For Pride Month here are 10 American composers in classical music to know

LGBTQ+ composers have existed in classical music for centuries, but their gender and sexual identities were often lost to history or deliberately concealed because of fears of ostracization, denunciation or worse.

Although violence and prejudice against this community still exists, the United States and other parts of the world are much more open and supportive  today, with LGBTQ+ composers freely and proudly asserting who they are as human beings and artists.       

National LGBTQ+ Pride Month is celebrated annually in June as a commemoration of New York’s Stonewall Uprising in 1969, a pivotal moment in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Here is a look at 10 significant contemporary LGBTQ+ composers in the United States:

Mark Adamo (Born 1962)

Notable works: Little Women, opera (1998); Becoming Santa Claus, opera (staged by Chicago Opera Theater in 2021) (2015), and The Lord of Cries, opera (served as librettist) (2021).

Factoid: Adamo and John Corigliano, another composer on this list, were married by conductor Marin Alsop during the 2008 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

John Corigliano (Born 1938)

Notable works: Clarinet Concerto (1977); Symphony No. 1 (1988), commissioned and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the movie score of The Red Violin (1997). The film, which won the 2000 Academy Award for original musical score, was released in 1999 in the United States.

Factoid: Corigliano’s 1991 opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, is the third part in what some enterprising presenters have called the Beaumarchais trilogy — three operas based around the 18th-century playwright’s most celebrated character,  the ever-clever barber Figaro.

Jennifer Higdon (Born 1962)

Notable works: blue cathedral (2000) for orchestra, Violin Concerto (2008), winner of 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the opera Cold Mountain (2015).

Factoid: Higdon met her future wife, Cheryl Lawson, at their eastern Tennessee high school, where they were both flute players. They came out in 1983 when they were students at Bowling Green State University, and Alsop also presided over their wedding in 2014.

Laura Kaminsky (Born 1956)

Notable works: Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project (2012), a feature-length cinematic experience; the chamber opera As One (2014), the most produced new opera in North America since its premiere, and the opera Hometown to the World (2021).

Factoid: In honor of Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 2019, Kaminsky hosted an all-female program of mostly lesbian composers and librettists at the New York Festival of Song.

Laura Karpman (Born 1959)

Notable works: The score for the television documentary The Living Edens (1997-2003), her music received nine Emmy Award nominations; Ask Your Mama (2009), a musical setting of Langston Hughes’ 1961 poem, and the score for the film American Fiction (2023), nominated for a 2024 Academy Award.

Factoid: This five-time Emmy Award winner is best known for her work in film, television and video games. In 2014, she co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers.

Nico Muhly (Born 1981)

Notable works: How Little You Are (2015) for 12 guitars and choir, the opera Marnie (2017) and In Certain Circles (2021) for two pianos and orchestra.

Factoid: Muhly regularly addresses issues of sexuality and identity in works like Two Boys, a kind of operatic police procedural that was staged in 2013 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Steven Reineke (Born 1970)

Notable works: Celebration Fanfare for orchestra (1995), commissioned by the Cincinnati Pops; Casey at the Bat (2001/2008), for orchestra or wind ensemble, and Mount Diablo: A Symphonic Portrait (2002) for concert band.

Factoid: Reineke is best known as a pops conductor, holding multiple posts in the United States and Canada, including music director of the New York Pops, but he also created more than 100 arrangements for the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and has written many works for wind ensemble.

Caroline Shaw (Born 1982)

Notable works: Entr’acte (2011/2014) for string quartet or string orchestra; the score for the television documentary Leonardo da Vinci (2020) and Rectangles and Circumstance (2024), a collaborative album with Sō Percussion and the winner of a 2025 Grammy Award.

Factoid: In 2013, Caroline Shaw came out of seemingly nowhere and astonished the classical world when she was announced as that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music winner, the youngest ever at 30, for her Partita for 8 Voices.

Michael Tilson Thomas (Born 1944)

Notable works: Upon Further Reflection (1973-2021) for solo piano; Poems of Emily Dickinson (2000) for voice and orchestra, and  Meditations of Rilke (2019) for voice and orchestra.

Factoid: Tilson Thomas is one of the greatest conductors the United States has produced, but he also is a major composer. In celebration of his 80th birthday, the Pentatone label released a four-disc set with recordings of 18 of his works, which  span five decades.

Mari Esabel Valverde (Born 1987)

Notable works: David: A Prison of Gender (2010) for tuba and string quartet or ensemble; When the Dust Settles (2019) for four soloists, chorus and piano, and For the Good (2015) for four soloists and chorus.

Factoid: “My collective experiences have placed me at this intersection between vocal music, social justice advocacy and my own half-Indigenous, transgender, female identity,” said the Mexican-American Valverde, born in Texas still based there, on I Care If You Listen, a multimedia hub overseen by the American Composers Forum.