Archives: Composers

German bassist Oswald Schwabe (1846 -1909) was Professor of Double Bass at Leipzig Royal Conservatoire and Principal Bass of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He studied with Emanuel Storch and was a successful teacher in his own right.
Schwabe’s works for double bass include a book of Technical Studies alongside three short pieces for double bass and piano Romanze Op.3, Adagio Op.4 and Cavatina.

(b.1945)

John Rutter studied music at Clare College, Cambridge and first came to notice as a composer and arranger of Christmas carols and other choral pieces during those early years; today his compositions, including such concert-length works as Requiem, Magnificat, Mass of the Children, The Gift of Life, and Visions are performed around the world. John edits the Oxford Choral Classics series, and, with Sir David Willcocks, co-edited four volumes of Carols for Choirs. In 1983 he formed his own choir The Cambridge Singers, with whom he has made numerous recordings on the Collegium Records label, and he appears regularly in several countries as a guest conductor and choral ambassador. John holds a Lambeth Doctorate in Music, and was awarded a CBE for services to music in 2007.

John Rutter’s website

Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist, born on January 6, 1872, in Moscow1. He is known for his innovative and influential contributions to music, particularly in the late Romantic period. Scriabin’s early works were influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom1.

However, Scriabin later developed a much more dissonant musical language that transcended usual tonality but was not atonal. This new style was deeply connected to his personal brand of metaphysics and his interest in synesthesia, where he associated colors with the various harmonic tones of his scale1. He also created a color-coded circle of fifths inspired by theosophy1.

Scriabin’s music often included elements of mysticism and Russian Cosmism, and he sought to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, that would combine music with other art forms1. His most famous work is “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire,” which was the first composition in history to include notation for lights and colors based on his scale of synesthetic colors2.

Despite his fame during his lifetime, Scriabin’s importance in the Russian (subsequently Soviet) musical scene and internationally declined after his death. However, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since the 1970s, and his works have garnered significant acclaim in recent years1. He passed away on April 27, 1915, in Moscow.

Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor, and pianist of the Romantic era, born on October 9, 1835, in Paris1. He is best known for his symphonic poems, the opera “Samson et Dalila,” and the orchestral piece “The Carnival of the Animals.” Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy, making his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he became a church organist and later a successful freelance pianist and composer.

Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of his time, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner. His own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition, but he was also a scholar of musical history and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers1. This sometimes brought him into conflict with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music in his later years.

He held only one teaching post at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris and remained there for less than five years. However, it was an important institution in the development of French music, with his students including Gabriel Fauré1. Saint-Saëns’s influence on later composers is widely recognized, and he is revered as a genius by many.

Erik Alfred Leslie Satie, known as Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist born on May 17, 1866, in Honfleur, Normandy, France. He passed away on July 1, 1925, in Paris. Satie was a significant figure in early 20th-century music, particularly in France, known for his spare, unconventional, and often witty style that influenced many composers, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc.

Satie’s early years were marked by his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. He worked as a pianist in café-cabarets in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his famous Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes1. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.

After a period of composing little, Satie entered Paris’s second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student, where his studies were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910, he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality, including the group known as Les Six1. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade in 1917 for Serge Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.

Satie’s music is characterized by unresolved chords, sometimes dispensing with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes, and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) and Sonatine bureaucratique, and most of his works are brief, with the majority being for solo piano.

Never married, Satie lived most of his adult life in a single small room, first in Montmartre and then in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically colored velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer born on January 31, 1797, in Himmelpfortgrund, near Vienna, Austria. He passed away on November 19, 1828, in Vienna1. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind an extensive oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works (mainly lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music.

His major works include the art songs “Erlkönig,” “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” and “Ave Maria”; the “Trout Quintet”; the Symphony No. 8 in B minor (“Unfinished”); the Symphony No. 9 in C major (“Great”); the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”); the String Quintet in C major; the Impromptus for solo piano; the last three piano sonatas; the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands; the opera “Fierrabras”; the incidental music to the play “Rosamunde”; and the song cycles “Die schöne Müllerin,” “Winterreise,” and “Schwanengesang”.

Schubert showed uncommon gifts for music from an early age. His father gave him his first violin lessons, and his elder brother gave him piano lessons, but Schubert soon exceeded their abilities. At the age of eleven, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt school, where he became acquainted with the orchestral music of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. He left the Stadtkonvikt at the end of 1813 and returned home to live with his father, where he began studying to become a schoolteacher. Despite this, he continued his studies in composition with Antonio Salieri and still composed prolifically.

In 1821, Schubert was admitted to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde as a performing member, which helped establish his name among the Viennese citizenry. He gave a concert of his works to critical acclaim in March 1828, the only time he did so in his career. He died eight months later at the age of 31, the cause officially attributed to typhoid fever, but believed by some historians to be syphilis.

Appreciation of Schubert’s music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased greatly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers in the history of Western classical music, and his work continues to be admired and widely performed.