaf Adolf Palmgren was a Finnish composer, pianist, and conductor. Palmgren was born in Pori, Finland, February 16, 1878. He studied at the Conservatory in Helsinki from 1895 to 1899, then continued his piano studies in Berlin with Ansorge, Berger and Busoni. He conducted choral and orchestral societies in his own country and made several very successful concert tours as a pianist in the principal cities of Finland and Scandinavia, appearing also as a visiting conductor. In 1921, he went to the United States, where he taught composition at the Eastman School of Music, later returning to Finland, where he died in Helsinki, aged 73. Palmgren was married to the opera singer Maikki Järnefelt.
Uuno (Kalervo) Klami was a Finnish composer of the modern period. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant Finnish composers to emerge from the generation that followed Jean Sibelius.
Erkki Gustaf Melartin was a Finnish composer, conductor, and teacher of the late-Romantic and early-modern periods. Melartin is generally considered to be one of Finland's most significant national Romantic composers, although his music—then and now—largely has been overshadowed by that of his exact contemporary, Jean Sibelius, the country's most famous composer. The core of Melartin's oeuvre consists of a set of six (completed) symphonies, as well as is his opera, Aino, based on a story from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, but nevertheless in the style of Richard Wagner.
Ragnar Søderlind is a Norwegian composer. He has written ballets and operas, and for the concert hall, programmatic works based on poems.
The Ostrobothnians, Op. 45, is a verismo opera in three acts written from 1917 to 1924 by the Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja. The story, variously comedic and tragic, takes place around 1850 in the historical Finnish province of Ostrobothnia and features as its central conflict the deteriorating relationship between the farm community and its oppressive sheriff.
Donald Henry Kay AM is an Australian classical composer.
The Tempest (Stormen), Op. 109, is incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest, by Jean Sibelius. He composed it in 1925–26, at about the same time as he wrote his tone poem Tapiola. Sibelius derived two suites from the score.
Emil Hartmann was a Danish composer of the romantic period, fourth generation of composers in the Danish Hartmann musical family.
Ernest Walker was an Indian-born English composer and writer on music, as well as a pianist, organist and teacher.
Belshazzar's Feast, JS 48, is incidental music by Jean Sibelius to a play of the same name by the journalist, poet and playwright Hjalmar Fredrik Eugen Procopé (1868−1927).
Hermann Zilcher was a German composer, pianist, conductor, and music teacher. His compositional oeuvre includes orchestral and choral works, two operas, chamber music and songs, études, piano works, and numerous works for accordion.
Kuolema, JS 113, is incidental music for orchestra by Jean Sibelius for a play of that title by his brother-in-law Arvid Järnefelt, structured in six movements and originally scored for string orchestra, bass drum and a bell. He conducted the first performance at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki on 2 December 1903. He drew individual works from the score and revised them as:
