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.
Nikolai Sergeevich Korndorf was a Russian and Canadian composer and conductor. He was prolific both in Moscow, Russia, and in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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.
The Raschèr Saxophone Quartet is a professional ensemble of four saxophonists which performs classical and modern music.
Anders Erik Birger Eliasson was a Swedish composer.
Carter Pann is an American composer. He studied composition and piano at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree. His teachers include Samuel Adler, William Albright, Warren Benson, William Bolcom, David Liptak, Joseph Schwantner, and Bright Sheng, and piano with Barry Snyder.
Sigurd Christian Jag Erland Vogt von Koch was a Swedish composer. He wrote symphonies, ballets, an opera, and other compositions, including music for film.
Joe Cutler is a British composer who grew up in Neasden and studied music at the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham, before receiving a Polish Government Scholarship to study at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw, Poland. He has taught composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire since 2000, and since 2005 he has been the Head of Composition there. In 2015 he was made Professor of Composition. He is also the co-founder of the instrumental ensemble Noszferatu.
Martin Fröst is a Swedish clarinetist and conductor. As a clarinetist, he performs internationally and is considered one of the most renowned instrumental soloists ever.
Hanna Kulenty is a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. Since 1992, she has worked and lived both in Warsaw (Poland) and in Arnhem (Netherlands).
Karin Rehnqvist is a Swedish composer and conductor of classical music. She composes chamber music, orchestral works, music for the stage, and particularly vocal music, incorporating elements of folk music such as the vocal technique of Kulning. In 2009 she was appointed the first female professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
Svante Henryson is a composer, cellist, bass guitarist and double bassist, active within jazz, classical music, and hard rock.
Karen Tanaka is a Japanese composer.
Marie Samuelsson is a Swedish composer.
Klas Torstensson is a Swedish-Dutch composer.
Sebastian Fagerlund is a Finnish composer. He is described as “a post-modern impressionist whose sound landscapes can be heard as ecstatic nature images which, however, are always inner images, landscapes of the mind”. Echoes of Western culture, Asian musical traditions, and heavy metal have all been detected in his music.
Ylva Q Arkvik is a prominent composer of contemporary classical music. She has written about 50 works for varying settings such as chamber ensemble, orchestra, choir, opera, theatre and electroacoustic music. Her works have been performed by Swedish ensembles and orchestras such as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kroumata, the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet and Musica Vitae.
Andrew March is an English composer. He was the winner of the first-ever Masterprize Composition Competition with his piece Marine — à travers les arbres. Andrew studied composition at the Royal College of Music with Jeremy Dale Roberts, graduating in 1996.
Matthew Peterson is a classical composer of operas, choral works, orchestral and chamber music.
Masterprize International Composing Competition, informally known as Masterprize, was an international composing competition founded in April 1996 by author, investment banker and former diplomat, John McLaren. The brief for the inaugural competition was "to find new and original works for symphony orchestra with artistic integrity with the potential for broad and lasting appeal". Additional specifications were that the compositional entry should be of a duration of 8 to 12 minutes and that composers could be of any age or nationality. For the 2001 competition, the submitted works had to have been scored for orchestral forces of between 50 and 90 players and have a duration of between 6 and 15 minutes. Composers who were awarded first place received a monetary prize of either £25,000 for the 1998 competition, or £30,000 for the 2001 and 2003 competitions, respectively.
