Born Today! 21.08.2023

Guillaume Du Fay ( dyoo-FEYE, French: [dy fa(j)i]; also Dufay, Du Fayt; 5 August 1397(?) – 27 November 1474) was a composer and music theorist of early Renaissance music, who is variously described as French or Franco-Flemish. Considered the leading European composer of his time, his music was widely performed and reproduced. Du Fay was well-associated with composers of the Burgundian School, particularly his colleague Gilles Binchois, but was never a regular member of the Burgundian chapel himself.While he is among the best-documented composers of his time, Du Fay's birth and family is shrouded with uncertainty, though he was probably the illegitimate child of a priest. He was educated at Cambrai Cathedral, where his teachers included Nicolas Grenon and Richard Loqueville, among others. For the next decade, Du Fay worked throughout Europe: as a subdeacon in Cambrai, under Carlo I Malatesta in Rimini, for the House of Malatesta in Pesaro, and under Louis Aleman in Bologna, where he was ordained priest. As his fame began to spread, he settled in Rome in 1428 as musician of the prestigious papal choir, first under Pope Martin V and then Pope Eugene IV, where he wrote the motets Balsamus et munda cera, Ecclesie militantis and Supremum est mortalibus. Amid Rome's finical and political disorder in the 1430s, Du Fay took a leave of absence from the choir to serve Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy. Du Fay returned to Italy in 1436, writing his most admired work, the complex motet Nuper Rosarum Flores, which celebrated the consecration of Filippo Brunelleschi's dome for the Florence Cathedral. He later joined the recently-moved papal court in Bologna, and was associated with the House of Este in Ferrara. For the next eleven years, Du Fay was in Cambrai serving Philip the Good, under whom he may have written now-lost works on music theory. After a brief return to both Savoy and Italy, Du Fay settled in Cambrai in 1458, where his focus shifted from song and motet, to composing English-inspired cyclic masses based on cantus firmus, such as the Missa Ave regina celorum, the Missa Ecce ancilla Domini, the Missa L'Homme armé and the Missa Se la face ay pale. During his final years in Cambrai, Du Fay wrote his now-lost requiem and both met and influenced the leading musicians of his time, including Antoine Busnois, Loyset Compère, Johannes Tinctoris and particularly, Johannes Ockeghem. Du Fay has been described as leading the first generation of European musicians who were primarily considered 'composers' by occupation. His erratic career took him throughout Western Europe, forming a 'cosmopolitan style' and an extensive oeuvre which included representatives of virtually every polyphonic genre of his time. Like Binchois, Du Fay was deeply influenced by the contenance angloise style of John Dunstaple, and synthesized it with a wide variety of other styles, including that of the famous Missa Caput, and the techniques of his younger contemporaries, Ockeghem and Busnois.

Kate Fanny Loder, later Lady Thompson, (21 August 1825 – 30 August 1904) was an English composer and pianist.

Otto Moritz David Goldschmidt (21 August 1829 – 24 February 1907) was a German composer, conductor and pianist, known for his piano concertos and other piano pieces. He married the "Swedish Nightingale", soprano Jenny Lind.

Lucien Chevaillier (sometimes spelled Chevallier) (21 August 1883 – 3 February 1932) was a French composer, pianist, and music journalist.

Leo Funtek (August 21, 1885 – January 13, 1965) was a Slovenian violinist, conductor and arranger. He is best known for work as a music professor and for his 1922 arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Funtek was born in Ljubljana, Austria-Hungary. He received his musical education at the Leipzig Conservatory (now the Felix Mendelssohn College of Music and Theatre) and Leipzig University.Funtek spent most of his working life in Finland, where he was conductor of the Finnish Opera. He was concertmaster with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra from 1906 to 1909, and then was orchestra director of the Viipuri orchestra from 1909 to 1910. His most prominent role as a practicing musician was as conductor of the Finnish Opera from 1915 to 1959. He also served as assistant concertmaster for the Stockholm court orchestra from 1916 to 1919.In addition to his work as a practicing musician, Funtek was an academician. His first such post was from 1911 to 1939, at the Helsinki Institute of Music (now the Sibelius Academy), where he taught violin, ensemble and orchestration. He later taught at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he was a professor of violin at from 1939 to 1955, and where he also taught the conducting class from 1950 to 1955. He is credited with the introduction of orchestral training into the conducting class. Funtek's students included Jorma Panula, who himself went to become a leading professor of conducting; as well as Helvi Leiviskä (1902–1982) and Heidi Sundblad-Halme (1903–1973), two of Finland's most prominent female composers; and the composer Usko Meriläinen.As an arranger, Funtek is best known for his orchestral arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition, which he published in July 1922, just months before an orchestration by the French composer Maurice Ravel, of whose project Funtek was seemingly unaware. Ravel's orchestration premiered in October 1922, and is now by far the most-performed of the several orchestrations of the suite. In contrast to other orchestrations, Funtek's adheres closely to Mussorgsky's original piano version.Funtek was married to Finnish soprano Ingeborg Liljeblad. He died in Helsinki.

Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger (French: [maʁi ʒyljɛt lili bulɑ̃ʒe] (listen); 21 August 1893 – 15 March 1918) was a French composer and the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize. Her older sister was the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Wilhelm Killmayer (21 August 1927 – 20 August 2017) was a German composer of classical music, a conductor and an academic teacher of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München from 1973 to 1992. He composed symphonies and song cycles on poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Joseph von Eichendorff, Georg Trakl and Peter Härtling, among others.

Zdeněk Lukáš (21 August 1928 in Prague – 13 July 2007 in Prague) was a prolific Czech composer who authored over 330 works. He graduated from a teachers' college and worked as a teacher from 1953 to 1963. He was a musical editor and program director at the National Broadcasting Company in Pilsen and conducted the Česká píseň (Czech Song), a choir in Pilsen.

Philippa Duke Schuyler (; August 2, 1931 – May 9, 1967) was an American concert pianist, composer, author, and journalist. A child prodigy, she was the daughter of black journalist George Schuyler and Josephine Schuyler, a white Texan heiress. Schuyler became famous in the 1930s for her talent, intellect, mixed race parentage, and the eccentric parenting methods employed by her mother. Hailed as "the Shirley Temple of American Negroes," Schuyler performed public piano recitals and radio broadcasts by the age of four. She performed two recitals at the New York World's Fair at the age of eight. Schuyler won numerous music competitions, including the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall. At 11, she became the youngest member of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors. Schuyler encountered racism as she grew older, and had trouble coming to terms with her mixed-race heritage. She later became a journalist and was killed in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam in 1967.

Philippa Duke Schuyler (; August 2, 1931 – May 9, 1967) was an American concert pianist, composer, author, and journalist. A child prodigy, she was the daughter of black journalist George Schuyler and Josephine Schuyler, a white Texan heiress. Schuyler became famous in the 1930s for her talent, intellect, mixed race parentage, and the eccentric parenting methods employed by her mother. Hailed as "the Shirley Temple of American Negroes," Schuyler performed public piano recitals and radio broadcasts by the age of four. She performed two recitals at the New York World's Fair at the age of eight. Schuyler won numerous music competitions, including the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall. At 11, she became the youngest member of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors. Schuyler encountered racism as she grew older, and had trouble coming to terms with her mixed-race heritage. She later became a journalist and was killed in a helicopter crash in South Vietnam in 1967.

Zbigniew Bujarski (21 August 1933 – 13 April 2018) was a Polish composer. Bujarski was born on 21 August 1933 and died on 13 April 2018 in Krakow. He was born in Muszyna, Poland about 120 kilometres south-west of Krakow, and very close to the border with what is now Slovakia, and studied composition at the State College of Music in Krakow with Stanisław Wiechowicz. He was awarded an honorary mention at the Young Polish Composers' Competition organized by the Polish Composers' Union in 1961, and three years later won 2nd Prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers' Competition. He went on to teach composition at the Academy of Music in Kraków.In 2011 Bujarski was awarded the Silver Medal of Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis by Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Bogdan Zdrojewski.

Dame Janet Abbott Baker (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer.Baker was particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which spanned the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus, Les Troyens. As a concert performer, Dame Janet was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in Gramophone, described her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder as "intimate, almost self-communing."

Qigang Chen ([tʂʰə̌n t͡ɕǐkɑ́ŋ]; Chinese: 陈其钢; pinyin: Chén Qígāng; born 8 August 1951) is a Chinese-French composer who has lived in France since 1984 and obtained French citizenship in 1992.

Vestards Šimkus (Vestard Shimkus, born 21 August 1984 in Jūrmala) is a Latvian pianist, composer and improviser. He has won several international and national awards, plays classical repertoire, composes music for cinema and theatre, and performs his own compositions and spontaneous improvisations. His younger sister Aurēlija Šimkus also is a pianist.