Igor Fyodorovich StravinskyJune 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971
Igor Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, considered by many to be the most influential composer of 20th century music. He was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the century. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6340 Hollywood Boulevard and posthumously received the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987. Stravinsky was born in Lomonosov, Russia and brought up in Saint Petersburg. He recalled in his autobiography that his childhood was troubled. His father, Fyodor Stravinsky, was a bass singer at the theatre where the young boy began piano lessons, studied music theory and attempted some composition. In 1890, he saw a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty. The performance, his first exposure to an orchestra, mesmerized him. At fourteen, he had mastered Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto in G minor, and the next year, he finished a piano reduction of one of Alexander Glazunov's string quartets.
Igor and his cousin Katerina Nossenko were married on 23 January 1906. They had four children together. In 1909, one of his compositions was heard by the director of the Ballets Russes in Paris who was sufficiently impressed to hire him to carry out some orchestrations, and then to compose a full-length ballet score, L'Oiseau de feu ("The Firebird"). He traveled to Paris to attend its premiere. His family soon joined him, and they decided to remain in the West for a time. He moved to Switzerland, where he lived until 1920 as he continued his composing. After one brief trip back to Russia in July 1914 Igor did not return to his homeland for nearly fifty years. 
He moved to France in 1920, where he formed a business and musical relationship with a French piano manufacturer. He also arranged many of his early works for the Pleyela, a brand of player piano. He did so in a way that made full use of the piano's 88 notes, without regard for the number or span of human fingers and hands, later claiming that his intention had been to give listeners a definitive version of the performances of his music.
In 1969, he moved to New York where he died at the age of 88 and was buried in Venice on the cemetery island of San Michele. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. Le Sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring"), whose premiere provoked a riot, transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure, and was largely responsible for Stravinky's enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of musical design.
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Despite his enthusiasm for music, his parents expected him to become a lawyer. Stravinsky enrolled to study law at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1901, but was ill-suited for it, attending few class sessions and receiving only a half-course diploma, in April 1906. From that point on he concentrated on music. He began to take twice-weekly private lessons from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was the predominant Russian composer at the time and who became like a second father to him.
During his latter years in Paris, he had developed professional relationships with key people in the United States. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Stravinsky moved to the United States. Settling in the Los Angeles area where, in the end, he spent more time as a resident than any other city during his lifetime, he became a naturalized citizen in 1946.
