Born Today! 18.07.2024

Giovanni Bononcini (or Buononcini) (18 July 1670 – 9 July 1747) (sometimes cited also as Giovanni Battista Bononcini) was an Italian Baroque composer, cellist, singer and teacher, one of a family of string players and composers. He was a rival to George Frederic Handel.

Maria Antonia, Princess of Bavaria, Electress of Saxony (18 July 1724 – 23 April 1780) was a German princess, composer, singer, harpsichordist and patron of the arts, known particularly for her operas: Il trionfo della fedeltà (“The triumph of fidelity”) and Talestri, regina delle amazoni (“Talestri, queen of the Amazons”). She was Electress of Saxony as the wife of Frederick Christian, Elector of Saxony. Following the latter's death in 1763, she became the Regent of Saxony for their son Frederick Augustus I of Saxony.

Joseph Siegmund Bachmann (monastic name Sixtus Bachmann; 18 July 1754 – 18 October 1825) was a German organist and composer. Musically talented at an early age, he had an organ-playing competition in 1766 with the ten-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Pauline Viardot (pronounced [po.lin vjaʁ.do]; 18 July 1821 – 18 May 1910) was a French dramatic mezzo-soprano, composer and pedagogue of Spanish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, she came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.

Julius Ernest Wilhelm Fučík (Czech: [ˈjulɪjus ˈfutʃiːk]; 18 July 1872 – 25 September 1916) was a Czech composer and conductor of military bands. He became a prolific composer, with over 400 marches, polkas, and waltzes to his name. As most of his works were for military bands, he is sometimes known as the "Bohemian Sousa". Today his marches are still played as patriotic music in the Czech Republic. His worldwide reputation rests primarily on two works: "The Florentiner March", popular throughout much of Europe, and the "Entrance of the Gladiators" (Vjezd gladiátorů), which is widely recognized, often under the title "Thunder and Blazes", as one of the most popular theme tunes for circus clowns. Fučík was the brother of opera singer and bass player Karel Fučík and uncle of the journalist Julius Fučík, who was executed by the Nazis.

Bernard Wagenaar (July 18, 1894 – May 19, 1971) was a Dutch-American composer, conductor and violinist. Wagenaar was born in Arnhem. He studied at Utrecht University before starting his career as a teacher and conductor in 1914. He moved to the U.S. in 1920, and he became a citizen in 1927. From 1925 to 1968 he taught at the Juilliard School, where Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, Norman Dello Joio, Bernard Herrmann, Robert Ward, Tutti Camarata, Charles Jones, Alan Shulman, Katharine Mulky Warne, and James Cohn were among his pupils. He was an active member of the League of Composers and similar organizations and was an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands. He died in York, Maine. He wrote four symphonies (1926, 1930, 1936 and 1946) and other orchestral, vocal, and chamber music in a broadly neoclassical style. His second symphony was one of the few American works Arturo Toscanini performed with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; the first performances were on November 10, 11, and 13, 1933, in Carnegie Hall.

Misha Mengelberg (5 June 1935 – 3 March 2017) was a Dutch jazz pianist and composer. A prominent figure in post-WWII European Jazz, Mengelberg is known for his forays into free improvisation, for bringing humor into his music, and as a leading interpreter of songs by fellow pianists Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols.

Oskar Sala (18 July 1910 – 26 February 2002) was a German composer and a pioneer of electronic music. He played an instrument called the Trautonium, an early form of electronic synthesizer.

Lidia Grychtołówna (born 1928 in Rybnik) is a Polish pianist. In 1955 she was awarded the V International Chopin Piano Competition's 7th prize, and one year later she shared the 3rd prize of the inaugural edition of the Robert Schumann Competition with Mikhail Voskresensky. She subsequently performed throughout the world, and held a professorship at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. She served as a juror at the Chopin Competition's X, XI and XIII editions. Grychtołówna has been decorated the Gold Medal of the City of Milan.

Raymond Murray Schafer (18 July 1933 – 14 August 2021) was a Canadian composer, writer, music educator, and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World (1977). He was the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.

Roger Lee Reynolds (born July 18, 1934) is an American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, and for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds with those newly enabled by technology. Beyond composition, his contributions to musical life include mentorship, algorithmic design, engagement with psychoacoustics, writing books and articles, and festival organization. During his early career, Reynolds worked in Europe and Asia, returning to the US in 1969 to accept an appointment in the music department at the University of California, San Diego. His leadership there established it as a state of the art facility – in parallel with Stanford, IRCAM, and MIT – a center for composition and computer music exploration. Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Institute of Arts and Letters awards. In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time, an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Reynolds is principal or co-author of five books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2009 he was appointed University Professor, the first artist so honored by University of California. The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998. His nearly 150 compositions to date are published exclusively by the C. F. Peters Corporation, and several dozen CDs and DVDs of his work have been commercially released in the US and Europe. Performances by the Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Symphonies, among others, preceded the most recent large-scale work, george WASHINGTON, written in honor of America's first president. This work knits together the Reynolds's career-long interest in orchestra, text, extended musical forms, intermedia, and computer spatialization of sound. Reynolds's work embodies an American artistic idealism reflecting the influence of Varèse and Cage, as well as Xenakis, and has also been compared with that of Boulez and Scelsi. Reynolds lives with his partner of 59 years, Karen, in Del Mar, California, overlooking the Pacific.

Tobias Picker (born July 18, 1954) is an American composer, pianist, and conductor, noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers, Keys To The City, and The Encantadas, as well as his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, An American Tragedy and Lili Elbe, among many other works.

Bent Sørensen (born 18 July 1958) is a Danish composer. He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2018 for L'isola della Città (2016). He studied composition with Ib Nørholm at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and with Per Nørgård at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. Sørensen treats major/minor tonalities with microtonal inflections and blurs the harmonies with glissandi. Examples of this technique can be found in his trombone concerto "Birds and Bells", a work for orchestra and choir "Echoing Garden", and his violin concerto "Sterbende Gärten", which took the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996. His early works deal with folksong in prosaic way. Sørensen has composed in a variety of mediums, including opera (his "Under the Sky" was premiered in 2004 at the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen), orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble and solo instruments, but notably he has not composed any electroacoustic music. Since 2008 he has been a visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Jonathan Dove (born 18 July 1959) is an English composer of opera, choral works, plays, films, and orchestral and chamber music. He has arranged a number of operas for English Touring Opera and the City of Birmingham Touring Opera (now Birmingham Opera Company), including in 1990 an 18-player two-evening adaptation of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen for CBTO. He was Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival from 2001 to 2006. Dove was born in London; both his parents were architects. He studied music at the University of Cambridge, under Robin Holloway, and afterwards worked as a freelance arranger and accompanist until 1987, when he was employed by Glyndebourne Opera. In 1998 Dove was joint winner of the Christopher Whelen Award for his work in the fields of theatre music and opera. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to music.