Most influential musician in history (2nd ver.)

[Joshua Yu]

Claudio Monteverdi
He wrote the first opera and can be seen as a musical revolutionary from Renaissance to Baroque.

Johann Sebastian Bach
He invented the stuff and standardized the notation of music notes.

Antonio Salieri
He played an important role of being a great teacher. His students included Beethoven, Czerny, Hummel, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Moscheles, Schubert, Süssmayr, etc.

Ludwig van Beethoven
He was the founder of Romanticism in music. He was also the first one to write a linked symphony, a scherzo as the third movement of a symphony and a vocalized symphony.

Pyotr Llyich Tchaikovsky
The first one to wrote concertos, dances optimized for orchestra instead of the soloist or dance. His music was adopted for movies and commercials the most.

Arnold Schoenberg
First to embrace atonal motivic development. Also known as the innovator of twelve-tone technique. He had also made his contribution by being a composing teacher.

Wilhelm Furtwängler
He was a great conductor. The standard size of the digital compact disc was designed to be the same length to his performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (74mins).

Miles Davis
He was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s.

LaMonte Young
He is commonly seen as the first minimalist composer and one of the four most celebrated leaders of the minimalist school. His works have been included among the most important and radical post World War II avant-garde, experimental, or drone music.

Kraftwerk
A German music group. They had made significant contributions to the development of experimental, electronic, New Wave, synthpop and techno music.

[Joshua Yu]

As there are suggestions of adding new choices to the poll. So I just made a new one. However, the forum is restricted to only 10 choices. So I just kicked out some of those relatively unimportant options.

[some guy]

Hey, made me grin!!

[Ron Ofir]

What about Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Malmsteen? I consider them as influential as Bach.

[Lunatique]

Your polls seem heavily biased (or uninformed). There's one electronic band and one jazz composer among the rest of orchestral composers, but where's rock? Country? Rap? Metal? Pop? Funk?

[ttw]

Hank Williams
Bob Wills
Sons of the Pioneers

[reith]

I suspect the publicity managers are more influential than the composers themselves.

[Thorolf]

Timing is also often very important regarding what comes out as influential.



Regards

[fundrazor]

.... still chuckling at the idea that Tchaikovsky invented the concerto ......

[MaestroX]

Tchaikovsky invented the concerto

What do you regard concertos that came before Tchaikovsky then?