US composer and guitarist Glenn Branca died on May 13th. He was 69. Branca studied theatre at Emerson College, Boston. After spending time in the UK in 1973, he returned ...
New York-based composer Matt Marks died on May 11th. He was just 38. Not just a composer but also a mean arranger, singer and horn player, Marks was a founding ...
American composer, pianist and academic Donald H. Keats died on 27th April. He was 88. Keats was a graduate of Yale University, where he studied with Quincy Porter and Hindemith, ...
Composer and academic James Wishart has died of a stroke aged 61. Wishart was a lecturer in composition at the University of Liverpool from 1980 to 2013. He was also active ...
Canadian composer Robert Joseph Rosen died on Monday 19th March in Ottawa. He was 61. Rosen studied in Canada with Violet Archer, Malcolm Forsyth and Bruce Mather. He attended the ...
Croatian composer, conductor and teacher Milko Kelemen died on 8th March in Stuttgart. He was 93. Kelemen was a composition pupil of Stjepan Šulek, later studying in Paris with Messiaen ...
Hungarian composer László Melis died on 12th February. He was 65. Melis studied the violin at the Liszt Academy, Budapest, before performing extensively as a founding member of the contemporary ...
Icelandic composer Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson died suddenly at his apartment on 9th February. He was just 48. He is best known for his film scores, including Prisoners (2013), The Theory of Everything (2014) Sicario (2015), Arrival (2016) and The ...
Photo: Pavel Antonov Sad news, with the death yesterday of the great Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Whilst not a great exponent of contemporary music, he was known for his ...
Czech-American composer Ladislav Kubík died on 27th October. He was 71. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Kubík studied at the Prague Academy of Music. He established a significant career in Europe—with ...
French composer and conductor Jean-Jacques Werner died on 22nd October aged 82. A native of Strasbourg, in his youth he studied the harp, horn and conducting before completing his higher ...
Swiss composer Klaus Huber died in Perugia, Italy on October 2nd. He was 92. Born in 1924, Huber attended the Zürich Conservatory, studying the violin with Stefi Geyer and composition ...
Sad news with the dead of two renowned British composers. Derek Bourgeois (1941–2017) Derek Bourgeois died on 6th September aged 75. Born in Kingston upon Thames, he was educated at ...
Sad news with the loss of composers Pēteris Plakidis and Marian Varga, both on 8th August. Pēteris Plakidis (1947–2017) was Latvian, a graduate from the Jāzeps Vītols State Conservatory in ...
French composer Pierre Henry died on Wednesday at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Paris. He was 89. Henry was known as one of the pioneers of noise in music, his interest beginning ...
French composer and organist Jacques Charpentier died on 15th June, aged 83. Partly self-taught, he was also decisively influenced by Indian music and by Olivier Messiaen. The fullest evidence of ...
Chilean composer José Vicente Asuar died on 11th January. He was 83. Asuar studied in his native Chile and subsequently in Germany, later taking charge of electronic studios in both ...
Belgian composer Tristan Clais died on 4th January aged 87. He studied music and theatre at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles and from 1958 presented musical programmes on Belgium television, ...
American composer Elliott Schwartz died on Wednseday aged 80. He taught for over 40 years at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine and was performed widely in the US. He held a ...
France is mourning the loss of composer Jean-Claude Risset, who died on Monday aged 78. He is often mentioned alongside French electronic pioneers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer and is ...
The Welsh musical community felt a deep sense of shock today at the news of the sudden death of composer Peter Reynolds. He was one of those figures that seemed ...
I was away doing other things when the death of Sir Neville Marriner came through on Sunday, so it feels a little belated to be mentioning it now. Even if ...
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies was one of a handful of composers truly to have dominated British cultural life, also winning a worldwide reputation with his substantial body of work. Sometimes ...
The death of Pierre Boulez marks the end of a remarkable, and often controversial, era in Western music. The last, and arguably greatest, composer of the postwar avant garde, he ...
Many readers will not have heard of Mervyn Burtch, a Welsh composer who died on 12th May aged 85. For Welsh musicians his is a very familiar name indeed. His ...
Though especially associated with early music, I cannot let today pass without lamenting the loss of Christopher Hogwood, one of our finest conductors. For me he was the man who ...
It was with great sadness that I learnt of Claudio Abbado’s death on Monday. He is perhaps best known for being appointed as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic following ...
John Tavener, who died yesterday aged 69, was one of contemporary music’s most remarkable figures: his ability, especially, to write works that connected with ordinary people was unsurpassed in the ...
Mortuos plango, I mourn the dead. Though annus horribilis is, perhaps, an exaggeration, the grim reaper has done his work unusually well in 2012. This has especially been the case ...