The White Hat Guide to Groupings of Composers

Sometimes a group of composers and artists is given a collective name. They may have chosen this name themselves or it might have been created by one of their contemporaries or applied retrospectively. Below is a short list of such groupings.

(First) Viennese School

The Viennese School is a name often applied to a remarkable group of composers working in and around Vienna at end of the 18th century and start of the 19th century. Their style and the forms they created and developed were to have a profound effect on the music which followed. Composers usually recognised as belonging to the Viennese School are:

although the use of the term 'Viennese School' is also sometimes used to include some of their lesser-known contemporaries. As people began to refer to the Second Viennese School (see below) then this grouping of composers above became more commonly known as the First Viennese School.

Second Viennese School

In the early 20th century Arnold Schoenberg started developing a revolutionary system of composing he called the twelve tone system. Schoenberg and his pupils are often referred to as the Second Viennese School. The prominent composers were:

The Mighty Handful or The Five

The name Могучая кучка (usually translated into English as 'mighty handful) was coined by Vladimir Stasov in 1867 to cover a group of composers who were attempting to develop a distinctly Russian voice for their music rather than just an extension of the German and French dominated European styles of the time. These composers were:

Les Six

In 1920 the French critic Henri Collet with obvious reference to The Five (see above) named a group of composers he saw as producing music that was particularly Gallic and reliant neither on a bloated romantic or an impressionist tradition. The group labelled Les Six were: