The hundredth birthday of Elliott Carter on December 11th, 2008, led to the a large number of concerts in his honour around the world (such as a three day festival in Amsterdam). Yet, the composer never became truly popular among the wider public. And it doesn't matter: in more than way the orthodoc composer had time on his side. He did non find his own style until the 1940s, in works such as his Sonata for Cello and Piano and his First String Quartet: compositions in which the various instrumenten seem to follow different paths from each other. It was the start of a body of works that paid tribute to both the Europe of Schoenberg, Debussy and Stravinsky, and the American Modernism of Ives and Varèse.

Luciano Berio was an Italian compser. From 1950 to 1964 he was married to the American soprano Cathy Berberian, for whom he composed several works, among which his Circles, Sequenza III, Visage and Récital.
Together with Bruno Maderna he founded the Studio di Fonologia, an experimental orchestra. Later, he became a teacher at the renowned Julliard School in New York. His body of works cover a wide range of forms experiments. Hij wrote both chamber music and orchestral works, and electronic music. For his whole life he worked on a set Sequenze for solo instruments. His use of musical and literature citations and his incorporations of all kinds of folk music is characteristic of his work. Some of the authors he used to cite a lot are James Joyce, Edoardo Sanguineti, e.e.cummings, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

He became popular with his 1964 Folk Songs and his Sinfonia composed for the Swingle Singers from 1968. Berio also orchestrated music by other composers. Rendering, for instance, is his orchestration and completion of sketches of an unfinished symphony by Franz Schubert.

Yun, Isang, important Korean composer; b. Tong Young, Sept. 17, 1917. He studied Western music in Korea (1935-37) and in Japan (1941-43). After the end of the war, he taught music in South Korean schools; in 1956 went to Berlin, where he took lessons in composition with Boris Blacher and Josef Rufer at the Berlin Musikhochschule. He settled permanently in Berlin, where he produced several successful theatrical works, marked by a fine expressionistic and coloristic quality, and written in an idiom of euphonious dissonance. His career was dramatically interrupted when on June 17, 1967, he and his wife were brutally abducted from West Berlin by the secret police agents of South Korea, and forced to board a plane for Seoul, where they were brought to trial for sedition; he was sentenced to life imprisonment; his wife was given three years in jail. This act of lawlessness perpetrated on the territory of another country prompted an indignant protest by the government of West Germany, which threatened to cut off its substantial economic aid to South Korea; twenty-three celebrated musicians, including Igor Stravinsky, issued a vigorous letter of protest. As a result of this moral and material pressure, South Korea released Yun and his wife after nearly two years of detention, and they returned to Germany. In 1970 he was appointed a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin.
[From Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians by Nicholas Slonimsky.] Isang Yun died on November 3, 1995 in Berlin, and was interred in a grave of honour provided by the City Senate. He was a member of the Hamburg and Berlin Academies of the Arts and of the European Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Salzburg, an honorary member of the International Society of Contemporary Music. He also held an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen, and was the recipient of the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Institute in Munich and the Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
[From the Yun-Gesellschaft website.]