Frédéric Chopin
Poland · 1810–1849
Wrote almost nothing that was not for the piano, and found more inside it than composers who wrote for everything. The nocturnes sound improvised and are not: every hesitation in them is written down.
Music, written
Composers
The first four names here were playing while I made most of the drawings in the other room, so the two things are hard to separate in my memory.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
Germany · 1770–1827
He made a musical form argue with itself. Then he went deaf and kept writing music that grows more insistent exactly where a careful composer would have stopped.
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Antonio Vivaldi
Italy · 1678–1741
A priest who wrote hundreds of concertos and never sounds hurried in any of them. Repetition in his hands is not laziness; it is a phrase being pushed until it gives something up.
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Sergei Rachmaninoff
Russia · 1873–1943
Wrote for hands like his own, which is why the music looks impossible on the page and lies perfectly under the fingers. Underneath all that weight there is a plain melodic line a child could sing back.
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Franz Liszt
Hungary · 1811–1886
Invented the piano recital and most of what an audience still expects a pianist to do. Late in life he threw the fireworks away and wrote pieces so bare that it took the next century to catch up with them.
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Edvard Grieg
Norway · 1843–1907
Kept the folk material of a whole country from being turned into decoration. His small pieces are small on purpose: the Lyric Pieces say in two minutes what a symphony would spend half an hour padding out.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Austria · 1756–1791
Everything sounds inevitable, which is the hardest thing there is to write. Listen to the bar after a phrase should have ended and the smoothness turns out to be full of risk.
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Russia · 1840–1893
Wrote melody that refuses to be embarrassed about itself. The ballets are where most people meet him; the late symphonies are where the same tunes get taken apart.
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Heitor Villa-Lobos
Brazil · 1887–1959
Put Brazil into concert music without turning it into a costume. In the Bachianas Brasileiras, Bach and the street music he grew up with occupy the same bar and neither one gives way.
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and others
Music, played
Interpreters
A score is instructions. What these five do with the same instructions is the argument for listening to more than one recording of anything.
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Vladimir Horowitz
Ukraine · 1903–1989
Made the piano sound like an orchestra that had decided to become one instrument. Nothing he played is neutral: you can always hear a decision being made.
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Arthur Rubinstein
Poland · 1887–1982
Played Chopin with no sentimentality at all and proved the music never needed any. He recorded into his eighties, and those late records are the warmest he made.
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Marc-André Hamelin
Canada · born 1961
Plays what everyone else files under unplayable and makes it sound like ordinary music, which is more radical than making it sound difficult. He composes too, and his own studies are jokes with real teeth.
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Valentina Lisitsa
Ukraine · born 1973
Built an audience by putting her playing online years before anyone considered that a serious way to have a career. The speed is what gets noticed first; the phrasing is what keeps you there.
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Boris Berezovsky
Russia · born 1969
An enormous sound and no fuss whatsoever. He plays the Russian repertoire as though weight were a kind of clarity rather than the opposite of it.
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and others
Drawing, painting, sculpture
Visual arts
I copied several of these people directly, badly, for years. Two of those attempts are hanging in the portraits room.
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Michelangelo
Italy · 1475–1564
Worked as though the figure were already inside the block and the job were subtraction. The unfinished Prisoners teach more about drawing than the finished statues do, because you can see the decision happening.
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Leonardo da Vinci
Italy · 1452–1519
The notebooks matter as much as the paintings: they show someone refusing to accept any boundary between looking and understanding. He left more unfinished than most people ever begin.
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Sandro Botticelli
Italy · 1445–1510
Draws with the outline itself, which is why the figures seem to float. Nothing in the Primavera stands where physics would put it and everything stands where the drawing needs it.
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Rembrandt
Netherlands · 1606–1669
Painted his own face for forty years and let it get old on the canvas without flattering it once. Light in his work is never decoration; it is the subject.
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Eugène Delacroix
France · 1798–1863
Built shadow out of colour set against colour instead of mixing it down towards black. His journals are as good as the paintings on the question of what it costs to keep working.
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Salvador Dalí
Spain · 1904–1989
The technique is entirely academic and the images are not, which is exactly why they land. Take the craft away and the melting clocks are a joke; with it, they are unsettling.
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Jim Warren
United States · born 1949
Paints impossible scenes with the patience of someone painting a landscape from life. Proof that an imagination survives being rendered carefully instead of being flattened by it.
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and others
Books
Literature
Two Brazilians, two Russians, and four others who between them explain most of what I think a story is for.
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Machado de Assis
Brazil · 1839–1908
Invented a narrator who mocks his own reader and got away with it in 1881. Brás Cubas is written by a dead man and is funnier than most books written by living ones.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russia · 1821–1881
Puts an idea inside a person and then makes the person live with the consequences. Nobody else writes arguments that bleed.
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Isaac Asimov
United States · 1920–1992
Wrote plainly on purpose, so that the idea would be the thing you carried out of the book. The robot stories look like logic puzzles and turn out to be about people.
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Alexandre Dumas
France · 1802–1870
The finest plot engineer who ever worked, and generous with it. The Count of Monte Cristo is a revenge story that keeps stopping to ask whether revenge was worth the years it took.
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J. R. R. Tolkien
England · 1892–1973
Built the languages first and the world afterwards, which is why the world holds together under any amount of weight. He wrote grief into a story about a ring, and it is the grief that stays.
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Dan Brown
United States · born 1964
Understands pace better than his critics do. His chapters end where you cannot put the book down, and that is worth studying as craft even when the prose is not the point.
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William Shakespeare
England · 1564–1616
Gave the best lines to ordinary people and let his villains be right on occasion. Four hundred years later the plays still work performed by anyone, anywhere, with nothing.
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José de Alencar
Brazil · 1829–1877
Wrote Brazil into existence as a subject worth a novel, at a moment when that was not obvious. The books belong to their century; the ambition in them does not.
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and others
Directors
Cinema
The room next door is for arguing about individual films. This is about the people whose whole way of working I learned something from.
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Christopher Nolan
England · born 1970
Builds a film the way an engineer builds a mechanism, then hides one straightforward emotion in the middle of it. The structure is never showing off; it does the work the plot cannot.
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Steven Spielberg
United States · born 1946
Knows exactly where to put a camera so that a child in the audience understands the scene before the adults do. He can frighten you and then make you cry about the same thing.
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Martin Scorsese
United States · born 1942
Films people who have chosen badly and refuses either to look away or to excuse them. The editing works like a rhythm section.
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Denis Villeneuve
Canada · born 1967
Slows a scene down until the silence starts carrying the information. He trusts an audience to sit still, which almost nobody working at that budget does.
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Darren Aronofsky
United States · born 1969
Puts a body under pressure and films what breaks. The films are hard to sit through by design, and none of the discomfort is cheap.
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and others
34 names · 5 disciplines