Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively.
Grieg is regarded as simultaneously nationalistic and cosmopolitan in his orientation, for although born in Bergen and buried there, he travelled widely throughout Europe, and considered his music to express both the beauty of Norwegian rural life and the culture of Europe as a whole. He is the most celebrated person from the city of Bergen, with numerous statues depicting his image, and many cultural entities named after him.

Louis Vierne was born in Poitiers nearly blind due to congenital cataracts, but at an early age was discovered to have an unusual gift for music.
After completing school in the provinces, Louis Vierne entered the Paris Conservatory. From 1892, Vierne served as an assistant to the organist Charles-Marie Widor at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Vierne subsequently became principal organist at the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, a post he held from 1900 until his death in 1937.
Vierne had a life that was physically and emotionally very difficult, with severe spiritual trials that are reflected in much of his music. His congenital cataracts did not make him completely blind, but he was what would be called today "legally blind." Early in his career, he composed on outsized manuscript paper, using "a large pencil" as his friend Marcel Dupré described. Later in life, as his already limited sight continued to diminish, he resorted to Braille to do most of his work. Moreover, he was deeply affected by a separation and subsequent divorce from his wife, and he lost both his brother René and his son Jacques to the battlefields of World War I A street accident in Paris caused him to badly fracture his leg, and it was briefly thought his leg would need to be amputated. The leg was saved, but his recovery, and the task of completely re-learning his pedal technique, took a full year during one of the busiest times of his life. Despite his difficulties, however, his students uniformly described him as a kind, patient and encouraging teacher. Among his pupils were Lili Boulanger, Nadia Boulanger, Marcel Dupré and André Fleury Vierne suffered either a stroke or a heart attack (eyewitness reports differ) while giving his 1750th organ recital at Notre-Dame de Paris on the evening of 2 June 1937. He had completed the main concert, which members of the audience said showed him at his full powers—"as well as he has ever played." Maurice Duruflé, another major French organist and composer, was at his side at the time of his death.
Vierne had an elegant, clean style of writing that respected form above all else. His harmonic language was romantically rich, but not as sentimental or theatrical as that of his early mentor César Franck. Like all of the great fin de siècle French organists, Vierne's music was very idiomatic for his chosen instrument and has inspired most of the great Parisian organist-composers who followed him.

Maurice Duruflé was a French composer and organist, who wrote chamber music and works for choir, organ and orchestra. He was also organist of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatory, and formed a famous organ duo with his wife Marie-Madeleine Chevalier. Duruflé published only a handful of works, because he was highly critical. He was not easily pleased, and often continued to edit and change pieces after publication. The result of this perfectionism is that his music tends to be well polished, and is still frequently performed in concerts around the world, especially his organ music.
Duruflé's works are reminiscent of impressionism, and are characterized by clarity, poetry and a clear design. Besides, Gregorian chant is an important source of inspiration, which is evident from the use of medieval modes. For his most famous work, the Requiem, Duruflé took the Gregorian mass of the dead as his point of departure, and combined it with the structure and optimism of the Requiem of Fauré.

Finzi took private lessons with Farrar from 1914-1916 and then with Bairstow from 1917-1922. He mainly underwent influences by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, loved the life in the country and developed his own, intimate style. He concentrated on songs and song cycles such as Oh fair to see, Till earth outwears, and A young man’s exhortation, preferably on texts by Hardy. Amongst his other works are a clarinet concerto from 1949 and Dies natalis for high voice and string orchestra (1939).
(Source: Musicalifeiten.nl)

Sir William Walton, in full Sir William Turner Walton, (born March 29, 1902, Oldham, Lancashire, Eng.—died March 8, 1983, Ischia, Italy), English composer especially known for his orchestral music. His early work made him one of England’s most important composers between the time of Vaughan Williams and that of Benjamin Britten.

Walton, the son of a choirmaster father and a vocalist mother, studied violin and piano desultorily as a boy and also sang, with somewhat better results, in his father’s choir. He taught himself composition, although he received advice from both Ernest Ansermet and Ferruccio Busoni. In 1912 he entered the University of Oxford, where he sang in the choir of Christ Church. He put in the requisite four years of study but failed by one examination (Responsonions) to win a bachelor of music degree. At Oxford he had met the Sitwell brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, by whom he was virtually adopted, and he spent most of the next decade traveling with them or living with them at Chelsea. During this period he composed Façade (1923)—a set of pieces for chamber ensemble, to accompany the Sitwells’ sister Edith in a recitation of her poetry—as well as Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra (1928; revised 1943) and Portsmouth Point (1926), which established his reputation as an orchestral composer.

Walton was influenced by some of his older contemporaries, notably Edward Elgar, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith. Hindemith was soloist in the first performance of one of Walton’s finest works, his Viola Concerto (1929). Walton also composed a number of scores for motion pictures, including Major Barbara (1941), Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1947), and Richard III (1954). His vocal music includes the oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast (1931) and the operas Troilus and Cressida (1954) and The Bear (one act; 1967). The composer received a knighthood in 1951.

Jacobus Clemens non Papa was a Renaissance composer from the Franco-Flemish school. The story goes he gave the nickname "non papa" to himself, so people could differentiate him from the Ypres poet Clemens Papa (Clément de Paepe). The pope, too, (which in Latin is called 'papa') was named Clemens at that time. However, considering that Pope Clement VII died in 1534, before any of Clemens's music was published, and that the confusion with the poet is unlikely in that the surnames were quite distinct, it is likely that the nickname was merely created in jest rather than for practical reasons. Nonetheless, the suffix has remained throughout the ages.
Little is known of his life. He came from one of the seventeen provinces of the current Belgium or the Netherlands (perhaps Zeeland). His first compositions was published in 1536. In 1544 he stayed in Brughes for a year, after which he started a business relationship with the publisher Tielman Susato from Antwerp, who woud publish most of his works until his death. Between 1545 and 1549 he probably was choirmaster to Philippe de Croy, Duke of Aerschot, one of Charles V's greatest generals, where he preceded Nicolas Gombert. According to Antonius Sanderus he was buried at Diksmuide near Ypres in present-day Belgium.
Unlike his contemporaries, Clemens never went to Italy. His style has remained "northern" without Italian influences. He composed a large number of works, among which 15 masses, more than 200 motets and 4 books with in total 159 psalms in Dutch (Souterliedekens). These were published by Tielman Susato in Antwerp.

Antoine Brumel was a Franco-Flemish composer. He was the choir master of the cathedral of Chartres in 1483, canon at Laon in 1498 and choir master at the Notre Dame in Paris from the same year. In 1505 he left to work at the court of the court of Ferrara, where he probably died. Hij composed missas, motets and French chansons in a late-medieval polyphonic style. His most popular work is probably his mass Et ecce terrae motus, in which he pulls out all of his isorhythmic strenghts while maintaining an extremely inventive, somewhat peculiar melody. which moreover demands a very high skill level from the singers.
According to witnesses, Brumel was known as a difficult person to deal with.

Howard Skempton was born in Chester in 1947, and has worked as a composer, accordionist and music publisher. He studied in London with Cornelius Cardew from 1967, which helped Skempton to discover a musical language of great simplicity. Since then he has continued to write undeflected by compositional trends, producing a corpus of more than 300 works – many pieces being miniatures for solo piano or accordion. Skempton calls these pieces ‘the central nervous system’ of his work.
Skempton’s catalogue of works is also as diverse as it is long, ranging from pieces for solo cello (Six Figures, 1998), and guitar (Five Preludes, 1999), to the Chamber Concerto for fifteen players, the Concerto for Hurdy-Gurdy and Percussion, and Lento, premièred by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in 1991, and performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov, at the 2010 BBC Proms.
In May 2005 Skempton’s Tendrils for string quartet was awarded the prize for ‘best chamber-scale composition’ by the Royal Philharmonic Society, and in December 2005 it won in the chamber music category at the annual British Composer Awards. Skempton won a second British Composer Award in 2008 for The Moon is Flashing, a song cycle for tenor and orchestra commissioned by the BBC, which was premièred by BBC NOW and James Gilchrist at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in September 2007 and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.