Stravinsky

Three scores for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes made him famous before he was thirty: The Firebird, Petrushka, and then the riot at the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913, where the shouting drowned out the orchestra and Nijinsky stood in the wings counting beats aloud.

He then changed language three times — the Russian period, the neoclassical one of Pulcinella and the Symphony of Psalms, and a turn to twelve-tone technique in his sixties. That capacity to keep overturning himself is itself the style. His rhythm is the most influential thing about him: constantly shifting metres and displaced accents that loosened the very idea of a barline.