The 242 Composers We Have Exactly One Piece By
Of the 435 composers in this library, 242 are represented by a single piece. That is more than half the names and about a tenth of the music, and until this page existed almost none of it was reachable by browsing — a composer page with one piece on it is not something anyone arrives at by clicking around.
So here they all are, easiest first. Every card below is the only piece we hold by that composer.
Why the list is worth reading rather than scrolling past
Because a one-piece composer is not the same thing as a minor composer. The reason a name appears here once is usually that the public-domain sources this library is built from happened to carry one of their works, not that the work is slight.
Look at who is in it. Rimsky-Korsakov is here, with the Flight of the Bumblebee — the hardest piece in the group at 96 out of 100. So are Paganini, Dvořák, Bartók, Berlioz, Bruckner, Massenet and Glazunov. Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, John Dowland, Orlande de Lassus and Guillaume Dufay — five of the most important composers before 1600 — appear once each, which says more about what survives in playable transcription than about them.
And Edward MacDowell is here with To a Wild Rose, which is in the daily pool and is one of the best-known short piano pieces ever written in America.
What we know about them
135 of the 242 now have a sourced biography on their composer page, written from the Wikidata identity we hold for them and checked against the English Wikipedia article. Click any card, then the composer's name, and you will get their dates, what they were known for, and a link to the source.
The remaining 107 have no biography, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished. A composer gets one only if there is an identity to check against; the ones without are mostly "Traditional" and "Anonymous" — five of the entries below are not people at all — or nineteenth-century song composers with no article in any language. An unsourced biography would be worse than none.
Difficulty, and where to start
The group spans the whole range: 51 pieces score under 30 and 33 score over 70. The five easiest are all at or near zero — the Cantigas de Santa Maria melody, Jingle Bells, Joy to the World, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and We Three Kings.
If you want a first piece from a composer you have never heard of, start at the top of the list and work down. If you want the famous ones, they are mostly in the middle: Dowland at 39, Byrd at 41, Paganini at 51, MacDowell at 52, Dvořák at 58.
If you find something you want more of
Tell us. This library grows from public-domain sources — Mutopia, IMSLP-derived CC0 collections, Wikimedia Commons — and a composer sitting here with one piece usually means we have not looked hard enough for the rest, not that the rest does not exist. Every addition is checked before it lands.
Read next: the composer atlas, which plots all 435 by era and output, the easiest pieces in the library, and the hardest.