Composer Map
Thirty composers, born across four centuries and two continents — from a village in Burgundy to a city on Lake Ontario. Grouped here by region; plotted properly, pin by pin, on the interactive map.
British Isles
Three centuries apart, one island.
- William Byrd — London, England (1543)
- Henry Purcell — Westminster, London, England (1659)
- Edward Elgar — Broadheath, England (1857)
France & the Low Countries
From Burgundy to the Seine.
- Josquin des Prez — Hainaut, Burgundian Netherlands (1450)
- Jean-Philippe Rameau — Dijon, France (1683)
- Claude Debussy — Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France (1862)
Italy
Where opera, and much of the Baroque, began.
- Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina — Palestrina, Italy (1525)
- Claudio Monteverdi — Cremona, Italy (1567)
- Jean-Baptiste Lully — Florence, Italy (1632)
- Antonio Vivaldi — Venice, Italy (1678)
Germany & Austria
The historic heartland of the classical tradition.
- Christoph Willibald Gluck — Erasbach, Bavaria (1714)
- Joseph Haydn — Rohrau, Austria (1732)
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Salzburg, Austria (1756)
- Ludwig van Beethoven — Bonn, Germany (1770)
- Franz Schubert — Vienna, Austria (1797)
- Felix Mendelssohn — Hamburg, Germany (1809)
- George Frideric Handel — Halle, Germany (1685)
- Johann Sebastian Bach — Eisenach, Germany (1685)
- Clara Schumann — Leipzig, Germany (1819)
- Johannes Brahms — Hamburg, Germany (1833)
Poland & Hungary
Folk melody carried into the concert hall.
- Frédéric Chopin — Żelazowa Wola, Poland (1810)
- Franz Liszt — Raiding, Hungary (1811)
- Béla Bartók — Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (1881)
Russia & Eastern Europe
The furthest east the map reaches.
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Votkinsk, Russia (1840)
- Gustav Mahler — Kalischt, Bohemia (1860)
- Igor Stravinsky — Oranienbaum, Russia (1882)
- Sergei Prokofiev — Sontsovka, Ukraine (1891)
- Dmitri Shostakovich — St Petersburg, Russia (1906)
North America
Across the Atlantic, into the movies.
- John Williams — New York, USA (1932)
- Howard Shore — Toronto, Canada (1946)
Curious about one composer's whole story? Browse the Composer Gallery, or explore by era — Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern.