10 famous composers of today

Plenty of us love classical music. But for most of us it’s the old masters that we continually fall back on: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy, Tchaikovsky. Maybe some Stravinsky if we’re feeling a little risqué.

But who’s out there at the cutting edge right now? Carrying the torch as classical music navigates the utter chaos of contemporary, globalised, Internet culture. As it's forced to compete with more genres than ever and combat accusations of elitism and irrelevance, which composers are safeguarding the survival and prosperity of our cherished tradition? And more importantly, which composers offer the best proof of all that it still has something unique to contribute to society?

That said, one of the great developments in recent years is the evolution and expansion of the role of the composer beyond the world of just classical music. Creative figures are able to ply their trade in other fields, and yet still acquire the kind of status traditionally reserved for composers of concert works. This is unquestionably a positive change, and for this reason we have included individuals who practise other strands of composition, too.  

One of them is Hans Zimmer, a leading figure in the realm of film music, one of the most accessible and influential frontiers for classical-style music today. His entry, and that of Kaija Saariaho - who can’t reasonably be excluded from any list of the greatest modern composers - are taken from previous articles in the ‘best composers’ series. You can find links to these articles at the end of this page. 

Let’s get down to it. 

The best modern music composers
 

• Eleanor Alberga
• Jonny Greenwood
• Anna Þorvaldsdóttir
• Roxanna Panufnik
• Hans Zimmer
• Lin-Manuel Miranda
• Errollyn Wallen
• Olga Neuwirth
• Max Richter
• Kaija Saariaho

Eleanor Alberga

Let’s kick things off with Eleanor Alberga, who is hands-down one of the visionary voices in the world of classical music today. Few contemporary composers have created as tirelessly, adaptably and distinctively as she. Spanning the full gamut of genres and instrumental combinations, her body of work has contributed to the classical community on a global scale, and collectively demonstrates its author’s gifts for expressive intensity, masterful orchestration and chameleonic versatility. 

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1949, Alberga was composing music for the piano by the age of ten. In her adolescence she was already exhibiting talents that would make her famous and in 1968 became a recipient of the Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies. This took her in 1970 to the Royal Academy of Music in the UK, which became her adopted home. After graduating, she established a fearsome reputation for herself as one of London’s finest pianists and composers, and in 1978 began a lasting association with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, on which she capitalised to become one of the great composers of dance music of her generation. 

While it isn’t definitive of Alberga’s musicality, interaction with the music of her homeland and Afro-Caribbean heritage distinguishes many of her pieces. From the folk tunes of the Jamaican Medley for solo piano (1983) to the cross-rhythms of Hill and Gully Ride (1990) for piano eight hands, the sounds of the country and the culture that has long enriched it reverberate in her artistry. Largely employing a tonal framework, Alberga frequently calls on unusual instrumental combinations to supply the colouristic edge, as in 2017’s Tower, for percussion, strings and solo string quartet, or through juxtaposition of harp and thumb piano in her 1997 television opera, Market of the Dead.

The last few years have seen Alberga’s music draw an increasing amount of attention. She was offered the enviable opportunity to compose a work to open the last night of the BBC Proms in 2015, one of the most widely watched annual classical concerts in the world; the fantasy for choir and orchestra - Arise, Athena! - was the sensational work that she produced. And just this year, recordings of her first and second violin concertos, two of the greatest takes on the classic form in the contemporary era, were released on the Lyrita label. More and more commentators seem to be recognising her status as one of the great composers of our time. 

Jonny Greenwood

What a life of music-making Jonny Greenwood has led. For three decades, he’s been one of the integral creative forces in a band many critics consider the greatest popular-music institution since the Beatles - Radiohead. And in recent years, as his group’s output has steadied and his attention has turned elsewhere, he’s increasingly transcended that role, diversifying his artistry and assuming the more conventional profile of a composer.  

Although a capable multi-instrumentalist, who plays viola, piano, ondes Martenot and others, Greenwood has primarily served as the guitarist for Radiohead since its formation in 1985. In addition to crafting his own unfailingly striking, experimental parts, he’s always been a key creator in the band’s overall dynamic, contributing from a composer’s perspective as opposed that of a traditional songwriter - coding and synthesising electronic textures, say, or assembling passages for string and brass ensembles. He perceives his own role as that of an arranger, cultivating the sparser demos that singer Thom Yorke puts together.

From The Bends to Kid A, OK Computer to In Rainbows, Radiohead’s masterpieces speak for themselves, and attest to the greatness of both Greenwood and his bandmates. But in 2003, Greenwood began to pursue solo projects in parallel to his Radiohead membership, and film music was his first port of call. Scoring the documentary Bodysong that year, he landed his second film commission a few years later. This was none other than 2007’s There Will Be Blood, considered by some to be the finest film of the 21st century. 

The tension that gnaws throughout the film is deftly fuelled by Greenwood’s aggressive and strident string-writing, a sound world that really characterises his film music. There Will Be Blood inaugurated his collaboration with revered director Paul Thomas Anderson, every one of whose films since has been scored by the composer. Inversely, the director’s work has been a key conduit for Greenwood’s powerful cinematic work.

Beyond film music, his work with Radiohead and the newer side project the Smile, and many contributions to other artists’ recordings and performances, Greenwood has also written a number of concert works that seal his reputation as a great 21st-century composer - some of which are arrangements of his film music. In compositions like Water, Doghouse and 48 Responses to Polymorphia, he fuses the agitated drama of his film work with the kind of extraordinary gestural material he trademarked as part of Radiohead.

Anna Þorvaldsdóttir

‘Never less than fascinating’ is how Gramophone magazine accurately described the work of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. Her endlessly immersive and idiosyncratic music - and her ability to produce more and more of it - has made her one of the most remarkable artists on the contemporary scene. With so much music already composed, so many experiments already carried out, the pressing task facing every modern composer is to find a new boundary to test, an original sound to develop, a niche in which to make their singular mark. Thorvaldsdottir seems to rise to all this effortlessly. 

She hails from Iceland, whose modest population has long chronically overachieved in all fields. Beginning her musical journey as a cellist, she quickly turned to composition, the path she chose for her years at university in Reykjavík and later in San Diego, California. In the early 2000s, her most significant compositions began to appear, and she has continually produced exceptional, idiosyncratic work ever since, broadly gravitating from choral work towards chamber compositions, and more recently large-scale orchestral music. The last five years in particular have seen her produce one monumental edifice after another - the powerfully titled METACOSMOS (2017) is one, whose surging, hypnotic textures and seamlessly rippling waves of sound perfectly encapsulate Thorvaldsdottir’s offering. 

The visceral, enveloping forms she generates in her music constitute a decidedly sensory experience that's impossible to capture in words. It is vibrant, organic, dynamic - a universe governed by principles of flow and order, whose parts impercptibly shift into and out of one another. These are soundscapes, not music as we’re used to comprehending it. It comes as little surprise, then, that she draws her works before scoring them, conceiving her ideas visually, in the abstract, before aiming to seize them in sound when she takes to the stave with her pencil.

She also composed for the Proms just this year, and many leading international orchestras have commissioned works from her, including the Berlin, New York and LA philharmonics. She is also active as an educator, having lectured at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and other A-list institutions - and inspired many in the next generation of composers who might well feature on a list like this one in 30 years’ time.

Roxanna Panufnik

The children of great individuals face a uniquely difficult challenge: having to prove to the world that they are where they deserve to be for their own merits, and not for who their parents are. Polish-born, British-naturalised composer–conductor Andrzej Panufnik is one of the 20th century’s iconic musicians. But, meeting and arguably surpassing her father’s challenge, Roxanna Panufnik has become one of the leading lights of the 21st.

Roxanna was born in London in 1968 - naturally into a musical family -and her creative gifts were nurtured under her father’s guidance. Studying composition at the Royal Academy, Panufnik reached her musical maturity at the turn of the 1990s. Works then appeared sporadically in that decade, first a piece for voice and string orchestra in 1992, Virtue, then a work for narrator and piano in 1994 - Piano Tuner, Untune Me That Tune. She became increasingly prolific, gathering creative momentum in her experiments with various idioms and instrumental combinations, and her engagement with a range of media - opera, ballet, theatre, and music for film and TV.

Sacred music, which has been a vital strand of the classical tradition since its emergence from the Latin Church a millennium ago, is a no less fundamental dimension of Panufnik’s practice. Her faithful participation in this lineage is epitomised by her violin concerto of 2008, Abraham. Written in response to a commission from soloist Daniel Hope, the work is inspired by the underlying connections that connect the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The faiths’ basic commitment to the same all-powerful God finds an analogy in Panufnik’s integration of chant melodies drawn from all three sacred musical traditions - a compositional approach that also satisfied her penchant for world music. 

This relationship with sacred music underpinned the work that announced Panufnik as a major player on the classical scene. This was the Westminster Mass of 1997, written in honour of the 75th birthday of Basil Hume, widely respected cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster. Premiered at Westminster’s majestic Catholic cathedral, the work was a unerring triumph, and commissions rapidly started coming its composer’s way in the ensuing years. Her career defined by responses to such commissions and collaborative work with poets, directors and performing institutions, Panufnik embodies the role of a socially committed composer, enriching the community through work and artistry - the antithesis of the ivory-tower-bound musician. 

Hans Zimmer

This entry is recycled from a previous article discussing the greatest film music composers. As one of the great outlets for contemporary classical composition, it had to be represented here.  

Hans Zimmer is widely regarded as the great film composer of the modern era. In fact he’s laid claim to that title for the best part of two decades after a seemingly unending streak of hugely popular, inevitably excellent blockbuster film scores. And he gives no indication that he’s over the hill. Even now, he continues to supply extraordinary music for the cream of the industry, and continues to reinvent himself in the process. His radical score for last year’s Dune won him his second Academy Award - though, like Morricone, he should have had more. Of his 100+ scores, over 50 have been nominated for major awards.

An performer in the pop sphere in the late 1970s (spot him performing on the music video to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’), Zimmer moved swiftly into television and film in the ’80s. He partnered up with fellow film composer Stanley Myers in 1982, and many of his earliest scores were born of that collaboration. His first solo effort coming in ’87, a really big break followed swiftly with the successful Rain Man (1988). That score and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) would cement Zimmer’s reputation in the industry.

He really exploded on to the scene in 1990, with the unforgettable (Oscar-winning) score to The Lion King, orchestrating Elton John and Tim Rice’s music and lyrics - and doing the same in The Prince of Egypt (1998) for Stephen Schwartz. Zimmer was recruited for some of the fnest films of the 1990s: Thelma and Louise (1991), True Romance (1993) and The Thin Red Line (1998), in which he drew influence from southeast Asian traditional music.  

Zimmer’s work is marked by the assimilation of electronic sounds into orchestral textures, to create epic and powerful soundscapes. Although he had experimented with this since his 1980s work with Myers, he took it to a whole new level at the turn of the millennium in his great middle-period scores for Gladiator (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2006), Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight’ films (2005–12) and Inception (2010). Expanding these innovations, he then pioneered different and very distinctive approaches in his later scores for Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017) and finally Dune.

Zimmer’s not without his critics, who frequently take issue with the overproduction of his scores, but film music - much like everything else - is constantly evolving. We’ve come a long way since the Wagnerian underscore of Steiner and his colleagues and it’s exciting to wonder where it may head next. Ludwig Göransson, who seems to have usurped Zimmer as Nolan’s composer of choice, might well be the one to watch.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Man of the moment Lin-Manuel Miranda scarcely needs an introduction. Within the space of a decade, he has risen from relative obscurity to become one of the most influential figures in contemporary popular culture. His great work has primarily come in the esteemed tradition of musical theatre, but it wouldn’t be sensible to pigeon-hole this butterfly of a musician, especially given that so much phenomenal work is still to come.    

Of course this all centres on Hamilton, which has to go down as one of the most stunning breakthroughs of recent history. The runaway success brought two-and-a-half hours of non-stop through-composed gold, in which - in what would be his trademark way - Miranda would interlock hip hop, soul, rock, and the rich show-tune vocabulary of the stage musical. Opening off-Broadway in 2015, in one of the smaller New York theatres (with Miranda himself performing the title role), the musical rapidly attracted enthusiastic acclaim and shifted on to Broadway later that same year. The production, a film version of which was released on Disney+ in 2020, earned nominations for a record-breaking sixteen Tony Awards, winning eleven. Its counterpart West End production, opening in 2017, is still running at London’s Victoria Palace Theatre. 

Miranda was never going to rest on his laurels, though. Catapulted to fame by Hamilton, he saw offers pour in in its wake, and accepted them eagerly. Some came from none other than Disney itself, for which he would write songs for Moana (2016) and the songs and story of Encanto (2021). The latter’s number ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ was a certified sensation, topping the US Billboard Hot 100 - Miranda’s first composition to do so. The same year, a film version of his debut musical In the Heights (2005) was released to more unanimous praise. While engagement with Latin-American popular and dance styles (Miranda himself is of Puerto Rican descent) might distance the musical from the later Hamilton, it’s prophetic of his work on Encanto.

And all of this sits alongside his acting and directing, which has contributed even further to the exposure of the musical medium to modern audiences - think of his performance in Mary Poppins Returns (2018) or his directorial debut, Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021). The huge popularity and originality of Miranda’s music, however, places him as one of the greatest songwriter–composers of the modern era. Already he has to be considered as one of the all-time greats of musical theatre, up there with Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. And as we said already, he’s only just getting started.

Errollyn Wallen

Many criticisms directed at contemporary art music target its perceived exclusivity and irrelevance. In response to the huge cultural upheavals of the 20th century, the Modernist avant-garde sought refuge in experiments and cerebralism, deliberately shunning mass appeal and alienating audiences in pursuit of high-art ideals. Many composers still choose this path in the face of the marginalisation of classical music, which is arguably caused as much by that reclusiveness as by the competition of other genres.

Errollyn Wallen is one of those who have selected a different path. Among the most celebrated musicians of her generation, she rejects art for its own sake in both theory and practice, integrating in her work the radical techniques of modern music with the populist elements that facilitate engagement and understanding. Her art represents an improbably harmonious fusion between fringe and mainstream, advocating a course that contemporary artists can follow if they want to spurn isolationism.

This isn’t just the same sacrifice at a different altar - i.e. the pursuit of accessibility for its own sake. Frequently, Wallen utilises egalitarianism as a means to share ideas and raise awareness of social issues. In Principia (2012) she communicates inspiring scientific findings; in Mighty River (2017), she pays tribute to the abolition of the Slave Trade Act. As a black woman, her artistic successes also qualify as achievements for her community - the performance of her Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra (1994) at the 1998 Proms marked the first time that the work of a black woman composer was heard at the festival - over a century after its founding. 

Wallen’s art testifies that there still is a role for contemporary classical music to play - one that perhaps only it can fill. Let’s not respond to the difficulties of the modern era by seeking ever smaller niches in which ever more restricted insight can resound. Why not instead respond by keeping in mind what made us love music in the first place? Connection. Inspiration. Unity.

What else is it for? Classical music should be reaching out to audiences, not deterring them. Her works are exemplars in this regard - and ones that also happen to sound amazing.

Olga Neuwirth

Any conversation about contemporary music and social responsibility would be remiss if it didn’t take Olga Neuwirth into account. For the better part of three decades, her work has been a vital arena for reflection on some of the most pressing issues of our time - and one of the most fascinating outlets of the European avant-garde more generally. Her artistry is at once remarkable for technical proficiency, boundary-dissolving adaptability and profound political import.

Born in the Austrian city of Graz, Neuwirth began to flourish as a composer in her teenage years, during which she attended composition workshops given by the likes of Modernist stalwart Hans Werner Henze. She, like Thorvaldsdottir, travelled to California for university study, but completed her master’s degree closer to home in Vienna. Working with Tristan Murail (see the entry on Saariaho below) in the early 1990s and strongly influenced by Luigi Nono in this period, she then began to find a signature voice, characterised by the hybdrisation of a plethora of compositional devices, intertextual references and raw sound materials. From these ingredients she assembles powerful artistic statements that challenge creative and wider socio-political conventions. 

Her work is defined by the pursuit of an ‘art in-between’, as she describes it. She has long strived to transcend restrictive genre labels, drawing on a broad range of fields artistic and intellectual: literature, philosophy, science, architecture. She’s usually categorised, as here, as a contemporary classical composer, but she is better understood as an artist in the widest possible sense, who happens to utilise music, alongside text, image, video and space, as a fundamental constructive tool. She has directed films, produced photography and written prolifically, and in numerous multimedia collaborations such as stage works and installation projects, she has contributed to all elements as a universal creative - her ‘musicstallation’ The Outcast (2009–11) is a fine example. 

This search for a fluid form of artistic expression has defined Neuwirth’s career and made her a singular figure in art history. But it has only ever been a means to an end. Her work is encompassed by a larger mission: to use such a form to articulate critiques on the most challenging questions that we face. Her politics are broad and nuanced, but running like a thread through her output is interaction with the plights of marginalised social groups, like women in art and minority-ethnic communities in general. Neuwirth has brought them into the spotlight, and her ongoing practice is keeping them there. 

Max Richter

Max Richter is yet another versatile composer who occupies that increasingly coalescent space between the spheres of visual media and the concert hall. Moreover, like Wallen, he's developed an approachable and instantly recognisable style of writing that continues to win countless new fans over to the world of classical music. His work, which belongs to the larger Postminimalist movement, offers further testament to the presence of exciting new horizons for contemporary art music.

The German-born, British-raised Richter studied piano and composition at the University of Edinburgh and London’s Royal Academy of Music, later training under the great Luciano Berio in Florence. He co-founded the classical ensemble Piano Circus in 1989, as part of which he performed the work of contemporary-music (and mostly Minimalist) titans such as Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and Julia Wolfe. Then collaborating with a number of popular-music artists at the turn of the millennium, Richter completed a first major solo in 2002, the studio album Memoryhouse. It was a massive popular breakthrough and in its pensive ambience many filmmakers immediately recognised powerful cinematic potential. Invitations to score short and feature films came rapidly, and haven't stopped since.

In landmark productions like Waltz with Bashir (2008), Arrival (2016) and Ad Astra (2019), Richter’s mesmerising, expressive strains imbue deeply humane stories with the pathos of the universal. Directors’ persistent desire to recruit him reflects not only the quality of his music but also the impact of his music - and that of numerous Minimalists before him - on the sound of contemporary cinema. Richter has also ventured into the world of music for the stage, writing the score for the 2008 ballet Infra and a 2011 opera based on the book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. 

Unique among the figures on this list - and rare beyond them - is Richter’s choice of the studio album as his primary medium of communication. From Memoryhouse onwards, the album has been the means by which he has decisively presented original music as well as rearrangements of his own material. The particularly accessible format enables the transmission of his work to wider audiences, and it also gives him greater control over the content, allowing him to don at once the roles of composer, performer and producer. Many of these releases have an overriding theme: 2020’s Voices utilises an ‘upside down’ orchestra to denote post-truth politics, while the 8.5-hour Sleep album is designed to function as the soundtrack to a full night’s rest. 

Perhaps nothing better epitomises Richter’s hauling the classical tradition into the modern age than The Four Seasons Recomposed. The composition sees Richter symbolically take Antonio Vivaldi’s timeless, canonic music and revitalise it using the phased, looped and shuffled bricolage of the Information Era. Music of the past and the style of the present are hybridised to offer an exciting glimpse into the future of classical music.

Kaija Saariaho

Saariaho’s entry is taken from the Best classical composers article, which begins with Hildegard von Bingen and considers Stravinsky in the penultimate slot, before concluding with Saariaho. 

Kaija Saariaho was nineteen when Stravinsky died, deep in the process of honing her own compositional craft. Progressing through the Sibelius Academy in her native Helsinki, and then the conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, she grew frustrated with the serialist method that Stravinsky had until recently practised, and which remained à la mode in this period among the elite European composers. Striving to find that unique voice and creative style  that one day would be so distinctive of her art, the breakthrough came in 1980.  

That year she discovered the music of the French spectral composers, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, who were discarding conventional notation by using sound’s raw acoustic properties as a basis for composing. Inspired by their work, Saariaho began to experiment with computer assisted composition, questioning the very practice of writing music itself. And so she followed in Cage and Nono's footsteps on the postmodern path, and became one of the most important electronic-music innovators since Schaeffer and Stockhausen. 

Then came her masterpieces. She drew electronics into orchestral textures, engineering vast and overwhelming soundscapes that listeners will struggle to rationalise. At the other end of the spectrum, in chamber and solo repertoire, she scales new heights of intricacy and virtuosity through dense polyphonic constructions. 

850 years on from Hildegard von Bingen, going into the 21st century, Saariaho stands as the greatest living composer - at least if this 2019 composers’ poll by BBC Music Magazine is anything to go by. 

Access sheet music from your favourite modern composers
 

From the acclaimed masterpieces of Thomas Adès to the music for the movies of John Williams, the tour de forces of Unsuk Chin to the groundbreaking electronic music of Anna Clyne - all the contemporary classical music that you could ever need is waiting for you on nkoda. Start your free trial today and begin your journey of discovery.  

You can also find more articles that explore history’s greatest composers right here on the blog. Take a look at the finest classical, women, medieval, film and video-game composers. Best music composers, mentioned above, selects the top figures from each list - and considers a few new faces, too. 

Find out who they are. Discover their achievements. Get inspired, and be your best musical self.