Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
John Harris Harbison is an American composer, known for his symphonies, operas, and large choral works.
Grażyna Bacewicz Biernacka was a Polish composer and violinist. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
The Raschèr Saxophone Quartet is a professional ensemble of four saxophonists which performs classical and modern music.
Wayne Peterson was an American composer, pianist, and educator. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark in 1992, when its board overturned the jury's unanimous selection of Concerto Fantastique by Ralph Shapey.
Frédéric Devreese was a Belgian composer of mostly orchestral, chamber and piano works that have been performed throughout the world; he was also active as a conductor. Devreese is known for his film scores, including Benvenuta by André Delvaux and The Cruel Embrace by Marion Hänsel.
Krzysztof Meyer is a Polish composer, pianist, and music scholar, formerly Dean of the Department of Music Theory (1972–1975) at the State College of Music, and president of the Union of Polish Composers (1985–1989). Meyer served as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne from 1987 to 2008, prior to his retirement.
Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian is a British composer, singer, and harper. She is considered one of today's leading emerging composers.
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.
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.
Grace-Evangeline Mason is a British composer of contemporary classical 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.
Pierre Jalbert is an American composer. For his performance Jalbert was awarded the Rome Prize in 2000 and 2001, the Masterprize in 2001, the Stoeger Prize in 2006 and the Academy Award in Music in 2010.
