Tom Service: Choosing just 50 composers to tell the story of the contemporary classical music scene has been a rich and rewarding experience, but I'm only too aware of the ones that got away

Tom Service: Our contemporary composers series ends with the most divisive figure of them all: Stockhausen

The Greek composer trained as an architect, and created works of shattering visceral power that still astound today, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: The Russian composer's brutally uncompromising work has an elementality that's both horrifying and thrilling

Without Goehr's appreciation of history, musical modernism would have taken even longer to reach Britain than it did, writes Tom Service

The American minimalist has fed bales of hay to his piano but it's his six-hour-plus Well-Tuned Piano that has changed the way we hear music, quite literally, writes Tom Service

The late composer's mastery of a gigantic spectrum of sound, texture and feeling makes his work some of the most special of the late 20th century, writes Tom Service

In Kurtág's tiny fragments lies music of unflinching emotional and existential rawness, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: Benjamin's latest opera features cannibalism, suicide, sex and murder, and could be a watershed moment – unleashing the expressivity of one of Britain's most essential composers

In tribute to John Tavener, who has died aged 69, here's a brief guide to his music, in a piece originally published earlier this year

Takemitsu's understated and crystalline compositions combine elements of his own Japanese traditions with the western modernism he loved so much, writes Tom Service

Tom Service: The composer James Dillon has created some of the most inventive and thrillingly expressive contemporary music around

Tom Service: His composition In C was a minimalist masterpiece, but these days Terry Riley takes in life, the universe and everything

Tom Service: The Frenchman has transformed his astonishing compositional refinement and willingness to take inspiration from other art forms and experiences into works of real emotional immediacy, writes Tom Service

He denied the influence of Poland's turbulent 20th-century history but Lutosławski's music, with its unique textures and vivid harmonies, was always dynamic, eloquent and coherent

Tom Service: The Irish composer's work is distinctive in its diamond-like hardness, its humour and, sometimes, its violence

Tom Service: This classically trained avant-garde tearaway brought hard-left politics into his music and was possibly assassinated for it

Tom Service looks at the Italian composer whose labyrinthine music admits as much of the world as he can cram into it