#2851
Leonard Slatkin
1944 - Present (80 years)
Leonard Edward Slatkin is an American conductor, author and composer. Early life and education Slatkin was born in Los Angeles to a Jewish musical family that came from areas of the Russian Empire now in Ukraine. His father, Felix Slatkin, was the violinist, conductor and founder of the Hollywood String Quartet, and his mother, Eleanor Aller, was the cellist with the quartet. His brother, Frederick, now a cellist, traced the family's original name as Zlotkin, and adopted that form of the family surname for himself professionally. Frederick Zlotkin has spoken of the family lineage as follows:"The Zlotkin/Slatkin lineage is Russian-Jewish.
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Roberto Alagna
1963 - Present (61 years)
Roberto Alagna is a French operatic tenor. He obtained French citizenship in 1981, while also retaining his previous Italian citizenship. Early years Alagna was born in Clichy-sous-Bois, outside the city of Paris, in 1963 to a family of Sicilian immigrants. As a teenager, the young Alagna began busking and singing pop in Parisian cabarets, mostly for tips. Influenced primarily by the films of Mario Lanza and learning from recordings of many historic tenors, he then switched to opera, but remained largely self-taught. He was discovered by Gabriel Dussurget, the co-founder of the Aix-en-Provenc...
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Julia Glass
1956 - Present (68 years)
Julia Glass is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in 2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Village universe, with three interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The Widower's Tale, in 2010; her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014; her sixth, The House Among the Trees, in 2017; her seventh, Vigil Harbor, in 2022.
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Jim Breen
1947 - Present (77 years)
James William Breen is a Research Fellow at Monash University in Australia, where he was a professor in the area of IT and telecommunications before his retirement in 2003. He holds a BSc in mathematics, an MBA and a PhD in computational linguistics, all from the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his involvement in several popular free Japanese-related projects: the EDICT and JMDict Japanese–English dictionaries, the KANJIDIC kanji dictionary, and the WWWJDIC portal which provides an interface to search them.
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Ron Mael
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ronald David Mael is an American musician, songwriter, composer and record producer. He is the keyboard player and principal songwriter in the band Sparks which he founded with vocalist, occasional songwriter and younger brother Russell Mael in 1971. Mael is known for his quirky and idiosyncratic approach to songwriting, his intricate and rhythmic keyboard playing style and for his deadpan and low key, scowling demeanour onstage often remaining motionless over his keyboard in sharp contrast to Russell's animated and hyperactive frontman antics. Ron Mael is also noted for his conservative clothes and distinctive moustache.
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Brad Bird
1957 - Present (67 years)
Phillip Bradley Bird is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He has had a career spanning forty years in both animation and live-action. Bird was born in Montana and grew up in Oregon. He developed an interest in the art of animation early on, and completed his first short subject by age 14. Bird sent the film to Walt Disney Productions, leading to an apprenticeship from the studio's Nine Old Men. He attended the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, and worked for Disney shortly thereafter.
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Alex Ross
1970 - Present (54 years)
Nelson Alexander Ross is an American comic book writer and artist known primarily for his painted interiors, covers, and design work. He first became known with the 1994 miniseries Marvels, on which he collaborated with writer Kurt Busiek for Marvel Comics. He has since done a variety of projects for both Marvel and DC Comics, such as the 1996 miniseries Kingdom Come, which Ross co-wrote. Since then he has done covers and character designs for Busiek's series Astro City, and various projects for Dynamite Entertainment. His feature film work includes concept and narrative art for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 , and DVD packaging art for the M.
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Ronnie Wilbur
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ronnie Bring Wilbur is an American theoretical and experimental linguist and a professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She also has a joint appointment in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the College of Health and Human sciences. Her main focus is sign language linguistics. Some of Wilbur's major contributions to the subfield include the discovery that sign languages have syllables similar to spoken languages and that blinks can be used grammatically to mark clause boundaries.
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Einojuhani Rautavaara
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Einojuhani Rautavaara was a Finnish composer of classical music. Among the most notable Finnish composers since Jean Sibelius , Rautavaara wrote a great number of works spanning various styles. These include eight symphonies, nine operas and twelve concertos, as well as numerous vocal and chamber works. Having written early works using 12-tone serial techniques, his later music may be described as neo-romantic and mystical. His major works include his first piano concerto , Cantus Arcticus and his seventh symphony, Angel of Light .
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Wolfgang Rihm
1952 - Present (72 years)
Wolfgang Rihm is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds".
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Janet Holmes
1947 - Present (77 years)
Janet Holmes is a New Zealand sociolinguist. Her research interests include language and gender, language in the workplace, and New Zealand English. Academic career After obtaining an MPhil at the University of Leeds, Holmes moved to Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, later becoming a naturalised New Zealander in 1975. She published a textbook Introduction to Sociolinguistics in 1992 which has run to five editions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and won the Dame Joan Metge Medal in 2012. She is now an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
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Pauline Jacobson
1947 - Present (77 years)
Pauline Jacobson is a professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she has been since 1977. She is known for her work on variable free semantics, direct compositionality, and transderivationality.
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Alan Hovhaness
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
Alan Hovhaness was an American composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies and 434 opus numbers. The true tally is well over 500 surviving works, since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.
Go to ProfileErik Ralske is an American classical horn player. He has been principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since 2010, following seventeen seasons as third horn of the New York Philharmonic. He was featured horn soloist of the MET's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and was a soloist on several occasions with the New York Philharmonic. He is also a member of the orchestra's Philharmonic Quintet of New York.
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Elizabeth Subercaseaux
1945 - Present (79 years)
Elizabeth Subercaseaux Sommerhoff is a Chilean journalist and writer. Biography Elizabeth Subercaseaux grew up near Cauqenes, Chile at her grandparents' home called Santa Clara. Subercaseaux's father died in 1956, when he was 42 years old and she was 11. The five children of the marriage – Bernardo and Juan, older than Elizabeth, and Martin and Ximena, younger – were brought up by their mother, the sculptor, painter, and photographer Gerda Sommerhoff, who was a German and grew up in Holland. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck.
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Meredith Vieira
1953 - Present (71 years)
Meredith Louise Vieira is an American broadcast journalist and television personality. She is best known as the original moderator of the daytime talk show The View , the original host of the syndicated daytime version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , and as co-host of the NBC morning news program Today . , she hosts the syndicated weekday game show 25 Words or Less.
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Lester R. Brown
1934 - Present (90 years)
Lester Russel Brown is an American environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and former president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day referred to him as "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."
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Margaret Mary Vojtko
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Margaret Mary Vojtko was an American adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University. Her death caused controversy at Duquesne and prompted conversations about unions and the role of adjunct faculty at American universities.
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Mike Sharwood Smith
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Sharwood Smith , Emeritus Professor of Languages at Heriot-Watt University & Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, is a researcher into multilingualism and the acquisition of non-native languages, a branch of developmental linguistics and cognitive science. He is a founding editor of Second Language Research, successor to the Interlanguage Studies Bulletin.
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Galina Vishnevskaya
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya was a Russian soprano opera singer and recitalist who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1966. She was the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and mother to their two daughters, Olga and Elena Rostropovich.
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Sissel Kyrkjebø
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sissel Kyrkjebø , also simply known as Sissel, is a Norwegian soprano. Sissel is considered one of the world's top crossover sopranos. Her musical style ranges from pop recordings and folk songs, to classical vocals and operatic arias. She sings mainly in English and Norwegian and has also sung songs in Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Irish, Italian, French, Russian, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Neapolitan, Māori, Japanese and Latin.
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Sylvia Porter
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sylvia Field Porter was an American economist, journalist and author. At the height of her career, her readership was greater than 40 million people. Early life Porter was born in Patchogue, New York, on Long Island as Sylvia Field Feldman to Louis and Rose Maisel Feldman. Originally majoring in English literature, she switched to economics and finance given the impact of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It has been suggested that her fiancé, bank employee Reed Porter, was relying upon Sylvia to explain the complications of the worldwide financial panic. They were married in 1931.
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Keith Jones
2000 - Present (24 years)
Keith Jones is a fifteen-time Emmy Award and five-time Edward R. Murrow Award winning News Anchor, Host, and Reporter for WCAU in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since July 2012. He anchors NBC10 News Today, which airs Monday through Friday from 4 to 7am, and co-hosts The Lineup on Apple TV and Roku. He also files reports for NBC News.
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Wojciech Kilar
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Wojciech Kilar was a Polish classical and film music composer. One of his greatest successes came with his score to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, which received the ASCAP Award and the nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Music. In 2003, he won the César Award for Best Film Music written for The Pianist, for which he also received a BAFTA nomination.
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Hodding Carter III
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
William Hodding Carter III was an American journalist and politician who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under President Jimmy Carter. He frequently appeared on the news and provided updates during the Iran hostage crisis.
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Carolin Emcke
1967 - Present (57 years)
Carolin Emcke is a German author and journalist who worked for from 1998 to 2006, often writing from areas of conflicts. From 2007 to 2014, she worked as an international reporter for . Her book Echoes of Violence – Letters from a War Reporter was published in 2007 at Princeton University Press. In 2008, she published Stumme Gewalt , in 2013 How We Desire , in 2016 Against Hate , and in 2019 Yes means yes and... . Carolin Emcke was honoured with several awards such as the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2016, and a Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 2017.
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Gustav Leonhardt
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Gustav Maria Leonhardt was a Dutch keyboardist, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor. He was a leading figure in the historically informed performance movement to perform music on period instruments.
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Katherine Dunn
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.
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James Milroy
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
James Robert Dunlop Milroy was a British linguist who pioneered the development of sociolinguistics. He was born in Portpatrick in Scotland, but grew up in Scotland, Wales and Surrey, and as a child he learned Welsh. He taught at several British universities before obtaining a teaching position at Queen's University Belfast where in 1965 he met his wife Lesley with whom he began carrying out sociolinguistics research on English dialects. In 1981 he became Chair of The Linguistics Science Department at the University of Sheffield, then moved to Newcastle University, and then taught for 10 yea...
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Paul Bley
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Paul Bley, CM was a Canadian jazz pianist known for his contributions to the free jazz movement of the 1960s as well as his innovations and influence on trio playing and his early live performance on the Moog and ARP synthesizers. His music has been described by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times as "deeply original and aesthetically aggressive". Bley's prolific output includes influential recordings from the 1950s through to his solo piano recordings of the 2000s.
Go to ProfileStephen Fox is a British clarinetist, saxophonist and clarinet maker, based in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. Born in England, Fox completed a master's degree in physics at the University of Saskatchewan before earning a degree in clarinet performance. He began a career in instrument repair in 1985 and started making clarinets in 1990. Fox makes modern soprano, basset, and bass clarinets, and basset horns. In addition he makes tárogatós, and is one of only a handful of makers of reproduction historical clarinets in the world. In 2006 he introduced the world's first Bohlen-Pierce clarinets.
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Nicole Ellison
1968 - Present (56 years)
Nicole Ellison is the Karl E Weick Collegiate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her research in the fields of computer-mediated communication, social media, and social networking sites. Her research has been cited over 63,000 times according to Google Scholar.
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B. W. Andrzejewski
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Bogumił Witalis "Goosh" Andrzejewski was a Polish-born, British-naturalised linguist whose research focused on the Somali language. Lists of Andrzejewski's works can be found in , , , and . General references
Go to ProfileMeredith Broussard is a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her research focuses on the role of artificial intelligence in journalism. Career Broussard was previously a features editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a software developer at the AT&T Bell Labs and MIT Media Lab. Broussard has published features and essays in many outlets including The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Slate Magazine. She is the author of the nonfiction book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.
Go to ProfileMark P. Hughes is the Grand Prix editor for Motor Sport magazine, a position he has held since the start of 2014. He is also an F1 correspondent for The Sunday Times and technical editor for the renowned motor racing annual, Autocourse. Hughes also provides analysis for British television coverage of Formula One, currently working in the role of technical analyst for Sky Sports following his previous role as commentary box producer for the BBC's coverage, in case commentators David Coulthard and Martin Brundle miss anything on track. He worked in a similar role for ITV when they had the rights to F1, assisting Brundle and James Allen.
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Albert Lee
1943 - Present (81 years)
Albert William Lee is an English guitarist known for his fingerstyle and hybrid picking technique. Lee has worked, both in the studio and on tour, with many famous musicians from a wide range of genres. He has also maintained a solo career and is a noted composer and musical director.
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John Naughton
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Naughton is an Irish academic, journalist and author. He is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, Director of the Press Fellowship Programme at Wolfson College, Cambridge, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the British Open University, adjunct professor at University College, Cork and the Technology columnist of the London Observer newspaper.
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Kenny G
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kenneth Bruce Gorelick , known professionally as Kenny G, is an American smooth jazz saxophonist, composer, and producer. His 1986 album Duotones brought him commercial success. Kenny G is one of the best-selling artists of all time, with global sales totaling more than 75 million records.
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Stephen Revere
1971 - Present (53 years)
Stephen Revere is an American author, media personality, and entrepreneur based in Seoul, South Korea. Revere's social media marketing company Intercultural Communications is the first social media marketing company to service bilingual websites and social media advertising in Korea. He has frequently appeared on Korean TV and has published three books in the Survival Korean series.
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Robin Milner-Gulland
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Rainsford "Robin" Milner-Gulland, FBA, FSA, is a British scholar of Russian and Byzantine literature, culture, and art. His main areas of expertise are Russian modern & medieval cultural history, modern Russian literature , Russian & Byzantine art history, the Russian language, English romanesque art & architecture and Sussex history. He is currently the Emeritus Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Sussex.
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Bobby McFerrin
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Keith McFerrin Jr. is an American jazz singer and songwriter. He is known for his vocal techniques, such as singing fluidly but with quick and considerable jumps in pitch—for example, sustaining a melody while also rapidly alternating with arpeggios and harmonies—as well as scat singing, polyphonic overtone singing, and improvisational vocal percussion. He is widely known for performing and recording regularly as an unaccompanied solo vocal artist. He has frequently collaborated with other artists from both the jazz and classical scenes.
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Jennifer Ward Clarke
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Jennifer Ward Clarke was a British cellist. After an early career in contemporary music, she later specialised in baroque music and performances on period instruments. Early life and career Jennifer Ward Clarke was born in Yateley, Hampshire on 20 June 1935, the daughter of Dorothea and Harry Ward Clarke, a prep school headteacher. At Benenden School in Kent she became interested in the cello, and studied at London's Royal College of Music with Ivor James, where she won the prize for cello. She won a scholarship to study for a year at the Paris Conservatoire with Paul Tortelier. On three occ...
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Faten Hamama
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Faten Ahmed Hamama was an Egyptian film and television actress and film producer. She was the first wife of Ezz El-Dine Zulficar. She made her screen debut in 1939, when she was only seven years old. Her earliest roles were minor, but her activity and gradual success helped to establish her as a distinguished Egyptian actress. Later revered as an icon in Egyptian cinema. In 1996, nine of the films she starred in were included in the Top hundred films in the history of Egyptian cinema by the cinema critics of Cairo International Film Festival.
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Eumir Deodato
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eumir Deodato de Almeida is a Brazilian pianist, composer, arranger and record producer, primarily in jazz but who has been known for his eclectic melding of genres, such as pop, rock, disco, rhythm and blues, classical, Latin and bossa nova.
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Andy Samberg
1978 - Present (46 years)
Andy Samberg is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and musician. He is a member of the comedy music group The Lonely Island alongside childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Samberg was also a cast member and writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2012, where he and his fellow group members are credited with popularizing the SNL Digital Shortss.
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Lorenzo Ferrero
1951 - Present (73 years)
Lorenzo Ferrero is an Italian composer, librettist, author, and book editor. He started composing at an early age and has written over a hundred compositions thus far, including twelve operas, three ballets, and numerous orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. His musical idiom is characterized by eclecticism, stylistic versatility, and a neo-tonal language.
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Mauricio Kagel
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Mauricio Raúl Kagel was an Argentine-German composer and academic teacher. Life and career Early life and education Mauricio Raúl Kagel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had fled from Russia in the 1920s. He studied music, history of literature, and philosophy in Buenos Aires. In 1957 he moved as a scholar to Cologne, Germany, where he lived until his death.
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Margalit Finkelberg
1947 - Present (77 years)
Margalit Finkelberg is an Israeli historian and linguist. She is the professor emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2005 and served as president of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies from 2011 to 2016.In 2021, she was elected Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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Jane Grimshaw
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jane Barbara Grimshaw is a Distinguished Professor [emerita] in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is known for her contributions to the areas of syntax, optimality theory, language acquisition, and lexical representation.
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John Corigliano
1938 - Present (86 years)
John Paul Corigliano Jr. is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar.
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