Neoclassicism (music) in the context of "Les Six"

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.

20th-century classical music is Western art music that was written between 1901 and 2000, inclusive. Musical style diverged during the 20th century as it never had previously, so this century was without a dominant style. Modernism, impressionism, and post-romanticism can all be traced to the decades before the turn of the 20th century, but can be included because they evolved beyond the musical boundaries of the 19th-century styles that were part of the earlier common practice period. Neoclassicism and expressionism came mostly after 1900. Minimalism started later in the century and can be seen as a change from the modern to postmodern era, although some date postmodernism from as early as about 1930. Aleatory, atonality, serialism, musique concrète, and electronic music were all developed during the century. Jazz and ethnic folk music became important influences on many composers during this century.

Louis Joseph Andriessen (Dutch: [luˈʋi ˈɑndrisə(n)]; 6 June 1939 – 1 July 2021) was a Dutch composer, pianist and academic teacher. Considered the most influential Dutch composer of his generation, he was a central proponent of The Hague school of composition. Although his music was initially dominated by neoclassicism and serialism, his style gradually shifted to a synthesis of American minimalism, big band jazz and the expressionism of Igor Stravinsky.

Born in Utrecht into a musical family, Andriessen studied with his father, the composer Hendrik Andriessen as well as composers Kees van Baaren and Luciano Berio. Andriessen taught at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague from 1974 to 2012, influencing notable composers. His opera La Commedia, based on Dante's Divine Comedy, won the 2011 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and was selected in 2019 by critics at The Guardian as one of the most outstanding compositions of the 21st century.

Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896 – March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher, and writer on music. He had started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved towards complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions's friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced him, but he modified his technique to a unique style involving rows to supply melodic themes, while composing subsidiary parts freely.

Elliott Cook Carter Jr. (December 11, 1908 – November 5, 2012) was an American modernist composer who was one of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century. He combined elements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a distinctive style with a personal harmonic and rhythmic language, after an early neoclassical phase. His compositions are performed throughout the world, and include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. Carter was the recipient of many awards – he was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his string quartets. He also wrote the large-scale orchestral triptych Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei.

Carter was born in New York City. He developed an interest in modern music in the 1920s. He was later introduced to Charles Ives, and he soon came to appreciate the American ultra-modernists. After studying at Harvard University with Edward Burlingame Hill, Gustav Holst and Walter Piston, he studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, then returned to the United States. Carter was productive in his later years, publishing more than 40 works between the ages of 90 and 100, and over 20 more after he turned 100 in 2008. He completed his last work, Epigrams for piano trio, on August 13, 2012.

Martial industrial (also known as military pop) is a syncretic offshoot of industrial music characterized by noise, dark ambient atmospheres, neofolk melodies, dark wave tunes and neoclassical orchestrations as well as the incorporation of audio from military marches, historical speeches and political, apolitical or metapolitical lyrics. Unlike other post-industrial genres, martial industrial is typically interested more in a particular worldview or philosophy than pure experimentalism.