It will be hard to keep Latvian composer Peteris Vasks's passionate, yearning, eminently accessible music secret here much longer. Read Daniel Stephen Johnson's portrait and listen to the composer introduce his own music. 

In recent decades, American composer David Lang has been best known as a founding member of the Bang On A Can collective – something of an activist-spirited composer/performer/educator outfit based in New York.

There's hardly a DJ alive who hasn't slowed a vocal down, or sped it up, to fit another beat, while keeping it in the same key. This landscape is the place where composer Jacob Cooper calls home.

Born in 1985, Timothy Andres (occasionally billed, somewhat insouciantly, as “Timo”) works in the post-dogmatic era of contemporary American composition. This means, among other things, that Andres feels as much at home recomposing (and playing) Mozart’s “Coronation” Piano Concerto as he does taking part in a street performance of Mauricio Kagel’s Eine Brise (for 111 bicyclists).

Sitting at the crossroads of installation art, extended vocal technique and non-score-based rehearsal processes is one of America’s late-20th century masters: Meredith Monk.

"Lowell Liebermann," wrote one critic, "has achieved a reputation of writing some of the most melancholy, even gloomy, music on the planet." Why was this, the writer wanted to know—had something terrible happened to him that wasn't hinted at in his biography?

Morton Subotnick has almost as many pioneering credits to his name as he does compositional ones. A leader of the San Francisco Tape Center in the '60s – a place where Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros and many others took some of their earliest aesthetic steps – Subotnick has consulted (or commissioned) the building of synthesizers from the ground up, and also recorded the first electronic-music album meant just for listening, instead of live-performance miming. (So radical!)

Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson is an inventor of a technique of generating a piece of music based on recorded speech and approximating it with musical notes.

Some of Ingram Marshall's earliest recordings are of solo, semi-improvised performances, playing an Indonesian flute and singing falsetto to an accompaniment of prerecorded electronics and live tape delays. They are mesmerizing—thick, swelling, fragrant clouds of music.

While it is true that Tyondai Braxton's father is the revered composer and improviser Anthony Braxton, their music might as well come from two different planets (neither of which is Earth). Light-years away from his father's liberated, happily baffling ensemble experiments, Braxton fils sounds more like a long-lost son of Zappa, his compositions as gaily colored, as rigidly constructed, and as outrageously, extravagantly pop as a life-size sculpture in Lego blocks.

The Bang on a Can collective—Michael Gordon, wife Julia Wolfe, and fellow Martin Bresnick student David Lang—took a shared fascination with modernist dissonance, minimalist process, and rock volume, and turned it into a new kind of New York institution. They founded festivals and a record label, and collectively composed evening-length works like the oratorio Lost Objects (2001) and the opera Carbon Copy Building (1999).

Phil Kline is a composer of the Bang on a Can generation, championed by that collective and sharing with them good deal of common aesthetic ground, fusing an experimental sensibility and minimalist processes with rock sonics and vigor.

Like many of his contemporaries, Sebastian Currier approaches classical music with a sort of double-consciousness—infatuated with its traditions, but well aware of its limitations. Is rock music to blame?

Angélica Negrón's music is a whisper. A young composer, she has crafted a small oeuvre of concert works, each suffused with a kind of compassion, as if regarding something very small and delicate, but without condescension. She samples tiny noises, seemingly trivial sounds, and turns them into music.

Perhaps only an artist with Missy Mazzoli's self-evident clarity of purpose could have raised vacillation to an art form. Her early mentor Meredith Monk toys with handfuls of pitches, making slight variations, but playfully as well as meditatively. It's the tension created by the relentless forward motion of Mazzoli's music, that ticking pulse, that gives the music the sense of a choked-up faltering between pitches.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that, despite his unassuming physical presence, Aaron Jay Kernis is some kind of extrovert. Listen to these titles: 100 Greatest Dance Hits, New Era Dance, Too Hot Toccata, Superstar Etudes.

For decades, rising composers, young composers working in aesthetics not yet embraced by the mainstream institutions of classical music—concert halls, symphony orchestras, universities—have had to find audiences by building and leading their own, brand new institutions. Paola Prestini has helped to build and lead VisionIntoArt, a multimedia performing arts collective, building bridges between the worlds of music, film, dance, theater, and poetry.

Few composers personify New York's young new-music scene in quite the same way as Judd Greenstein. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the ETHEL string quartet and by the Minnesota Orchestra. New Amsterdam, the label he co-founded with composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle, serves as an umbrella for many of the city's most celebrated young composers and ensembles, including his own NOW Ensemble of new-music virtuosos. In 2011, he inaugurated the Ecstatic Music Festival, bringing together indie rock, jazz and classical music for a series of cross-genre concerts and collaborations.

With the attention Paul Moravec received after his Tempest Fantasy won the Pulitzer Prize for music, one might have hoped that this would have put to rest the tired dialectics suggesting that tonality and complexity.

After his clarinet was stolen from a Paris phone booth, Derek Bermel explains, he gave up busking to become a goatherd in the south of the country. He has studied the music of Yemen in Jerusalem, the music of Thrace in Bulgaria, choro music in Brazil, and in Ghana the music of a xylophone-like instument called the gyil, and conducted a choir of emotionally disturbed boys at a residential center in New York City.