Five modern composers you should know

"He keeps asking for 'angel music," she said. "What the hell is that?"

Contemporary classical music is the most unloved genre of modern music. Jazz has become a niche branch of music with relatively few listeners, but a modern jazz musician who releases a decent recording has a good chance of getting some airplay on one of the radio stations that still plays jazz.

Many living classical music composers can only dream about getting on classical music radio, which overwhelmingly plays the agreed-upon greats.

I like the agreed-upon greats, too, but the situation still seems unfair to me. Many composers write music which I think many people might like, if they only had a chance to hear it!

So here are five composers I really like, and listen to pretty often. While you should be able to find them on music streaming services such as Spotify, I have whenever possible tried to link to recordings on one of the two main public library digital music services, Hoopla Digital and Freegal, so that you don’t have to spend any money if you want to try them.

If you have a library card, you probably have access to Hoopla, a digital platform very popular with public libraries across the country. Freegal is less popular, but if you can, it’s a good idea to get access to both, as there is little overlap to what’s offered by the two services. In Ohio at least, it’s easy to acquire more than one library card so that you can listen to both services. In other states, you might have to use some ingenuity.

Arvo Pärt

Two of my recommended composers, Arvo Pärt and John Adams, are pretty well known to people who know modern classical music, but how many such people are likely to be reading a Substack newsletter in 2026? The two should not be missed, but many folks have missed them. And perhaps if you do know Pärt and Adams you will be willing to listen to my recommendations for composers you don’t know.

Still, it seems likely many of you won’t know even the relatively well-known composers I write about here. Years ago I interviewed a local pastor named John Adams for a newspaper article, and when I mentioned he had the same name as a prominent American composer, he did not seem to recognize who I was talking about.

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer, sometimes described as a minimalist. The music critic Alex Ross has described how when one of Pärt’s best pieces, the astonishing “Tabula Rasa,” was played for dying AIDS patients, they begged to hear the “angel music” again. (Seriously, click on the link if you haven’t read Ross’ article). I like this recording, but if you simply hunt for any recording of “Tabula Rasa,” you should get the idea.

John Adams

From John Adams’ official website

John Adams, 79 as I write this, has written plenty of music to choose from, but I particularly like two pieces.

His first opera, “Nixon in China,” came out in 1987, and resulted in two of my favorite albums, a highlights recording and an instrumental piece, “The Chairman Dances,” the title track for another John Adams album I like.

Later in his career as a composer, Adams wrote “On the Transmigration of Souls,” his moving piece on the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City. It won a Pulitzer Prize and is available on this massive Collected Works album (track 189).

Sebastian Currier

You can pay a lot of money to hear an over-the-hill rock music artist. Or you can go to a free concert of contemporary classical music and discover a composer you had never heard of before. I discovered Sebastian Currier at a New Music Ensemble concert at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

That got me interested in Currier’s colorful music and I found that a fair amount of it has been recorded. Sebastian Currier: Quartetset, Quiet Time is a beautiful album recorded by the Cassatt String Quartet, an all-women group named after the painter Mary Cassatt. On the Verge is a good collection of chamber music.

Boris Tishchenko

Boris Tishchenko (1939-2010) is one of the two composers on my list who is no longer with us but made it to the 21st century.

I guess this guy was fairly big in Russia — he wrote a lot of of music and much of it was recorded at least once — but I’ve never heard a note of his music played on classical radio, and I listen to the radio a lot. I also haunt modern classical music performances in Cleveland, and I’ve never heard him played live, either.

Well, I wish he would get some attention in the U.S. I listen to a lot of modern Russian classical music. Of course I regularly imbibe the three folks you almost surely know — Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich — but I also like many obscure modern Russians, too. (A photo of one of them, Gavriil Popov, adorns this newsletter). Tishchenko is my favorite Russian composer you’ve likely never heard of.

He wrote a great deal of music, but perhaps his symphonies (he wrote more than 15) are a good way of getting to know him. I love the 52-minute Symphony No. 7 from beginning to end. If you want to try a smaller dose, Symphony No. 8 shows what he can do in about 20 minutes, and I listen to it when I need a quick Tishchenko fix.

William Duckworth

Duckworth, also an educator and an author, was influenced by John Cage. He is best known for his collection of piano pieces, The Time Curve Preludes. There have been at least four recordings of at least some of them. I can’t find any of the recordings on the public library music services, but Bandcamp will let you listen to much of R. Andrew Lee’s recording before you decide whether to buy a copy. Lee also has recorded a great deal of other minimalist and postminalist music.