Rulers of Music

12" Wooden Ruler made in U.S.A. of American-grown basswood. This ruler is a list of Great Composers. Does this mean that we think composers are the only great musicians? Of course not. Maybe someday we’ll make a Rulers of Music - Great Instrumentalists or a Rulers of Music - Great Singers … or maybe a Rulers of Music - Great Conductors. Music certainly started with the human voice. Music consisting of a single sung line, as composed by Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), is known as monophony.  Renaissance composers like Josquin des Près (1450-1521), also written “des Prez”, added more lines of music consisting of different notes and rhythms, a style known as polyphony.  Baroque composers like Henry Purcell (1659-1695) in England and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in Germany wrote lines of music that were performed simultaneously but using different notes, a style called homophony. Although our list of composers is largely limited to writers in the Western tradition, many of them, li