Respighi

He spent a season as a viola player in St Petersburg and studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov; those few months decided the sound of everything he wrote afterwards. He was also a scholar of early music who edited Monteverdi and sixteenth-century lute pieces, and the Ancient Airs and Dances came out of that work.

The Roman trilogy — Fountains, Pines and Festivals of Rome — is a textbook of twentieth-century orchestration. The Pines calls for a recording of an actual nightingale to be played by the orchestra, one of the earliest uses of playback in a concert work. He says almost nothing new about harmony, and is extremely modern about colour and space.