Villa-Lobos

Almost entirely self-taught. He travelled the Brazilian interior as a young man listening to street choro bands and the folk music of the northeast, and later set all of it beside Bach's counterpoint — which is where the nine Bachianas Brasileiras came from, written for a range of unlikely ensembles.

The fifth, for soprano and eight cellos, opens with a wordless vocalise that is one of the most famous melodies of the century. He was prodigiously productive, with well over two thousand works of very uneven quality, but the best of it is irreplaceable. In the 1930s he also designed a national choral education programme for the Brazilian government and conducted forty thousand singers in a stadium.