Musicologists usually break up the great Ludwig van Beethoven's career into three periods: early, middle, and late. But to add a touch more flavor, you could call them the "I'm young and getting my feet wet" period, followed by the "Since I'm going deaf, I'm gonna get wacky and break some rules" peri

Dramatic, Manic, Moody, Pathos, Romantic music, Sublime

Some artists march to the beat of a different drummer, but Erik Satie wrote the melody to accompany that different beat, and then gave the whole piece a crazy name. Dismissed by many critics during his lifetime as an eccentric bohemian whose absurdist humor disguised a lack of talent, Satie is now cr

Ambient, Fantastic, Kaleidoscopic, Parody, Spiritual, Surreal

Shostakovich is often, in musical circles, called the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Yet the quality of his music is so uneven that, while a third of it is the brain-bombing work of a divine genius, another third is almost worthless, and another third scares young violinists into abandon

20th-century music, Catastrophe, Lyrical, Melancholy, Moody, Pathos, Visceral

His name is an inevitable entry in the roll call of American Minimalist composers. Steve Reich, along with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, and others defined a new wave of art music in the latter half of the twentieth century, one that deliberately rejected the knotty complexities of its Eu

Ecstatic, Hypnotic, Minimalist music, Rhythmic, Spiritual, Tribal