Born Today! 02.07.2024

Johann Staden (baptized 2 July 1581 – 15 November 1634) was a German Baroque organist and composer. He is best known for establishing the so-called Nuremberg School.

Georg Daniel Speer (2 July 1636 – 5 October 1707) was a German composer and writer of the Baroque. Speer was born in Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland) and died in Göppingen, Germany.

Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck (German: [ˈkʁɪstɔf ˈvɪlɪbalt ˈɡlʊk]; 2 July 1714 – 15 November 1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using orchestral recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera. The strong influence of French opera encouraged Gluck to move to Paris in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French (with rich chorus) into a unique synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) was a great success and is often considered to be his finest work. Though he was extremely popular and widely credited with bringing about a revolution in French opera, Gluck's mastery of the Parisian operatic scene was never absolute, and after the poor reception of his Echo et Narcisse (1779), he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna to live out the remainder of his life.

Albert Szirmai (sometimes credited as Albert Sirmay) (2 July 1880 –15 January 1967) was a Hungarian operetta composer and music editor. Szirmai was a graduate of the Budapest Academy of Music, studying piano and composition (with Hans Koessler). Szirmai received a doctorate in music from the University of Budapest, and was devoted to creating works for the stage. He wrote music for 12 one-act plays and over 300 songs for the Budapest theater Népszínház-Vígopera, at which he was musical director. When his first operetta, The Yellow Domino, met with success, he decided to continue in the genre; it is due to the works of Szirmai, Emmerich Kálmán, and Victor Jacobi, among others, that the Hungarian operetta gained recognition internationally at the beginning of the 20th century. Szirmai was born in Budapest. On September 3, 1923, he arrived in New York City aboard the SS Leviathan and took a post as music director for Chappell Music (a publishing house now owned by Warner Music Group). He was music editor for such Broadway luminaries as Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin, and for a collection of the British duo Gilbert and Sullivan. Szirmai made headlines in 1965, when he discovered 100 unpublished songs Porter had written from 1924 to 1955, in Porter's nine room apartment in the Waldorf Towers shortly after Porter's death. "I would call the material a rich musical heritage," Szirmai told The New York Times. "There is enough material for one or two Broadway musical scores. There are dozens of excellent songs." Though he lived in America for most of his later years and was a good friend of Gershwin, Szirmai eschewed the jazz styles popular at the time; in addition to the folk music of his native Hungary, his music shows the influence of German Romanticism, particularly Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, whom he most admired. He died in New York.

Oles' Semyenovich Chishko (1895–1976) was a Ukrainian and Russian Soviet composer and singer (tenor). Oles' Semyenovich Chishko was born on 3 July 1895. He graduated from the Kharkiv Institute of Music and Drama (vocal) in 1924 and studied composition with Pyotr Ryazanov at the Leningrad Conservatory. Chishko was a soloist in the opera theatres of Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, and Leningrad. He was also the first performer of the roles of Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace by Sergei Prokofiev, Kobzar in "Taras Bulba" by Lysenko, and Pyotr in "V plenu u yablon" by himself. His students included film composer Nadezhda Simonyan.

Henryk Kowalski (Polish pronunciation: [ˈxɛnrɨk kɔˈvalskʲi]; July 2, 1911 – January 24, 1982) was a Polish Jewish violinist and composer.

Józef Franciszek Skrzek (born 2 July 1948, Siemianowice, Silesia, Poland) is a Polish multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer, an important figure in Polish rock.

Gareth Glyn, born Gareth Glynne Davies (born 1951), is a Welsh composer and radio broadcaster.

Đặng Thái Sơn (born July 2, 1958, in Hanoi, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-Canadian classical pianist. In 1980, he won the X International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, becoming the first pianist from Asia to do so. He has received particular acclaim for the sonority and poetry in his interpretations of Chopin and the French repertoire.

Walter Hus (born 2 July 1959) is a Belgian composer and musician. He studied at the music conservatories in Ghent and Brussels. In 1984, he graduated with excellence (Diplôme supérieur) for piano with Prof. Dr. Robert Steyaert and soon became involved with new music in many different expressions. He performed improvised piano recitals (1984: LP Eight Etudes on Improvisation); occasionally flirted with free jazz (Belgisch Pianokwartet) and rock (Simpletones); collaborated with painters (Michel Thuns) and video artists (Walter Verdin, Marie André). He wrote film scores for Suite Sixteen (Dominique Deruddere) and The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway); toured the world with his ensemble Maximalist! and wrote and performed for theatre and ballet (amongst others Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Roxanne Huilmand, Needcompany, Bud Blumenthal, Discordia, Beukelaars, Kortekaas, Ritsema). From the nineties on, he appeared less on stage and concentrated on composition as his main interest. He was commissioned by a number of music institutions and festivals, such as the Kaaitheater, deSingel, the Beursschouwburg, Automne en Normandie, Festival van Vlaanderen, Antwerpen '93, Happy New Ears, Vooruit, Felix Meritis, Hebbel Theater and the Rode Pomp. Recent works include four String Quartets ("La Théorie", "Le Désir", "Le Miroir" and "La Folie") and their symphonic transcriptions; chamber music for various combinations of instruments; music for choir and wind-ensembles; one Violin Concerto; one Piano Concerto; solo pieces; two song cycle; a children's opera ("de Nacht"); "Orfeo", an opera His trilogy of operas ("Meneer, de zot & tkint" / "Bloetwollefduivel" / "Titus Andonderonikustmijnklote"), lyrics by Jan Decorte, toured in Belgium and other European countries and were described as "masterpieces of stilistic venom [...] flawless little lessons in opera eshthetics" He composed a cycle of twenty-four preludes and fugues in four volumes, for multiple combinations of instruments. In 2004 he performed Books II & III of Preludes and Fugues for 2 pianos with pianist/composer Frederic Rzewski. In 2012, Hus created an opera based on Chris Ware's Lint (Acme Novelty Library #20). Since 2004, Walter Hus is artist in residence at Namahn. Walter Hus' recording studio, featuring a Decap organ, is located in the Namahn spaces. In recent years, Hus is best known for his work with the Decap organ. He started transcribing sheet music for Decap's new instruments in the early 2000s and "fell completely in love with the whole instrumentarium and saw far greater potential in it". Decap lent him an instrument, and Hus continues composing for and performing with the organ. In 2010, Hus composed a Decap version of Universal Nation for the documentary The Sound of Belgium. In 2015, he received the Ensor Award at the Oostende International Film Festival for his soundtrack to the film N-the madness of reason by Peter Krüger.

Masakazu Natsuda (夏田 昌和 Natsuda Masakazu, born 2 July 1968 in Tokyo) is a Japanese composer, former student of Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire de Paris.