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Johann Christoph Pezel was born in the little town of Glatz, near Bautzen in Silesia, and was probably educated in the city Gymnasium of Bautzen. He was a Ratsmusiker, meaning that his professional roots went back to the trumpeters who used to keep watch from city towers and give signals with their trumpets. As such, he made his living as a member of various town bands.

Over the years, the Ratsmusiken evolved into a group providing music for civic functions and by the seventeenth century, it had string instruments as well as brass.

Pezel did not spend his entire career in the Bautzen area. In the first place, there is evidence that he traveled widely before he received his first appointment. He is first mentioned in Leipzig and the city fathers decided in 1664 to increase their town band from seven members to eight and Pezel got the job, listed as "fourth Kunstgeiger" (the word means something like "artist/violinist"). In 1670, Pezel was promoted to Stadtpfeifer (city piper), which was a musicians' rank equivalent to "Meister" in a craft guild. It also was a life appointment.

His first important published work was Hora decima musicorum, which appeared in 1670, with his name given as Joanne Pezelio, although he signed the dedication Johann Bezeld. Over the years, he used a puzzling variety of different versions of his name, such as Petzoldt, Bezel, Bezelius, Petzel, and Pecelius. The last variant is unfortunate because there is a Johannes Pecelius who was a Czech musician and confusion has resulted.

Pezel made some efforts to find a different job and once he applied for the post of Cantor of St. Thomaskirche in Leipzig (Johann Sebastian Bach's future post) and another time for a position in Dresden's Ratsmusiken.

Pezel's important music is for cornet or trombone ensembles, typical Ratsmusik. While he worked in Leipzig, this brass music would be played twice a day from the town tower, or Rathaus. It is collected in the Hora decima musicorum and the Funf-stimmigte blasende Music.

Hora decima musicorum comprises 40 sonatas in one movement for wind or strings, the type of figurations used show that it was conceived as brass music and the sonatas are grouped according to tonality. In addition, in every case a piece in double time is followed by one in triple measure, leading one commentator to suggest they are conceived as two-movement pairs.

Fünf-stimmigte blasende Music is a group of 76 wind pieces, mostly intradas but also including some dance movements. Sharing of motives between pieces strongly suggests that they were arranged in performance pairs and the music is harmonically conservative. The composer shows great skill in devising fresh textures to overcome the inherent lack of variety in color caused by the instrumentation. An example of this is alternating sections in imitative counterpoint and homophonic texture. The part writing is smooth and interest mainly lies in the outer parts. The music is lively and shows that Pezel was fine composer within the limited possibilities of this genre.

One of the earliest German composers to forge a synthesis of traditional Germanic chorale and counterpoint with the more modern textures emerging from Italy, Samuel Scheidt was a multifaceted composer of music both sacred and secular whose fame, however, rests almost entirely on the excellence of his instrumental music.

Scheidt was born in Halle during the late 1580s, within a year of both Heinrich Schütz and Johann Hermann Schein. Both would later become friends of Scheidt, and who were engaged, like Scheidt, in the fusion of the musical idioms from northern and southern Europe. Scheidt's father was a municipal official who maintained a number of friendships with prominent local musicians, and encouraged his sons to pursue musical studies. Scheidt attended public school, and was instructed in music by the Kantor of the local Gymnasium, Matthäus Birkner, until he attained the position of organist at the Moritzkirche in Halle in 1604. After resigning the post four years later, Scheidt journeyed to Amsterdam for a period of study with well-known organist Jan Sweelinck, whose music Scheidt would later edit and publish back in Germany.

From 1609 to 1625, Scheidt served as court organist and secular keyboard composer to Christian Wilhelm of Brandenburg, the new administrator of Halle. These were prosperous years for the composer, and after 1619 Scheidt combined his duties as organist with those of kapellmeister, strengthening the instrumental and vocal forces of the court and overseeing the rebuilding of the Mortizkirche organ. Much of Scheidt's better-known music hails from the years immediately following his appointment as Kapellmeister: three separate volumes of instrumental pieces, one collection each of motets and vocal concertos, and the Tabulatura nova, a massive collection of organ music, all which appeared between 1620 and 1624.

In 1625, however, Wilhelm left Halle to fight in the Thirty Years War, and Scheidt was left virtually unemployed. Despite his lack of salary and the departure of most of his musicians for more lucrative positions, Scheidt remained in Halle, earning what he could from teaching and the occasional commission from other cities' courts. He was rewarded for such loyalty in 1628, when Halle created a new and important musical post for him, that of director musices (musical director). A conflict with the Rektor of the local Gymnasium, who claimed, as did Scheidt, to have jurisdiction over the choirboys, resulted in Scheidt's dismissal from the post in 1630. The composer's personal life soon worsened when all of his children died of the plague during a 1636 outbreak.

In 1638, the return of a city administrator (now Duke August of Saxony) brought a renewed musical prosperity to Halle, and Scheidt once again assumed his duties as the city's kapellmeister. He continued to compose music for public and private occasions until his death in 1654 at the age of 66.

Scott Joplin was "The King of Ragtime Writers," a composer who elevated "banjo piano playing," a lowly entertainment associated with saloons and brothels, into an American art form loved by millions. Born in Texas in either 1867 or 1868, Scott Joplin was raised in Texarkana, the son of a laborer and former slave. As a child, Joplin taught himself piano on an instrument belonging to a white family that granted him access to it, and ultimately studied with a local, German-born teacher who introduced Joplin to classical music. Joplin attended high school in Sedalia, MO, a town that would serve as Joplin's home base during his most prosperous years, and where a museum now bears his name.

In 1891, the first traceable evidence of Joplin's music career is found, placing him in a minstrel troupe in Texarkana. In 1893, he played in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition, reportedly leading a band with a cornet. Afterward, Joplin settled in Sedalia, worked with other brass bands and founded a vocal group called the Texas Medley Quartette. During an 1895 appearance in Syracuse, NY, the quality of Joplin's original songs for the Texas Medley Quartette so impressed a group of local businessmen that they arranged for Joplin's first publications. Around 1896, Joplin enrolled in Sedalia's George R. Smith College for Negroes to study formally, publishing a few more pieces in the years to follow.

In 1899, publisher John Stark of Sedalia issued Joplin's second ragtime composition, Maple Leaf Rag. It didn't catch on like wildfire, but within a few years the popularity of Maple Leaf Rag was so enormous that it made Joplin's name; and Joplin earned a small percentage of income from it for the rest of his days, helping stabilize him in his last years. By the end of 1899, Joplin presented his first ambitious work, the ballet The Ragtime Dance, at the Wood Opera House in Sedalia. It didn't appear in print until 1902, and then only in a truncated form. Joplin moved to St. Louis in 1901, as did Stark, who set his new publishing venture up as The House of Classic Rags. Joplin wrote many of the other rags he is known for during this time, including The Entertainer, The Easy Winners, and Elite Syncopations.

In 1903, Joplin organized a touring company to perform his first opera, "A Guest of Honor," which foundered after a couple of months, leaving Joplin destitute. He had recovered well enough to appear at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair to present his rag The Cascades, which proved his second great success. Joplin also married for a second time to a woman who died only a few weeks into their marriage after a bout with pneumonia, plunging Joplin into another bout of despair. During a visit to Chicago he renewed an acquaintance with St. Louis pianist Louis Chauvin, who did not long outlast their visit. Joplin utilized a strain drawn from Chauvin's playing into the finest of his "collaborative" rags, Heliotrope Bouquet. This was published after Joplin moved to New York in 1907. Stark had also resettled there, and they resumed their partnership to some degree, but Joplin also published through Seminary Music, likewise home to aspiring songwriter Irving Berlin. Through Seminary many of the best of his late works appeared, such as Pine Apple Rag, the transparently beautiful "Mexican serenade" Solace, and the harmonically adventurous Euphonic Sounds.

From 1911 until his death in 1917, most of Joplin's efforts went into his second opera, Treemonishia, which he heard in concert and except performances, but never managed to stage during his own lifetime. With his third wife Lotte Joplin, Joplin formed his own music company and published his final piano rag, Magnetic Rag (1914), one of his best. By this time, the debilitating, long-term effects of syphilis were beginning to undermine Joplin's health, although he did manage to make seven hand-played piano rolls in 1916 and 1917; though heavily edited, these rolls are as close as we are likely to get to hearing Joplin's own playing. One of them is W.C. Handy's Ole Miss Rag, which suggests that Joplin might have had a hand in its composition or arrangement. Joplin was selfless in his advocacy of his fellow ragtime composers, collaborating with James Scott, Arthur Marshall, Louis Chauvin, and Scott Hayden and helping arrange pieces by Artie Matthews and the white New Jersey composer Joseph Lamb, whose work Joplin pitched to Stark.

Maple Leaf Rag remained a constant in popular music throughout the Jazz Age, but the better part of Joplin's work remained unknown until the ragtime revival of the early '70s, during which "Scott Joplin" became a household name and Treemonishia was finally staged by the Houston Grand Opera. Although primary sources on Joplin's music were still extant as late as the late '40s, today not a single manuscript page in Joplin's hand still exists and only three photographs of him have survived, along with precious few first-hand quotations. Joplin died in a mental facility convinced that he had failed in his mission to achieve success as an African-American composer of serious music. Were he alive today, Joplin would be astounded to learn that, a century after his work was first printed, he is by far the most successful African-American composer of serious music who ever lived. Some of his works have been recorded hundreds of times and arranged for practically every conceivable instrumental combination, played by everything from symphony orchestras to ice cream trucks. For a couple of generations of Americans who have never heard of Stephen Foster, the music of Scott Joplin represents the old, traditional order of all things American.

Although he was indicted (along with Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and a number of other prominent Soviet musicians) for "formalism," in the infamous Zhdanov decree of 1948, Aram Khachaturian was, for most of his long career, one of the Soviet musical establishment's most prized representatives. Born into an Armenian family, in Tbilisi, in 1903, Khachaturian's musical identity formed slowly, and, although a tuba player in his school band and a self-taught pianist, he wanted to be a biologist, and did not study music formally until entering Moscow's Gnesin Music Academy (as a cellist) in 1922. His considerable musical talents soon manifested themselves, and by 1925 he was studying composition privately with Gnesin himself. In 1929, Khachaturian joined Miaskovsky's composition class at the Moscow Conservatory. Khachaturian graduated in 1934, and before the completion, in 1937, of his postgraduate studies, the successful premieres of such works as the Symphony No. 2 in A Minor "With a Bell" (1935) and, especially, the Piano Concerto in D flat Major (1936) established Khachaturian as the leading Soviet composer of his generation. During the vicious government-sponsored attacks, in 1948, on the Soviet Composers' Union (in which Khachaturian, an active member since 1937, also held an administrative function) Khachaturian took a great deal of criticism. However, although he was officially censured for employing modernistic, politically incorrect musical techniques which fostered an "anti-people art," Khachaturian's music contained few, if any, of the objectionable traits found in the music of some of his more adventuresome colleagues. In retrospect, it was most likely Khachaturian's administrative role in the Union, perceived by the government as a bastion of politically incorrect music, and not his music as such, which earned him a place on the black list of 1948. Nevertheless, Khachaturian made a very full and humble apology for his artistic "errors" following the Zhdanov decree; his musical style, however, underwent no changes. Khachaturian joined the composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory and the Gnesin Academy in 1950, and that same year he made his debut as a conductor. During the years until his death in 1978 Khachaturian made frequent European conducting appearances, and in January of 1968 he made a culturally significant trip to Washington, D.C., conducting the National Symphony Orchestra in a program of his own works. Khachaturian's characteristic musical style draws on the melodic and rhythmic vitality of Armenian folk music. Although not adverse to sharp dissonance, Khachaturian never strayed from a basically diatonic musical language. The Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto in D Minor are truly Romantic works, virtuosic, clear, and unaffectedly expressive, remaining therefore popular and frequently performed composition. Of course, many neither of these works matches the popularity of the famous "Sabre Dance" from the ballet Gayane, which made Khachaturian a household name during World War II. His other works include film scores, songs, piano pieces, and chamber music. The degree of Khachaturian's success as a Soviet composer can be measured by his many honors, which include the 1941 Lenin Prize, for the Violin Concerto, the 1959 Stalin Prize, for the ballet Spartacus, and the title, awarded in 1954, of People's Artist.

Adler, the son of a concert pianist, was mostly a self-taught musician. After serving in the U.S. Navy he started writing songs, and in 1950 he began collaborating with Jerry Ross. Their first success together was Rags to Riches and their first musical, The Pajama Game, brought them recognition for the way the songs worked with the plot and for their integration of American speech idioms. The pair also wrote Damn Yankees, a musical comedy version of the Faust story. Adler was less successful after Ross' death, but continued to write for commercials and television musicals as well as serving as an arts consultant to the White House from 1965-1969. He also produced several Broadway shows. Richard Adler died at his home in Southampton, New York in June 2012 at the age of 90. ~ Lynn Vought

Known for his brief but highly successful partnership with Richard Adler, composer/lyricist Jerry Ross was born Jerold Rosenberg in the Bronx on March 9, 1926. He began singing at synagogue at age ten, and when his talent quickly became apparent, he got involved in Yiddish theater, taking professional jobs by the time he was in high school. He also started writing songs as a teenager, and went on to study music at New York University. After college, he honed his chops on the so-called borscht belt resort circuit in the Catskills, where he met pop singer Eddie Fisher. Fisher helped introduce the newly renamed, less ethnic-sounding Jerry Ross around New York's music publishing world, and in 1950, he met fellow composer/lyricist Richard Adler. The two decided to team up and split the music- and lyric-writing duties evenly, as opposed to the usual arrangement of having one partner concentrate exclusively on each. Songwriter Frank Loesser signed the team to his publishing company in 1951, and two years later, their composition "Rags to Riches" became a monster number one smash for Tony Bennett. Several more of their songs were featured in a Broadway revue that same year, and they were hired by director George Abbott to write the musical score for The Pajama Game, a comedy about labor unrest. The Pajama Game opened in 1954 starring John Raitt and Carol Haney, and it was a smash success, particularly on the strength of the songs "Hey There" (recorded for a hit by Rosemary Clooney) and "Hernando's Hideaway." The show ran for over a thousand performances and won its composers a Tony Award; a successful film version also followed, with Doris Day taking the lead female role. Ross and Adler's next collaboration was 1955's Damn Yankees, a baseball-themed retelling of the Faust story line; it too was a Tony Award-winning smash that ran for over a thousand performances, and spawned the popular, oft-covered tunes "Heart" and "Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets)." Unfortunately, at the height of the duo's success, tragedy struck: Ross fell victim to a lung disease related to chronic bronchitis, and died unexpectedly on November 11, 1955. Adler continued on a lengthy career as a composer, but never reached quite the same level of Broadway success he enjoyed in tandem with Ross. ~ Steve Huey