10 best music composers of all time

This post represents the culmination of the blog’s recent ‘best composers’ articles. It presents the crème de la crème of that series - a greatest hits compilation, if you will - bringing together the leading figures we’ve looked at in all those settings, from women composers to film-score specialists, and everything in between. 

We’ve also tossed in a couple of newcomers for good measure. We haven’t looked at best jazz composers, for instance, but such is his quality Duke Ellington deserves a place on a list of the finest composers of all time - jazz or otherwise. 

Entries from other articles have been repurposed for this one, and each is introduced by a few words that contextualise their placement in this new backdrop. If you feel inspired to read about these composers in their original contexts, you can find links to those articles here:

• Best classical music composers
• Best movie composers
• Best video game composers
• Medieval music composers
• Famous modern composers
• Female composers

Drawn from those fields and beyond, here are ten of the greatest writers of music of all time. Taken from across the world, the centuries and the plethora of musical styles that the world has to offer. 
 

Best music composers
 

• Duke Ellington
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Paul McCartney
• Nobuo Uematsu
• Hildegard von Bingen
• Ravi Shankar
• Kaija Saariaho
• Scott Joplin
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Quincy Jones

Duke Ellington

Few would argue with the claim that the Duke is the greatest of jazz composers. Not only present but pioneering from the tradition’s embryonic years in the late 1910s right through to the 1970s, he saw it all: Dixieland to fusion; the rise, fall and rise again of swing (the last of which he was single-handedly responsible for); jazz’s meteoric ascent from a modest vernacular to global commercial sensation. All this occurred in the great man’s lifetime, and within his sphere of influence. 

Duke was a remarkably gifted pianist and bandleader, and a bona fide national treasure - but most extraordinary of all his achievements is his output of over a thousand compositions, some of which are among the best-known jazz standards in the repertoire. No jazz composer can match this prolificacy or depth of impact. Few in any genre come close. His popular tunes exhibit a masterful handling of melody and harmony, while large-scale arrangements demonstrate an astounding subtlety of orchestration. For composer Percy Grainger, ‘the three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington’. There’s a serious case to be made that Duke is the greatest American composer of all time.

Duke started out emulating ragtime pianists in his native Washington D.C., and he made his first records with his own combo in the early 1920s. Leading a growing orchestra, his late-1920s tenure at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York would catapult him to national fame, and although he mostly played existing favourites, Duke’s own swing compositions gradually came to dominate the band's repertoire. 

Come the 1930s, he would perfect the fine art of the compact, three-minute composition prescribed by 78 rpm vinyls. But the rich depth, colour and complexity of even these small arrangements set him apart from bandleader contemporaries like Benny Goodman. The success of his records and performances - and the profile of many players that joined his band - ensured that his star kept soaring right through to the mid-1940s. 

Popular appetite for big bands waned in the years after WWII, and an economic slump put lots of them out of business, but a truly legendary performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 thrust Duke back into the limelight and in his later years he recorded countless successful albums, many of which contain his most profound explorations of extended jazz form. 

Some of his finest numbers include ‘Take the A Train’, ‘C Jam Blues’ and ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’ - the last two of these are explored in the blog’s posts on best piano songs and best jazz piano songs respectively. Black, Brown and Beige, meanwhile, which is perhaps Duke’s greatest large-scale work, is discussed in the famous orchestral works article. If you want to understand what makes him so special, just listen to that.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Where better to head than one of Grainger’s other favourites? The iconic Baroque composer voted in a recent poll as the greatest of all time. This entry is taken from the article on the finest classical composers.

As Josquin is to Hildegard, Bach is to Monteverdi. The Italian was no slouch, a composer of music more complex than many realise, but as Baroque techniques consolidated, order, refinement and melodic simplicity gradually defined this style that was now preoccupying musicians across Europe. Building on the innovations of Buxtehude, Purcell and Pergolesi, Bach took the Baroque era to its pinnacle, an unsurpassed height of complexity. 

Only recently established, the principles of tonality were totally exhausted by his musical geometry. The German composer crafted countless, exquisite articulations of harmony and counterpoint, in polyphonic forms like the fugue and invention, and his homorhythmic chorales remain the music student’s bread and butter today. 

He was well versed in concertos and sonatas, and the dance forms that were the cornerstone of Baroque practice. His musical machinations are maths in sound, and that’s precisely what inspired the great writer Douglas Adams to say: ‘Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven, and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe’.

Not merely a composer, he was also a teacher, organist and Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany - a position that required him to compose one whole cantata a week. Colossal liturgical works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, and masterpieces for keyboard (harpsichord in his day) such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue, are the most towering achievements of his towering career. 

Bach was acclaimed solely as an organist for almost a century until the ‘Bach Revival’, ignited by Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St Matthew in 1829. His star has continued to rise ever since, and now he might well be history’s most highly rated composer.

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney, like Duke, is another debutant in this series, but there can be no denying his leading position as one of history’s greatest composers. Another extraordinarily prolific figure who mastered the oft-underestimated art of writing a great tune, he represents the very best of what the wide world of popular music has to offer.

For most critics the Beatles are the greatest band in history. They enjoyed unprecedented popularity. They pioneered new studio recording techniques. They authored a catalogue of hits unmatched in scale, flair and innovation. At the musical frontier in the revolutionary 1960s, they served to elevate pop from entertainment music to high art. Rolling Stone ranked the band as the greatest artist of all time, and Time named John, Paul, George and Ringo among the most influential people of the 20th century. 

No less significantly, they wrote and performed their own songs when such a thing was a rarity. From the 1964 album A Hard Day’s Night onwards, they supplied their own material, mostly written by the Lennon–McCartney songwriting team - the most successful musical collaboration ever by records sold (600 million). In 1963 British newspaper The Sunday Times hastily - but presciently - declared them the greatest composers since Beethoven.

Whether you’re a Paul person or a John person is rightly down to you, but towards the end of the Beatles era, Paul was the dominant creative force in the group, composing most of Abbey Road (including the celebrated B-side medley) and the biggest hits on Let It Be, their final studio album. The recent Get Back documentary demonstrates just how central Paul was in the band’s dynamic at the time. There’s no denying that Lennon was a singularly astonishing creator, but his music is more reflective of a wider notion of great artistry. McCartney’s, meanwhile, demonstrates greatness in the more traditional compositional mould. 

For his breadth of influence and for the sheer number of exceptional and uniquely popular songs that he composed - not only as a Beatle but with his later band Wings, and as a solo artist - McCartney must be considered a major contender for the title of history’s greatest song composer. It’s only fitting that one of his peak achievements, ‘Yesterday’, is the most covered song in history. Guinness estimates that roughly 2,200 different artists have recorded an interpretation.

Nobuo Uematsu

Doubtless the most influential and revered composer of video-game music in history, Uematsu can lay claim to a body of work that has captivated countless listeners - many of whom would not even recognise his name. It’s high time his great legacy was championed beyond the gaming community. 

Ask anyone who knows anything about video game music to name the finest composers in the medium, and they’re all but guaranteed to utter 'Nobuo Uematsu’. Innovative, prolific and immeasurably talented, he is an icon of the art he practises and a tremendous testament to its under-acknowledged integrity and prestige.

A self-taught musician, Uematsu played piano from the age of twelve under the unerring guidance of Elton John’s inspiration. He first composed professionally for TV advertisements, before being recruited by Tokyo-based games studio Square in 1985, a chance move that put him on course to compose music for some of the most historic titles of the era. 20 years later, and with over 30 game soundtracks to his name, he went freelance, continuing to compose for Square (now Square Enix) while touring with his own bands: the Black Mages, and Earthbound Papas.

The beating heart of his musical legacy is Square's mammoth Final Fantasy series. Itself one of the great institutions in gaming history, the franchise played out to the enchanting strains of Uematsu’s music from 1987 to 2001, after which time a number of other composers began to contribute to this already-sprawling musical tapestry. Across almost 20 instalments, his work has acquired an incredible variety, ranging from sweeping orchestral soundscapes and synthesised edifices, to lilting piano ballads and speed-metal numbers. Final Fantasy’s popularity and longevity have served to propagate his much-imitated work on the widest of scales, and the series has done more than most to elevate the profile of video game music.

In 2013 the unthinkable occurred when his music for Final Fantasy took third place in the Classic FM Hall of Fame, an annual poll held by British radio station Classic FM. 200,000+ listeners voted that year, and their collective endorsement of Uematsu’s music marked a watershed indication of the rising stock of gaming soundtracks. Live performances of Final Fantasy arrangements - and not just by Uematsu’s own bands - are not uncommon, and numerous recorded interpretations of his work have emerged on YouTube and Spotify. 

This impact, and the enhanced status Uematsu is awarded relative to other video game composers - especially in his native Japan, a country that has made untold contributions to the story of gaming and where the composers of their soundtracks enjoy unmatched celebrity - speaks volumes for the importance of his legacy.

Hildegard von Bingen

A stalwart of the best composers series, Hildegard is a must-feature here. Included in the countdowns of the greatest classical, medieval and women composers, she represents a cross-section of several important spheres in the story of composition. 

Classical music has been, for the vast majority of its history, a world dominated by men. It still is of course, though momentous and encouraging changes are well underway. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that from the farthest reaches of the tradition that we can call ‘classical music’, it is a woman’s voice that connects to us. From nearly a millennium ago, Hildegard of Bingen offers modern ears some of the most pioneering and expressive music of the first centuries of the story of classical music.

Middle Age Europe in general was an enormous boys’ club. Males prevailed in all aspects of life, and together worked to perpetuate their own dominance. A bastion of that society was of course the all-powerful Latin Church, which happens to be not only the very home of the tradition we’re exploring, but also an area where women were far more empowered than you might expect. 

In convents scattered across Europe, well-respected communities of nuns studied, wrote, prayed, and served God. As the abbess of two such convents in the German Rhineland, Hildegard would rise to become one of the most revered scholars in Europe. 

Composer, playwright, theologian, philosopher, healer, saint. She was a quite extraordinary individual. Her musical output, consisting of 69 compositions - each with its own original poetic text - is one of the largest surviving medieval repertoires. Composed circa 1151, her morality play Ordo Virtutum ranks among the most monumental achievements of the era.

Her music is entirely monophonic, featuring a lone melodic line like all plainsong of the period - Gregorian chant or otherwise - but it’s distinguished by constructive adventurousness and emotive power. Her use of elaborate melisma is another hallmark, which reflects an unusually close correspondence between music and text. In this regard her work anticipates the innovations that her later medieval and Renaissance successors would soon carry out.

Ravi Shankar

Shankar was selected in the countdown of great film composers, but, as we point out, his talents far exceed that. Combined, his classical and filmic achievements more than merit a place here.

In any list of history’s great filmmakers, alongside the likes of Kubrick, Bergman, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, you’re guaranteed to find the name Satyajit Ray, and any discussion of the Bengali director is bound to centralise his so-called ‘Apu’ trilogy. Released between 1955 and ’59, the loosely bound trio of films is regarded by many as the pinnacle of Indian film, and one of the most monumental achievements in world cinema. Through the vehicle of these hugely important works, Ravi Shankar’s most valuable work as a film composer was done.

Of Bengali extraction himself, Shankar was born in 1920 in the northern Indian city of Varanasi. He toured India and Europe as a dancer in his youth, but began studying sitar in 1938 in the Hindustani classical tradition. Involving improvised elaboration on scalar melodies known as ragas, Hindustani classical custom entails a form of spontaneous composition, akin to the performances of jazz masters such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. 

Melding this fundamentally performative practice with the Western-aligned notion of fixed creation, Shankar composed his first film score in the mid-1940s and wrote pieces for the All India Radio orchestra, which he personally formed as the music director for the station. From 1956, and more or less for the remainder of his life, he toured internationally, often performing classically but always looking beyond the traditional in an effort to spread the  music of India and his breath-taking sitar-playing to global audiences. He did this through concerts, written compositions, dozens of commercial recordings, and collaborations with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, Philip Glass and Beatle George Harrison. 

Film was one of the most effective and influential outlets for his compositional practice. Between Neecha Nagar in 1946 and Genesis 40 years later - via the landmark score for Gandhi in 1982 - Shankar adapted the traditional Hindustani idioms, which had existed for centuries unto themselves, in response to the formal demands of film. It is difficult to look past Ray’s cinema, though, which looms large not only over Shankar’s filmography but also over cinema generally. Complemented by the slow, reflective pace of the films, Shankar’s music brings the Bengali setting to life, offering up a realistic soundtrack to the landscape depicted, capturing young Apu’s youthful exuberance in his virtuosic sitar.

Today Indian cinema is a huge industrial and social phenomenon, and while the vibrant, contemporary sounds of Bollywood might seem a world away from Ray’s quietly radical cinema of the 1950s, Shankar nonetheless played his part in laying the musical groundwork for this colossal hub of world culture.   

Kaija Saariaho

Saariaho draws level with Hildegard by featuring in three lists of the greatest composers: classical, modern and women. The result of the poll cited below says everything you need to know about her credentials.

Kaija Saariaho was nineteen when Stravinsky died, deep in the process of honing her own compositional craft. Progressing through the Sibelius Academy in her native Helsinki, and then the conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, she grew frustrated with the serialist method that Stravinsky had until recently practised, and which remained à la mode in this period among the elite European composers. Striving to find that unique voice and creative style  that one day would be so distinctive of her art, the breakthrough came in 1980.  

That year she discovered the music of the French spectral composers, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, who were discarding conventional notation by using sound’s raw acoustic properties as a basis for composing. Inspired by their work, Saariaho began to experiment with computer assisted composition, questioning the very practice of writing music itself. And so she followed in Cage and Nono’s footsteps on the postmodern path, and became one of the most important electronic-music innovators since Schaeffer and Stockhausen. 

Then came her masterpieces. She drew electronics into orchestral textures, engineering vast and overwhelming soundscapes that listeners will struggle to rationalise. At the other end of the spectrum, in chamber and solo repertoire, she scales new heights of intricacy and virtuosity through dense polyphonic constructions. 

850 years on from Hildegard, going into the 21st century, Saariaho stands as the greatest living composer - at least if this 2019 composers’ poll by BBC Music Magazine is anything to go by.

Scott Joplin

That Scott Joplin is another new entry is partly reflective of the fact that he doesn’t neatly slot into the received mould of the great composer. This is a consequence of the musical style he engaged with, but probably has more to do with his ethnicity. It should go without saying, but that mould as it is typically applied and understood is sorely outmoded. His inclusion here aspires to illustrate its shortcomings, and to acknowledge the exceptional creative contribution that Joplin made to musical history in his relatively short life.

Born to a formerly enslaved father and freeborn mother in Arkansas, 1868, Joplin showed promise at the piano from an early age. His talent was encouraged by his mother and carefully nurtured by a local tutor, Julius Weiss. Weiss was a German-Jewish émigré well versed in European classical music, and he would expose his talented young pupil to the Romantic idioms that he in turn would so fatefully manipulate. 

Joplin was a skilful performer but his exceptional talents of course lay in composition, and his great achievement was the near single-handed consolidation and popularisation of the mature ragtime style. Exploiting his experiences of traditional African-American music and classical forms, he fused the former’s syncopated rhythmic impetus with the latter’s harmonic progressions and pianistic figures. Elevating the medium beyond the dance- and march-like traits of honky-tonk rags that ‘serious’ musicians and indeed Joplin himself derided, the composer assimilated ragtime into the classical tradition that he felt was the rightful home of the form.

‘Maple Leaf Rag’ was his breakthrough. The definitive rag; his definitive work. Occupying a significant position in the history of sheet music, the 1899 work - while not quite selling the one million copies in the composer’s lifetime that some musicologists have previously claimed - was nonetheless the first instrumental sheet-music hit in the US. Sales gradually raised Joplin’s national profile, and gave him a steady income until his untimely death in 1917. Other popular rags of his include ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Elite Syncopations’, while ‘Solace’, even if it’s an imaginative take on the Latin habanera form, is perhaps the work that best testifies to the classical attributes of Joplin’s piano music.

This ‘classic rag’ art form that Joplin developed had profound consequences for American music, functioning as a cornerstone for jazz, blues and white popular music of the 20th century - very few individuals exert this kind of influence on music history. He also wrote a number of works in forms other than rag, and even authored several operas. Tragically, much of this work is lost, and even more tragically, racist discrimination posed immense difficulties for Joplin in his lifetime, in his attempts to get his work performed. But his posthumous legacy among the master composers rightly grows ever greater.

Ludwig van Beethoven

This entry comes from the article on greatest classical-music composers. The man hardly needs an introduction.

You may or may not have noticed, but there’s a real Germanic predominance in this phase of classical-music history. With the dawn of the Enlightenment, this part of Europe begins to innovate intellectually and culturally, and the growing power of the Habsburgs in Austria also facilitates the establishment of Vienna as the continent’s musical capital. 

From the era of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart until the German annexation of Austria in 1938, some of the finest musicians in the world would take up residence in the city to practise their artistry. Beethoven was among the first - he made the long journey there from Bonn in 1792, when he was 22 years of age.

Like Monteverdi, Beethoven - initially grounded in Classicism but dying as the first Romantic composer - is a transitional figure. But through the sheer magnitude of his innovations, he is able to usher in the Romantic era almost single-handedly. And because he’s impossible to classify as belonging to one or the other he arguably occupies a historical period all of his own. For this reason, it becomes more practical to subdivide his work itself, which falls into three stages: Classical, Heroic and late. 

Emulating Mozart and Haydn in his Classical phase, it is in his Heroic and late works that his most seismic innovations occur: expansion of the orchestra, subversion of formal structures, the enrichment of harmony and dissonance. His piano sonatas and string quartets are monumental bodies of work, but his symphonies are emblematic of his contribution.

Most significantly, there is an unprecedented emphasis on expression. On the notion that music can capture the emotion, pain and triumph of the composer - Beethoven’s personal torment in coming to terms with his worsening deafness is widely regarded as a catalyst for this great breakthrough. Because these values are everything that Romanticism stands for, he then becomes a paragon for later artists. 

He immediately influenced Franz Schubert and Hector Berlioz. Both factions in the ‘Wars of the Romantics’ - Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt on one side, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann on the other - laid claim to his legacy. As the (extremely Romantic) painting above shows, every composer had a bust of Beethoven in their study. He still represents a pinnacle for many, and while his greatness relative to other masters may be up for debate, few would contest that he’s the supreme iconic figure of Western classical music. 

Quincy Jones

Quincy comes to us from the film composers countdown, but just like Shankar and others explored in that article, his musicianship far exceeds that sphere alone.

The talents of Quincy Jones are numerous: trumpeter, conductor and producer of records, film and television. But he must be most revered for his creative prowess, which manifests in songwriting, arrangement and all-out composition. His most significant body of work as a creative inhabits the world of film - in the 20 years between 1965–85, Jones completed 35 film scores, diverse, accessible and individual.

His stylistic influences are as broad as his resumé. Jones is masterfully versed in rhythm and blues, soul, funk, hip hop, bossa nova, classical music, and all strands of jazz - in fact Time magazine named him one of the 20th century's most influential jazz musicians. And of course he brought all these ingredients to his film scores over the years, from the swingin’ pop arrangements in his 1960s work to the lush orchestral textures of his final film project, Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.

Jones’ earlier film scores are particularly innovative in their contribution to the wider integration of popular music into film scores in the 1960s. Before that, it had largely been orchestral - Steiner, Herrmann, Copland, etc. While Morricone brought surf guitar to the spaghetti westerns and John Barry enriched 007’s world with jazz, Jones gave African-American popular music a voice in Hollywood. 

This went hand-in-hand with cinema that spoke for that community, at a time of great and long-awaited upheaval that came at the climax of the Civil Rights Movement. This valuable work is perfectly symbolised by Jones’ collaboration with Ray Charles in the title song for the defiant 1967 classic In the Heat of the Night. (Watch and hear the iconic opening sequence here.) Indeed with seven nominations, including two for Best Original Score (1967’s In Cold Blood and Color Purple) and three for best-song awards, he’s the joint-most-nominated African American in the history of the Academy Awards.

Alongside In the Heat, Spielberg’s film is probably Jones’ best known and mostcelebrated work. Check out ‘Miss Celie’s Blues’ from that film on nkoda, which perfectly demonstrates his chameleonic ability to engage with a variety of styles.

Access sheet music from all your favourite music composers
 

Discover all these composers and the music that makes them great on nkoda, a digital sheet music library containing over 100,00 titles from over 140 of the world’s greatest music publishers. Britten, Shostakovich, Chopin and the rest - they’re all there, in all their notated glory.

Don’t forget that you can read about more great musicians in the other categories named above and throughout this article, and the blog offers dozens more articles on a variety of subjects: instrumental content, music theory and other apps like nkoda. Keep reading, keep learning and keep loving music.

That's all, folks!