Composer

George Perle, 93, the American music theorist and scholar who was widely regarded as the composer who put a human face on atonal music, died Jan. 23 at his home in New York after a long illness, according to his wife. Always highly regarded by his peers, Mr. Perle began to draw wider public attention after he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his Wind Quintet No. 4. He also won a MacArthur Fellowship that year. "His music is a special language," wrote Princeton University composer Paul Lansky, "and while each piece sings uniquely and...

Does Jewish music actually need a helping hand today? Today's music scene is a pretty straightforward, if subjective, meritocracy: Performers and presenters are always on the lookout for high-quality work, from any era, regardless of provenance. Thus, I'm a little uneasy at concerts featuring music by any group of historically discriminated-against composers. Pro Musica Hebraica, a local philanthropy founded in 2007, seeks "to reintegrate the Jewish musical past and present into the mainstream...

‘Good composers borrow," Stravinsky allegedly said. "Great ones steal. " The quote is so popular it has been bowdlerized into a dozen forms: attributed to Picasso (about artists), T.S. Eliot (about poets) and, no doubt, others. We all throw it around and laugh and cite instances of such "theft" in various compositions. We attend "The Enchanted Island," a pastiche opera made up of arias by Handel, Rameau and Vivaldi that premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in December, and knowingly say this kind of thing was...

STOCKHOLM — Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho have been awarded the international 2013 Polar Music Prize, Sweden's most prestigious award for musicians. They will each receive 1 million kronor ($153,300) and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm Aug. 27. In its awarding citation on Tuesday, the prize committee said 53-year-old N'Dour, who has collaborated with artists including Sting, Bruce Springsteen and Neneh Cherry, has a voice that...

Jonathan Harvey, a British modernist composer whose operas and other works reflected a deep engagement with spirituality, died Dec. 4 at a hospice in Sussex, England. He was 73. Faber Music, which published many of Dr. Harvey's compositions, said the cause was motor neuron disease. Dr. Harvey developed his style in the 1980s working at Pierre Boulez's Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music in Paris. Fruits of that work included "Mortuous Plango, Vivos Voco," an experimental composition using...

Genevieve Fritter Bieber, 93, a violinist, music director and composer in the Washington area for decades, died March 18 at her home in Alexandria. She had Alzheimer's disease. Mrs. Bieber, known most of her professional life as Genevieve Fritter, was the music director and composer-in-residence for 20 years for the Montgomery Ballet. She was a member of many local orchestras and often substituted in the National Symphony Orchestra. Her "Theme and Variations for String Orchestra" was performed at the Kennedy Center in...

American composer Peter Lieberson, who wrote his most inspired songs for his great love, the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, died April 23 at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 64 and had complications from lymphoma. The New York-born composer, who lived in Santa Fe, N.M., was in Israel for medical treatment. His cancer was diagnosed while he was mourning his wife's death in 2006 from breast cancer. Dr. Lieberson was a well-established artist years before he met Lorraine Hunt in 1997.

Television and film music composer Fred Steiner, creator of the bold and gritty theme for the "Perry Mason" TV series and one of the composers of the Oscar-nominated score for "The Color Purple," died of undisclosed causes June 23 at his home in the Mexican state of Jalisco. He was 88. One of the busiest composers working in Hollywood in the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Steiner also crafted music for "Gunsmoke," "The Twilight Zone," "Star Trek," "Have Gun, Will Travel," "Rawhide," "Hogan's Heroes" and other...

Elliott Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who fused European and American modernist traditions in seminal but formidable works, and who lived to hear ovations for music that was once thought to be anything but listener-friendly, died Nov. 5 at his home in New York City. He was 103. His assistant, Virgil Blackwell, confirmed the death but did not disclose an immediate cause. Mr. Carter's career was like some of the towering cathedrals of Europe: so long in the making...

Richard Rodney Bennett, a British composer, pianist and arranger who was nominated three times for Academy Awards, died Dec. 24 in New York City at age 76. His publisher, Novello & Co., confirmed his death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Bennett was nominated for Oscars for the scores for "Far From the Madding Crowd" in 1967, "Nicholas and Alexandra" in 1971 and "Murder on the Orient Express" in 1974. After he studied with composer Pierre Boulez in the 1950s, Mr. Bennett's work evolved...

Today is Tuesday, May 7, the 127th day of 2013. There are 238 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On May 7, 1763, Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa Indians, attempted to lead a sneak attack on British-held Fort Detroit, but was foiled because the British had been tipped off in advance. (The Ottawa Indians and other tribes then launched an all-out war with the British that came to be known as Pontiac's War.) On this date: In 1789, the first inaugural ball was held in New York in honor of President George Washington and his wife,...

Youngsters, pull up your chairs. Way, way back in the 1960s, when serialism ruled the Earth and composers subjected audiences to the most angular, rebarbative music they could devise, along came a man — a simple, honest man — named George Crumb. With his warm and darkly poetic scores, full of exotic tonalities and birdlike warblings, Crumb appeared less a composer than a sort of conjurer, and — in an era when Milton Babbitt famously Didn't Care If You Listened — seemed to reach out, wrap an arm...

Janos Starker, a Hungarian-born master of the cello who emerged from the devastation of World War II to become known as one of the most rivetingly powerful instrumentalists of his generation, died April 28 at a hospice in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88. Indiana University, where Mr. Starker taught for more than five decades, announced his death but did not disclose the cause. For decades, Mr. Starker was one of the most sought-after cellists in the world. He was venerated as a soloist and particularly as an...

Correction: A previous version of the article misstated the year of Princess ­Diana's funeral, at which the composer's "Song for Athene" was performed. It was in 1997, not 2007. This version has been updated. Sir John Tavener, the choral composer, almost died a few years ago. Having suffered from health complications for years — he has Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder affecting connective tissue, and has had several surgeries and a stroke — he topped it off with a heart...

Romanticism is alive and well, you may be glad to hear. At least, it was at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ in Bethesda on Saturday night, when the Polish guitarist Marcin Dylla took the pulpit for an evening of unabashedly expressive music that ranged from Franz Schubert to the modern-day Magnus Lindberg. Dylla's a world-class virtuoso — you don't win first prize at 19 international competitions for nothing — and the evening was a riveting display of guitar technique.

Composers have been smashing the boundaries between traditional Asian and contemporary Western music for years now, blending those apparently opposite worlds and producing a wealth of fascinating new music. The Korean-born composer Hi Kyung Kim is a master of the genre, and at the Freer Gallery on Sunday afternoon — joined by the Borromeo String Quartet and an unusual ensemble that uses both Korean and Western instruments — she showcased two new works that pushed both East and West...

As a little girl, Kaija Saariaho often heard music as she was falling asleep — so she asked her mother if she could have a quieter pillow. The sounds, of course, were in her imagination, and in the intervening decades the Finnish composer went on to write music that seems to drift in gently from the unconscious, with the strange and otherworldly beauty of a dream. But it's not just atmospherics; Saariaho herself was at the Phillips Collection on Thursday night for a performance of her music by members of...

If you want people to listen, don't shout; whisper. That might be the thinking behind the music of Miroslav Srnka, a young Czech composer who appeared at the Phillips Collection with the Fama Quartet on Thursday night to open the gallery's Leading European Composers series. Srnka presented three of his recent chamber works for strings, intriguing pieces that explored a sound world of spare, often rough textures and fragile sonorities — and rarely rose above a delicate pianissimo.

The Great Noise Ensemble — as you've no doubt picked up from the name — is one of the more playful and uninhibited classical groups in town. Specializing in music from cutting-edge young composers, the group has been putting on concerts at the Atlas Performing Arts Center this year on themes such as "irreverence" and "revolution," and on Friday night, the performance was titled — simply but with tantalizing promise — "Revelation. " There are plenty of ways to interpret that word, and the young Serbian composer...

I never considered a career outside of the arts. It was such a profoundly obvious thing to do. I started playing the piano by ear when I was 3 years old and composing at 10. I thought for a long time that I would be the one who was on stage. But as I got older, I began to be curious about the producing side. I didn't just want to perform, I wanted to organize performances. My parents saw I wanted to do music but they told me that I needed other skills to fall back on. So...