English composer and bassist has achieved sonically rich musical results in works like The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Read an appreciation of the composer's work.

While never fully breaking from the expressive language developed by Mahler and his 20th-Century heirs, Corigliano develops it to often harrowing extremes. Read a profile of the celebrated American composer and listen to him introduce his music. 

Poul Ruders’s diverse body of compositions is tied together by his smooth absorption of many styles and modes. Read a full profile on the Danish composer, featured on this weekend's CONTACT! performance with The New York Philharmonic, and listen to him introduce his music.

Given his Yale teaching post and the number of composers he has mentored there, Martin Bresnick may wind up being remembered as the Nadia Boulanger of the late 20th-century American scene: a rite of compositional passage embodied in a single instructor.

Avner Dorman is a composer of musical spices, perfumes and toxins in a figurative sense. His music is piquant — vivid, present, spicy. Read a profile of the Israeli-born composer and hear him introduce many of his key works. 

Now that Elliott Carter has passed, we might well bestow the title of “world’s most impressive late-blooming composer” onto the shoulders of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Read a full portrait of the Finnish composer-conductor and listen to him introduce many of his key works.

Charles Ives wrote him a letter of recommendation to Harvard. He attended the New York premiere of The Rite of Spring. Decades later, Stravinsky himself would proclaim that he had written the first American masterpiece.

Heinz Karl Gruber (or HK Gruber, depending on your program) isn’t afraid of being called silly. One of the Austrian composer’s most notorious pieces, Frankenstein!! (yes, with two exclamation points), is formally described as a “pan-demonium,” and takes as its text some would-be Austrian children’s rhymes penned by an absurdist-minded pal of Gruber’s.

The tradition of the star performer-composer is as old as classical music itself — Beethoven on the piano, Paganini on the violin. But Mason Bates isn't a virtuoso of the organ or the lute. The role of the performer and the role of the composer have changed: Bates's instrument is the laptop.

Philip Glass is one of the only living classical composers, if not the only one, to have achieved any kind of popular celebrity. For people who "don't listen to classical music," his name still evokes his instantly recognizable musical signature.

Jacob ter Veldhuis, the Dutch composer better known as JacobTV, comes as close to pop art as classical music is ever likely to get. Borrowing the "speech-melody" technique of Scott Johnson and Steve Reich, he loops sampled conversation to form the basis for his music.

A decade or two before post-minimalism became the lingua franca of emerging American composers, the young Michael Torke was already building his career on it. Learn more about Torke and listen to the composer himself introduce many of his key works. 

Tan Dun's teacher, student of Edgard Varèse, Chou Wen-chung stands at the intersection of Asian and European traditions, of old and new logics for cross-cultural listening.

For a newcomer to Terry Riley, In C is where to begin, with its 53 melodic fragments passed back and forth between whatever instruments may have been assembled, and which are paced against the constant pulse of a piano’s top two Cs.

From time in the serialist trenches of academia to a position in the front ranks of the neoromantic movement, David Del Tredici has played a surfeit of roles over the last half-century. Read Seth Colter Walls's portrait, and listen to the composer introduce his works.

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.