Who Are The Top Ten Composers?

This is a varied list to cover a variety of social areas and times and, inevitably, would differ wildly from another person’s top ten composers.

I’m looking at mine through social and historical impact  coupled with the generations of musicians that they’ve inspired… there is also a little bit of personal preference in there as well! The top three should be no surprise as composers who have been at the pinnacle of musicians who have shaped modern Western music but there might be a couple of surprises!

1 - Bach

Bach is era-defining for the Baroque period and was the tip of the iceberg of musicians who developed what has become the harmonic and tonal language of Western music. Despite popular forms of modern music having strong influences from jazz, funk and elements from around the world, the rules and sounds developed and popularised by Bach still have a significant sway. You still here pieces like Bach’s ‘Prelude in C’ in various guises in adverts.

2- Mozart

Similar to Bach, Mozart is the highest regarded composer of the Classical period and is still a household name to date. He pushed out a huge number of varied compositions from symphonies to choral music to huge amounts of piano music despite only living for 35 years. Like Bach, his work has had an immeasurable influence on Western Music with his ‘Magic Flute’ and Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ being firm favourites to perform.

3 - Beethoven

Another big dog of the later Classical period, Beethoven signalled the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Romantic period. Another composer who created a huge plethora of music, Beethoven took the simplistic beauty and functional harmony of the Classical period, turning it into more complex pieces with more lush harmony, chromatic writing for more emotional impact. This culminated in his famous ‘Ninth Symphony’ which caused riots on the night and a general fissure amongst composers (the crisis of the Ninth) who, after listening to Beethoven’s Ninth felt they needed to take the concept of the Symphony in a different direction (for example, Mahler’s giganticism with his Symphony of a Thousand  or Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk with his complete artistic control over his operas).

Writing only a hundred or so words on Beethoven is a crime but so much of his work is still in performance rotation with piano pieces like ‘Für Elise', ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ and The ‘Pathetique Sonata’ being household names - Beethoven is a hugely influential composer.

4 - Debussy

Claude Debussy was a French Romantic Composer famous for his lush piano pieces with ‘Clair De Lune’ being his most famous and still used regularly in Tv and film. He is widely acknowledged as the most famous of the Impressionist composers where, like Impressionist art focusses on the bigger picture rather than clean melodies - I think of it as blurred music using many more extended notes like major Sevenths, ninths etc. There was much more of an improvised quality and flow in comparison to Classical music and it remains very influential to this day.

5 - Richard Wagner

An often overlooked German composer famous for such bombastic works as his ‘Flight of the Valkyrie’ which is from the third instalment of his mammoth ‘The Ring’ cycle (German Lord Of The Rings) and ‘Tristan Und Isolde’. Musically, Wagner popularised the concept of the Leitmotif (a little snippet of a melody where multiple Leitmotifs are weaved together to become a melody) which was actually taken from a scathing review of how his melodies were barely more than a small snippet… Wagner took this and ran with it. His use of Leitmotifs is still heard in how a lot of film music is written, though with very different instrumentation.

Wagner had a huge influence on the performance world as well. His creation of new instruments such as the Wagner Horn not withstanding, he was also ahead of the curve with developing theatre production. He very much believed in Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork) where he had to be responsible for everything from the music to the libretto to the building of the theatre which made him a nightmare to work with but it lent his work a thematic strength that is rarely seen.

He developed the use of lights within the theatre to affect the mood and draw the eye on stage as well as sinking the orchestra and having them play into an orchestral shield on the back of the stage allowing the orchestra sound to feel behind where the singers were, allowing the opera singers a bit more breathing space.

Wagner is mostly remembered for ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ and being a raging anti-semite but he had a massive impact on the theatre and film world as well as the opera and music world.

6 - The Beatles

The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Star) are a defining band of the 20th Century and, like the Classical Greats mentioned earlier, had a significant impact on later pop groups in a variety of ways. From a musician’s point of view, their big influences were the standardisation of song structure (Verse, Pre-chorus, Chorus) and production of how songs are actually mixed and made.

The Fifth Beatle (George Martin) was important due to his arrangements, production and was present on nearly all of the original recordings. The Beatles were a good band but without George Martin’s guiding hand wouldn’t have been the mega-band it is today.

7 - Richard Rogers

An American Musical Theatre Composer, Rogers had a huge output throughout the 20th Century with 43 Broadway Musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, remaining a huge influence over the pop and theatre worlds.

His song writing partnership of Rogers and Hammerstein is probably best known for the new life it brought Broadway, with musicals such as ‘The Sound Of Music,’ ‘Oklahoma!’ And ‘South Pacific’ where the light-hearted entertainment was augmented with drama and character development as well as songs that have stood the test of time and remain popular to this day.

8 - John Williams

I still vividly remember watching Jurassic Park as a five year old and hearing John Williams’s Jurassic Park Theme sending shivers up my spine. John Williams is an amazing arranger and his mastery over orchestral forces and when to go big or not is a pleasure to listen to - every film score from Jaws to Indiana Jones fits the picture’s needs perfectly and nearly always with an incredibly memorable hook.

9 - Hans Zimmer

Braaaaaaam. A hugely influential TV and film composer who re-defined cinematic sound with his soundtracks to ‘Gladiator,’ ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Inception’. Zimmer’s strength lies in his ability to ask the write questions of the Director and delegate what is needed to his team very effectively; his network of composers called ‘Remote Control’ allows him to create amazing film scores in weeks rather than months. The more famous element of his influence is popularising ‘Hybrid Film-scoring’ where composers utilise samples to augment the traditional recorded orchestras creating a massive and thick sound.

Braaaaaaaam.

10 - Ludovico Einaudi

I suspect the choice of Einaudi might be argued a fair bit but this Italian composer, despite a lot of flack, is one of the foremost composers of Neoclassical piano music and was hugely influential to me when I was young. His music has a simplicity and beauty that speaks to modern audiences in a way that plenty of 20th and 21st century music doesn’t and, whilst critics might say his compositions are light music, it has popularised and given new life to the concept of Contemporary Classical music. Pieces such as ‘Experience’, ‘Divenire’ and ‘Nuvole Bianche’ stand out for me as particular favourites.

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Explore More from Nick Pike

Nick Pike is a London-based composer, pianist, saxophonist, producer, and educator with over 15 years of professional experience. His music blends neoclassical piano with jazz, funk, and contemporary influences, drawing comparisons to Ludovico Einaudi, Yiruma, and Ólafur Arnalds. Alongside original compositions, Nick offers music services including scoring for film, TV, and advertising, piano and saxophone recording, arranging for strings and horns, and professional mixing and production.

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