2001: A Space Odyssey

Johann Strauss II , also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son , was an Austrian composer of light music,... particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely then responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century. Strauss was born in St. Ulrich , the son of Johann Strauss I, another composer of dance music. His father did not wish him to become a composer, but rather a banker; however, the son defied his father's wishes, and went on to study music with the composer Joseph Drechsler and the violin with Anton Kollmann, the ballet répétiteur of the Vienna Court Opera. Strauss had two younger brothers, Josef and Eduard Strauss, who became composers of light music as well, although they were never as well known as their elder brother.
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Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was a prominent Soviet Armenian composer. Khachaturian's works were often influenced by classical Russian music and... Armenian folk music. He is most famous for the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from his ballet Spartacus, and for the "Sabre Dance" from his ballet Gayane and the adagio from the same ballet, much used in films since its first use in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was born in Tiflis, Imperial Russia to a poor Armenian family. His father was a bookbinder. In his youth, he was fascinated by the music he heard around him, but at first he did not study music or learn to read it. In 1920, when Armenia was declared a Soviet republic, Khachaturian joined a propaganda train touring Armenia, populated by Georgian-Armenian artists. The following year he travelled to Moscow to join his brother, the stage director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre.
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György Sándor Ligeti was a composer of contemporary classical music. Born in a Hungarian Jewish family in Transylvania, Romania, he... briefly lived in Hungary before becoming an Austrian citizen. Ligeti was born in Târnava-Sânmărtin , in the Transylvania region of Romania to a Hungarian Jewish family. Ligeti recalls that his first exposure to languages other than Hungarian came one day while listening to a conversation among the Romanian-speaking town police. Before that he hadn't known that other languages existed. He moved to Cluj with his family when he was 6, and he was not to return to the town of his birth until the 1990s. Ligeti received his initial musical training in the conservatory at Kolozsvár, and during the summers privately with Pál Kadosa in Budapest. In 1940, Northern Transylvania was taken over by Hungary following the Second Vienna Award. In 1944, his education was interrupted when he was sent to a forced labor brigade by the Horthy regime.
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