Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's musical training began at the family piano, where his mother gave him lessons after realizing that the boy was a musical prodigy: he had perfect rhythm at the age of two, and could play dozens of folk tunes by heart at the age of four. As a young man, Bartok traveled

20th-century music, Anxiety, Bombast, Dissonant, Dramatic, Grand

By all accounts, Peter Tchaikovsky was an emotionally troubled man. He suffered from nervous depression, which was heightened by the constant social presssure to hide his homosexuality. The composer had affairs with women and even married Antonina Miliukova -- with disastrous emotional effects to bot

Dark, Dramatic, Elegant, Grand, Lush, Psychological, Romantic music, Voluminous

No composer made more of an effort to immortalize the epic quality of America than Aaron Copland. Though he studied music under conservative German and French teachers in his youth, Copland was constantly tempted to experiment with innovative, contemporary musical styles. Born during the first year o

20th-century music, Epic, Expansive, Grand, Pioneering

The mystically inspired Louis Kahn was born in Estonia and raised in the United States. He acquired a thorough grounding in the Beaux-Art school of architecture and worked through the 1920s and 1930s first as a draughtsman and then as a head designer. Kahn infused his buildings with monumentalism, ri

Grand, Layered, Modernist architecture, Monumental, Sincere, Spiritual