Born in Austria-Hungary on March 25, 1881;
died in New York City on September 26, 1945

The son of keen amateur musicians who encouraged his early interest in piano and composition. At the Budapest Academy of Music, he earned a reputation as a talented pianist with a particular aptitude for performing Liszt’s piano pieces.

From 1905 onward, in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály, he began travelling throughout Hungary collecting and publishing folk songs, eventually expanding this project to the folk music of other countries and cultures.

In 1942, just two years after moving to the United States to develop a folk collection at Columbia University, Bartók was diagnosed with leukemia. He died in 1945, leaving a corpus of work that combined traditional folk melodies with experimental harmonies to create a bold new music. His work developing a scientific classification of folk music is widely considered a starting point for the discipline of ethnomusicology.

Born in Vienna on September 13, 1874;
died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951

Austrian composer and painter Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 and exhibited musical talent from a young age despite minimal formal training. Mentored by Gustav Mahler from 1909 to 1911, he graduated to orchestrating operas and teaching, ultimately moving to the United States in 1934 to escape Nazi Germany. There, he taught at the University of Southern California and UCLA.

Arguably Schoenberg’s most significant contribution to music was his celebrated twelve-tone technique, which unusually employed all 12 notes in the chromatic scale. The influence of this technique is clear in the works of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who later became known as members of the Second Viennese School, with Schoenberg as their leader.

A highly superstitious man who dreaded the number 13, Arnold Schoenberg is said to have died from an extreme state of fear on July 13, 1951.