Born Today! 25.01.2024

Johann Gottfried Vierling (January 25, 1750 – November 22, 1813) was a German organist and composer.

Jan Blockx (25 January 1851 – 26 May 1912) was a Belgian composer, pianist and teacher. He was a leader of the Flemish nationalist school in music.

José Juventino Policarpo Rosas Cadenas (25 January 1868 – 9 July 1894) was a Mexican composer and violinist.

Julia Frances Smith ( January 25, 1905 – April 18, 1989) was an American composer, pianist, and author on musicology.

Julia Frances Smith ( January 25, 1905 – April 18, 1989) was an American composer, pianist, and author on musicology.

Witold Roman Lutosławski (Polish: [ˈvitɔld lutɔˈswafski] ; 25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of 20th-century classical music, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szymanowski, and possibly the greatest Polish composer since Chopin". His compositions—of which he was a notable conductor—include representatives of most traditional genres, aside from opera: symphonies, concertos, orchestral song cycles, other orchestral works, and chamber works. Among his best known works are his four symphonies, the Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941), the Concerto for Orchestra (1954), and his cello concerto (1970). During his youth, Lutosławski studied piano and composition in Warsaw. His early works were influenced by Polish folk music and demonstrated a wide range of rich atmospheric textures. His folk-inspired music includes the Concerto for Orchestra (1954)—which first brought him international renown—and Dance Preludes (1955), which he described as a "farewell to folklore". From the late 1950s he began developing new, characteristic composition techniques. He introduced limited aleatoric elements, while retaining tight control of his music's material, architecture, and performance. He also evolved his practice of building harmonies from small groups of musical intervals. During World War II, after narrowly escaping German capture, Lutosławski made a living playing the piano in Warsaw bars. After the war, Stalinist authorities banned his First Symphony for being "formalist": accessible only to an elite. Rejecting anti-formalism as an unjustified retrograde step, Lutosławski resolutely strove to maintain his artistic integrity, providing artistic support to the Solidarity movement throughout the 1980s. He received numerous awards and honours, including the Grawemeyer Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal. In 1994, Lutosławski was awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle.

Andrzej Cwojdziński (28 January 1928 – 23 March 2022) was a Polish composer, conductor and music teacher.

Donald Henry Kay AM (born 25 January 1933) is an Australian classical composer.Kay was born on 25 January 1933 in Smithton, Tasmania. He attained a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Melbourne after which he taught music at Colac High School, Victoria, 1957–59. He then went on to teach music at Peckham Manor Comprehensive School for Boys, London, UK 1959-64 and was Director of Music there 1962–64. He studied composition privately at this time with Malcolm Williamson. His first publication was in 1964–65 with Songs of Come and Gone for choir, flute, piano and string orchestra.Kay returned to Tasmania in 1965 with a young family of two daughters as lecturer of music, Hobart Teachers College; in 1967 he was appointed Lecturer of Composition and Music Education, Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music. He received his first commission in 1966, Organ Sonata, broadcast on ABC national radio by John Nicholls, the Hobart City Organist, in 1967. Active as a music tutor from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s with the Tasmanian Youth Theatre, Secheron House, Battery Point, Kay also composed a number of scores for production by the Tasmanian Puppet Theatre as well as Theatre Royal professional productions e.g. Richard II (Shakespeare), The Imaginary Invalid (Molière), the Wakefield Miracle Plays (Tasmania Festival, 1970) at that time. In 1984 Kay wrote an opera The Golden Crane with a libretto from Gwen Harwood. During these years Kay was also contributing to Creative Music and Arts workshops at National and International conferences for Music and Arts Education. He was appointed Senior Lecturer at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music in 1976; elected Dean of Music, University of Tasmania, 1989; and elected Head of the Conservatorium of Music, University of Tasmania, 1990. Kay has had over 50 compositions broadcast on ABC national radio and over 60 works publicly performed in Australia, UK, US, Switzerland and Italy from a symphony, to operas, orchestral and choral works to chamber and solo works. In 1989 Tasmania Symphony - The Legend of Moinee for cello and orchestra was awarded the best composition by a composer resident in Tasmania in the Sounds Australian awards.In 1990 Dance Concertante for String Orchestra was given a similar award.Kay's music in recent years has been largely the result of a variety of responses to Tasmanian ecology and history. In June 1991 Don Kay was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for his contribution to the arts and particularly to music composition. In 2001 he was awarded a Centenary Medal for an outstanding contribution to music, music education and composing in Tasmania. He retired from the staff of the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music in 1998, having served as head of department from 1990 to 1993 and has since been appointed adjunct professor in composition. He now composes full-time.

Roger Steptoe (born 1953) is an English composer and pianist. He studied music at the University of Reading as an undergraduate and then at the Royal Academy of Music, London, from 1974 to 1977 as a post-graduate student. There he studied composition with Alan Bush and piano accompaniment with Geoffrey Pratley.His String Quartet No. 1 (1976) and the opera King of Macedon (1978–79, to a libretto by Ursula Vaughan Williams, based on a stage play by Charterhouse school pupil 1973-77 Charles Jockelson) were composed during his time as composer in residence at Charterhouse School from 1976 to 1979. Between 1980 and 1991 he was professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Notable works during this period include the Clarinet Quintet and the solo piano piece Equinox, a series of concertos, and the Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (1988) for counter tenor and strings.As a pianist, Steptoe recorded the first modern performances of the Walton and Bridge piano quartets, and in the first recording of the Four Last Songs by Vaughan Williams. Anthony Bye has described Steptoe's style as "wholeheartedly in the tradition of Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Howells, Britten and Tippett...regenerated with thoroughly contemporary means of expression".

Jan Sandström (born 25 January 1954) is a Swedish classical music composer. His compositions include the so-called Motorbike Concerto for trombone and orchestra and his choral setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.

Bettina Skrzypczak (born 25 January 1963) is a Polish/Swiss composer.

Stefan Milenkovich (Serbian: Stefan Milenković, Стефан Миленковић; born January 25, 1977) is a Serbian violinist.

Agata Zubel (born 1978 in Wrocław, Poland) is a Polish composer and singer.

Walt Ribeiro (born January 25, 1984) is an American composer of classical music. He was born in New Jersey. His work has been primarily distributed via the internet. His symphony I.I was written for an 80-piece orchestra, but produced using orchestral sampling software. Ribeiro is also notable for his music tutorials available via web sites such as YouTube, which he ended in October 2009. That same year he launched For Orchestra where he arranged pop songs for orchestra. He has arranged covers of songs by Lady Gaga, Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Rimsky-Korsakov, MGMT and PSY, along with others. It has since been featured on Comedy Central Tosh. O, Perez Hilton (for his Lady Gaga arrangements), Green Plastic (for his Radiohead arrangement) and more. Currently, Ribeiro is producing one song per week. He suffered an accident on October 10, 2015, at which point he decided to take a break from his YouTube and composing activities in order to recover.