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Arvo Pärt is a contemporary Estonian composer of choral, chamber, and orchestral music, and the inventor of the compositional technique known as Tintinnabula. He faced opposition early in his career for both his faith and his exploration of modernist compositional concepts, but became one of the most performed composers during his lifetime. He was born in 1935 in Paide, Estonia and he was an only child. When he was three years old, he moved with his mother to Rakvere, where he attended the Rakvere Music School from 1945 to 1953. It was at this time that he studied with Ille Martin and he composed his first works, which were unfortunately lost. After he graduated in 1954, he enrolled at the Tallinn Music School but was called into service with the Soviet Army. He played the oboe, percussion, and piano in the military band, but he was discharged in the fall of 1956 because of poor health, and he resumed his education. Upon his return, he received instruction from Veljo Tormis, followed by studies with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory from 1957 to 1963. He developed long-lasting friendships with both instructors, and in 1963 he dedicated his Symphony No. 1 to Eller. Beginning around 1958, Pärt supported himself by composing theatrical works for the Estonian State Puppet Theater and scores for films and documentaries, and he worked as a recording engineer for Estonian Radio until 1967. He became interested in composers from the Renaissance such as Machaut, Desprez, and Obrecht, and these influences can be heard in Credo from 1968 and Symphony No. 3 from 1971. Credo also contained several other compositional concepts like serialized rhythm, tone clusters, and 12-tone technique. This caused an outrage among the nationalist Soviet Composers’ Union, which viewed his music as the hostile acceptance and integration of foreign (Western) influence. Additionally, the sacred theme of Christianity upset the anti-religious Soviet-Estonian government and the work was banned from performance for many years. In the early '70s he became dissatisfied with his methods for composition, and he took some time to reflect and redefine himself as a composer. He returned to composing in 1976 and created the concept of tintinnabula, which remains a key component to his style as a composer. In 1977 he continued developing tintinnabula, and he composed some of his most performed works, including Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Fratres, and Tabula rasa. After his absurdly ironic acceptance speech at the 11th Congress of the Estonian SSR Composers’ Union in 1979, he was dismissed from the organization, and Estonian authorities suggested that he leave the country. He moved with his family to Vienna in 1980 and they settled in West Berlin in 1981. Over the next ten years, he established partnerships with ECM Records and the publisher Universal Edition, and he composed several large-scale works including Stabat Mater and Te Deum. He also began important collaborations with The Hilliard Ensemble and conductor Tõnu Kaljuste, which led to many recordings including the albums Arbos, Passio, and Te Deum. Pärt’s membership to the Estonian Composers’ Union was reinstated in 2005, and in 2007 the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir won a Grammy award for the album Arvo Pärt: Da Pacem. Pärt moved back to Estonia in 2010, and he established the Arvo Pärt Centre, which manages and curates his personal archive and offers educational programs. The 2012 release Arvo Pärt: Adam’s Lament conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance in 2014. Many artists have recorded his music in the 2020s including Arabella Steinbacher, Tomasz Wabnic and the Morphing Chamber Orchestra, and Pedro Piquero on the 2023 release Pärt: Lamentate. ~ RJ Lambert

As one of postmodern music's most celebrated and high-profile composers, Philip Glass' myriad orchestral works, operas, film scores, and dance pieces proved essential to the development of ambient and new age sounds, and his fusions of Western and world musics were among the earliest and most successful global experiments of their kind. Tirelessly exploring and pushing boundaries since the early '60s, Glass produced multiple breakthrough works that helped define entire musical movements, with standouts including 1976's durational opera Einstein on the Beach, 1982's collection of more accessible neo-classical pieces Glassworks, and stellar film scores perfecting the mood for The Thin Blue Line, Kundun, The Hours, and many, many more.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 31, 1937, Glass took up the flute at the age of eight; at 15, he was accepted to the University of Chicago, ostensibly majoring in philosophy but spending most of his waking hours on the piano. He spent four years at Juilliard after graduation, followed in 1963 by a two-year period in Paris under the tutelage of the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Glass' admitted artistic breakthrough came while working with Ravi Shankar on transcribing Indian music; the experience inspired him to begin structuring music by rhythmic phrases instead of by notation, forcing him to reject the 12-tone idiom of purist classical composition as well as traditional elements including harmony, melody, and tempo.

Glass' growing fascination with non-Western musics inspired him to hitchhike across North Africa and India, finally returning to New York in 1967. There he began to develop his distinctively minimalist compositional style, his music consisting of hypnotically repetitious circular rhythms. While Glass quickly staked out territory in the blooming downtown art community, his work met with great resistance from the classical establishment, and to survive he was forced to work as a plumber and, later, as a cab driver. In the early '70s, he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, a seven-piece group composed of woodwinds, a variety of keyboards, and amplified voices; their music found its initial home in art galleries but later moved into underground rock clubs, including the famed Max's Kansas City. After receiving initial refusals to publish his music, Glass formed his own imprint, Chatham Square Productions, in 1971; a year later, he self-released his first recording, Music with Changing Parts. Subsequent efforts like 1973's Music in Similar Motion/Music in Fifths earned significant fame overseas, and in 1974 he signed to Virgin U.K.

Glass rose to international fame with his 1976 "portrait opera" Einstein on the Beach, a collaboration with scenarist Robert Wilson. An early masterpiece close to five hours in length, it toured Europe and was performed at the Metropolitan Opera House; while it marked Glass' return to classical Western harmonic elements, its dramatic rhythmic and melodic shifts remained the work's most startling feature. At much the same time, he was attracting significant attention from mainstream audiences as a result of the album North Star, a collection of shorter pieces that he performed in rock venues and even at Carnegie Hall. In the years to follow, Glass focused primarily on theatrical projects, and in 1980 he presented Satyagraha, an operatic portrayal of the life of Gandhi complete with a Sanskrit libretto inspired by The Bhagavad Gita. Similar in theme and scope was 1984's Akhnaten, which examined the myth of the Egyptian pharaoh. In 1983, Glass made the first of many forays into film composition with the score to the Godfrey Reggio cult hit Koyaanisqatsi; a sequel, Powaqqatsi, followed five years later.

While remaining best known for his theatrical productions, Glass also enjoyed a successful career as a recording artist. In 1981, he signed an exclusive composer's contract with the CBS Masterworks label, the first such contract offered to an artist since Aaron Copland; a year later, he issued Glassworks, a highly successful instrumental collection of orchestral and ensemble performances. In 1983, he released The Photographer, including a track with lyrics by David Byrne; that same year, Glass teamed with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek for Carmina Burana. Released in 1986, Songs from Liquid Days featured lyrics from luminaries including Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, and Suzanne Vega, and became Glass' best-selling effort to date.

By this time, he was far and away the avant-garde's best-known composer, thanks also to his music for the 1984 Olympic Games and works like The Juniper Tree, an opera based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In 1992, Glass was even commissioned to write The Voyage for the Met in honor of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas -- clear confirmation of his acceptance by the classical establishment. In 1997, he scored the Martin Scorsese masterpiece Kundun, and in coming years would become increasingly more involved with film, composing a new score for the 1931 Dracula film as well as original scores for films like Music from The Hours (2002), Neverwas (2005), The Illusionist (2006), No Reservations (2007), and many more. During the 2000s, Glass also prolifically composed for the concert hall, writing a series of concerti for various instruments, a handful of symphonies (No. 6: Plutonian Ode, No. 7: Toltec), several operas (Galileo Galilei, The Perfect American), songs, poems, and countless other projects.

Theatrical works like Glass' 2009 score for Euripides' The Bacchae and the opera Kepler led into the next decade, which saw him continue to compose at seemingly tireless rate. His collaborations have branched out into various popular musical genres including rock musicians (David Bowie, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen) electronic and ambient artists (Aphex Twin, Brian Eno), and mainstream, big-budget cinema, as on his 2015 soundtrack collaboration with composer Marco Beltrami for Marvel's Fantastic Four film. 2015 also saw the publication of his memoir, Words Without Music. In 2017, Glass supplied the score to Jane, a documentary about famed primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall. Two years after he debuted Symphony No. 12, inspired by David Bowie's 1979 album Lodger. Preceded by 1992's Symphony No. 1 (Low) and 1996's Symphony No. 4 (Heroes), it completed Glass' cycle of symphonies based on Bowie's late-'70s Berlin trilogy.

After scoring Bernard Rose's film Samurai Marathon 1855 and a theatrical production of King Lear, Glass began the 2020s with several major works. Among the most high profile were the 2021 opera Circus Days and Nights, the Alice ballet for orchestra his 13th symphony, both of which premiered in 2022. A year later he collaborated with fellow composer Paul Leonard-Morgan on the score for the John le Carre documentary The Pigeon Tunnel. ~ Jason Ankeny & Timothy Monger

With themes that touch on nature, emotions, and the passage of time, Yiruma's gentle piano compositions bridge spare new age atmospheres and classical program music. Released the same year as his debut, his second album, 2001's First Love, included "River Flows in You." Based on an isolated melodic line and minimal left-hand accompaniment representative of Yiruma's style, it charted around the world and became a favorite for television and advertising placements. After nearly a dozen albums, The Best: Reminiscent 10th Anniversary appeared on Sony in 2011. An edition of the record with rearranged, newly recorded versions of fan favorites topped the Billboard classical and new age albums charts in 2020. The following year saw the releases of Rewritten Memories and Solo, which coincided with his 20th anniversary as an artist.

Born on February 15, 1978 in Seoul, South Korea, Yiruma (born Lee Ru-Ma) began playing the piano at the age of five. He moved to London in 1988 to enroll at the Purcell School of Music. After graduating in 1997, he studied composition at King's College London, completing his degree in June of 2000. He released his first two albums of solo piano music, Love Scene and First Love, on the Stomp Music label in 2001. "River Flows in You" from the latter record became his signature piece, not only reaching the Top 20 of the singles charts in countries like Germany and Austria but appearing on television, in advertisements, and in various other media settings for years to come.

Yiruma next composed the scores for a pair of 2002 films: Oasis, a romance, and Doggy Poo, a claymation feature. Both received soundtrack releases, with Oasis' titled Oasis and Yiruma. His third studio album, 2003's From the Yellow Room, offered another popular track, "Kiss the Rain." Containing a set of improvisations among prepared pieces, Nocturnal Lights They Scatter followed in 2004, and the next year's Destiny of Love featured reworked tracks including two that were rearranged for orchestra. He delivered Live at Hoam Art Hall and the original album Poemusic before the end of the 2005. Yiruma contributed an album's worth of tracks to the four-part soundtrack of the KBS drama Spring Waltz that arrived on Seoul Records in in early 2006. Subtitled One Day Diary 19th September, the religion-themed H.I.S. Monologue followed that November. He returned with the studio album P.N.O.N.I. in 2008.

In 2010, German DJ Alex Christensen, aka Jasper Forks, further boosted the popularity of "River Flows in You" with a remix of the track, and a year later, Sony celebrated the tenth anniversary of Yiruma's recording debut with the collection The Best: Reminiscent 10th Anniversary. By that time, the pianist had established a habit of releasing piano books to accompany his albums, with an acknowledgment that he was writing music that many people could play. During his live shows, he would often bring an audience member on-stage to improvise with him.

Yiruma's first album of original material for Sony, Stay in Memory, saw release in mid-2012, with the studio album Blind Film and the Stomp Music collection Healing Piano close behind in 2013. Credited to "Yiruma and Friends," 2014's Atmosfera included versions of his songs performed with guests. An album simply titled Piano was issued by Sony in 2016, and Yiruma returned with Frame in 2017. He went back to the studio for fresh takes on fan favorites for a 2020 reissue of his 10th anniversary album. The Best: Reminiscent 10th Anniversary went to number one on the Billboard Classical Albums chart in 2020, also topping the New Age Albums chart. Around that time, another best-of release, First Love: Piano Music, hit number five on the former and seven on the latter. In the meantime, Yiruma issued the five-track EP Room with a View. It arrived on Mind Tailor Music/Universal that May. The following year saw Yiruma issue the orchestral Rewritten Memories and the sparse Solo to celebrate his 20th anniversary in music. Both efforts revisited pieces from throughout his long career. ~ Marcy Donelson