Born Today! 13.03.2024

Francesco Durante (31 March 1684 – 30 September 1755) was a Neapolitan composer.

Francesco Durante (31 March 1684 – 30 September 1755) was a Neapolitan composer.

Michel Blavet (March 13, 1700 – October 28, 1768) was a French composer and flute virtuoso. Although Blavet taught himself to play almost every instrument, he specialized in the bassoon and the flute which he held to the left, the opposite of how most flutists hold theirs today. Quantz wrote of Blavet: "His amiable disposition and engaging manner gives rise to a lasting friendship between us and I am much indebted to him for his numerous acts of kindness."

Emilio Serrano y Ruiz (13 March 1850 – 8 April 1939) was a Spanish pianist and composer.

Hugo Philipp Jacob Wolf (13 March 1860 – 22 February 1903) was an Austrian composer, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but diverging greatly in technique. Though he had several bursts of extraordinary productivity, particularly in 1888 and 1889, depression frequently interrupted his creative periods, and his last composition was written in 1898, before he suffered a mental collapse caused by syphilis.

Amédée Henri Gustave Noël Gastoué (19 March 1873 – 1 June 1943) was a French musicologist and composer.

Enrico Toselli, Count of Montignoso (March 13, 1883 – January 15, 1926), was an Italian pianist and composer. Born in Florence, he studied piano with Giovanni Sgambati and composition with Giuseppe Martucci and Reginaldo Grazzini. He embarked on a career as a concert pianist, playing in Italy, European capital cities, Alexandria and North America.His most popular composition is Serenata 'Rimpianto' Op.6 No.1. His other works include two operettas, La cattiva Francesca (1912) and La principessa bizzarra (1913).Toselli's fame largely derives not from his musical ability but from his scandalous elopement with Archduchess Louise of Austria, the former Crown Princess of Saxony, in 1907. She had previously deserted her husband, Frederick Augustus of Saxony, and they had divorced in 1903. Her ex-husband became king of Saxony in 1904. Toselli's marriage ended in divorce in 1912. They had one son, Carlo Emanuele (7 May 1908 – 1969). Toselli's memoirs of his marriage to royalty, Mari d’altesse: 4 ans de mariage avec Louise de Toscane, ex-princesse de Saxe, were published in French after his divorce. He died of consumption in 1926 at the relatively young age of 43.

Pancho Haralanov Vladigerov (or Wladigeroff, Wladigerow, Vladiguerov, Vladigueroff; Bulgarian: Панчо Хараланов Владигеров [ˈpant͡ʃo xɐrɐˈɫanov vɫɐdiˈɡɛrof]; 13 March 1899 – 8 September 1978) was a Bulgarian composer, pedagogue, and pianist.Vladigerov is arguably the most influential Bulgarian composer of all time. He was one of the first to successfully combine idioms of Bulgarian folk music and classical music. Part of the so-called Second Generation Bulgarian Composers, he was among the founding members of the Bulgarian Contemporary Music Society (1933), which later became the Union of Bulgarian Composers. Vladigerov marked the beginning of a number of genres in Bulgarian music, including the violin sonata and the piano trio. He was also a very respected pedagogue; his students include practically all notable Bulgarian composers of the next generation, such as Alexander Raichev, Alexander Yossifov, Stefan Remenkov, and many others, as well as the pianist Alexis Weissenberg.

Kikuko Kanai (金井 喜久子, Kanai Kikuko, née Kawahira, 13 March 1911 – 17 February 1986) was a Japanese composer and one of the first Japanese women to compose classical music in the Western tradition.

James Yannatos (March 13, 1929 – October 19, 2011) was a composer, conductor, violinist and teacher. He was a senior lecturer at Harvard University until his retirement in 2009.Yannatos was born and educated in New York City. In 1943, he was invited to attend Camp Rising Sun, a tuition-free, international summer camp in upstate New York. He attended the High School of Music and Art and the Manhattan School of Music. Subsequent studies with Nadia Boulanger, Luigi Dallapiccola, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith, and Philip Bezanson in composition, William Steinberg and Leonard Bernstein in conducting, and Hugo Kortschak and Ivan Galamian on violin took Yannatos to Yale University (B.M., M.M.), the University of Iowa (Ph.D.), Aspen, Tanglewood, and Paris. As a young violinist, he performed at the Casals Festival and elsewhere in various professional ensembles, including a piano trio, a string quartet, and early music groups with Hindemith and Boulanger. In 1964, he was appointed music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and led that group on tours to Europe, Russia, South America, and Asia. He organized and co-directed the New England Composers Orchestra and the Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestra, and taught conducting at Tanglewood. He appeared as guest conductor-composer at the Aspen, Banff, Tanglewood, Chautauqua, and Saratoga Festivals, and with the Boston Pops, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Baltimore, and San Antonio Symphonies and the Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, Cleveland, and American Symphony Chamber Orchestras. Yannatos composed music for both stage and television in addition to chamber music, choral works, and art songs. Many of his compositions are for children. His only opera, Rockets' Red Blare, to a libretto he wrote himself, premiered in 1971 in a student performance at Harvard University's Loeb Drama Center. On October 1 and 2, 2011, a completely rewritten score to Rocket's Red Blare received its professional premiere by Intermezzo, The New England Chamber Opera Series at the Agassiz Theater in Radcliffe Yard, Cambridge, MA. In pre-performance talks, Yannatos revealed his dissatisfaction with virtually every element of the 1971 premiere, especially the stage direction, as well as his own music. After that production closed, he shelved the score until 2008, when he revised the libretto (mostly making cuts), and with the exception of a few vocal moments he liked, wrote an entirely new score. Intermezzo's production was directed Kirsten Z. Cairns, with Edward Jones conducting the Juventas New Music Ensemble; designers William Fregosi (scenery), Rebecca Butler (costumes), and Winston Limauge (lights); and Singers David Kravitz (King), D'Anna Fortunato (Queen), Gregory Zavracky (Prince), Natalie Polito (The Girl), and Charles Blandy (Jester). Yannatos died of cancer on October 19, 2011, not quite three weeks after having seen his only opera finally produced successfully.

Wolfgang Rihm (born 13 March 1952) is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds".

Anthony Powers (born 13 March 1953) is a British composer of classical music. He has received a number of commissions, including the BBC and the Three Choirs Festival Society and a number of individuals, while his works have been performed both in Great Britain and abroad. He was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2003.

Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American trumpeter, pianist and composer. A jazz musician, he has also composed film scores and operas. He started his career in 1982 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then The Jazz Messengers. He has composed more than forty film scores and performed on more than fifty. A frequent collaborator with director Spike Lee, he has been nominated for two Academy Awards for composing the scores for Lee's films BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). He has won five Grammy Awards from fourteen nominations. From 2000 to 2011, Blanchard served as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2011, he was named artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami, and in 2015, he became a visiting scholar in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music. In 2019, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), named Blanchard to its Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, where he remained until 2023. The Metropolitan Opera in New York staged Blanchard's opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones in its 2021–2022 season, the first opera by an African American composer in the organization's history.

Vít Zouhar (born 1966) is a Czech composer, pedagog, and musicologist. He is the son of Zdeněk Zouhar, who was also a composer, educator and musicologist, and close friend of Martinů.

Alberto Pizzo (Naples, March 13, 1980) is an Italian pianist and composer.