Ask most classical music fans to name the greatest composers and you’ll probably hear a list dominated by Europeans.
But what about Latin America, a region with its own dazzling musical traditions and composers of global stature? From Mexico down to Argentina, and across the Caribbean, classical music has long thrived alongside folk and popular traditions. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, concert halls in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires hosted the same stars who dazzled audiences in Paris or Vienna. Local composers, too, wrote sonatas, waltzes, and symphonies firmly in the European Romantic style.
Yet Latin American composers soon began weaving their own voices into the classical tradition. The unique blend of Iberian, African, and Indigenous influences gave rise to music of striking rhythm, colour, and emotional force. Dance forms like the tango, huapango, and samba found their way into the concert hall, transformed into sophisticated works that still feel fresh today.
Despite their brilliance, much of this repertoire remains underperformed outside the region, often tucked into “Latin-themed” concerts. But with conductors like Gustavo Dudamel, Giancarlo Guerrero, and Miguel Harth-Bedoya championing it worldwide, these works are gaining the recognition they deserve. Here are 15 of the finest Latin American composers.
Best Latin American composers of all time
15. Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972, American/Peruvian)
The wish to express her Peruvian heritage motivates Gabriela Lena Frank, a pianist-composer born in Berkeley, California, to a Jewish-American father and a Peruvian mother. Encouraged to explore her background by mentor William Bolcom, she has made many visits to the Peruvian Andes to absorb the indigenous culture and music.
Inspired by Hungary's Béla Bartók and Argentina's Alberto Ginastera, Frank has written a distinctive body of music, particularly for piano and chamber music groups. Her Leyendas: an Andean walkabout for orchestra incorporates traditional Andean harmonies and instruments in sections describing a dance, a song of condolences, flirtations and Inca couriers. Hilos, eight short pieces for piano quartet, describe the variety and beauty of Peruvian textiles. Illapa is a tone poem for orchestra on the Incan weather god that includes a melancholic harawi.
14. Roberto Sierra (b. 1953, Puerto Rican)
In Puerto Rico, Roberto Sierra (b1953) started as a piano prodigy, then realised he wanted to write for his instrument and, after studying at the conservatory in San Juan, left for the Royal College of Music and University of London in England. He later studied electronic music in the Netherlands and composition with György Ligeti.
Sierra’s early works are abstract, polyphonic and extremely difficult with Afro-Caribbean elements embedded in a texturally complex style. More recently, such influences have become more assimilated and melodic in his work. His Fandangos is an infectious piece that builds, with fanfare and elaborated orchestrations, to a rousing finale. His Missa Latina is a beautiful, and uniquely Afro-American, interpretation of the Latin text.
Sierra has written four symphonies, the last characterised by repeating motifs sparked with little rushes of energy and infused with hints of the Afro-Caribbean. Recently, he has returned to writing for the piano, musing on the bolero, a slow-tempo Latin music, which has been a constant component of his compositions.
13. Cláudio Santoro (1919–1989, Brazilian)
Cláudio Santoro was a pivotal figure in shaping Brazil’s 20th-century musical identity, bridging nationalism, modernism, and later avant-garde experimentation. A prodigious talent, he studied in Europe with Nadia Boulanger and absorbed influences from serialism and modernist trends, yet he never abandoned his Brazilian roots. Early works reflect a strong nationalist character, while later pieces embraced Serialism and bold orchestral textures.
As a conductor, educator, and institution-builder, Santoro helped elevate Brazil’s cultural life, founding ensembles and nurturing new talent. His career embodies Brazil’s musical evolution: deeply rooted in tradition yet engaged with the global avant-garde of the 20th century.
12. José Pablo Moncayo (1912–1958, Mexican)
José Pablo Moncayo (1912–1958) is celebrated as one of Mexico’s most iconic composers, conductor, and pianist, whose work became central to the country’s cultural identity. A student of Carlos Chávez, Moncayo was part of Mexico’s “Group of Four,” which sought to integrate folk traditions into modern concert music. His most famous composition, Huapango (1941), is often called Mexico’s “second national anthem.”
Drawing on traditional sones huastecos and veracruzanos, Moncayo orchestrated them into a brilliant, colourful, and rhythmically vibrant symphonic piece that still resounds in Mexican concert halls today. Although his life was tragically cut short, Moncayo’s music remains a proud symbol of Mexican identity, embodying both folkloric authenticity and symphonic sophistication. Have a listen to the gloriously pungent and rousing Huapango, below:
11. Francisco Mignone (1897-1986, Brazilian)
Of Italian lineage, Francisco Mignone played the violin with chorões and used their popular modinhas (love songs), sambas and habaneras in his works. Mignone was influenced by his compatriot Heitor Villa-Lobos (more on him shortly) although by the mid-20th century he was experimenting with serialism, eventually returning to a more lyrical style.
Mignone, little known outside Brazil, was championed in the 1950s by conductor Arturo Toscanini, who performed his orchestral pieces Festa das igrejas and Congada in the US and South America. He wrote some of his most innovative works for the great bassoonist Noel Devos, including 16 Waltzes for Solo Bassoon, each describing a distinct aspect of Brazil, and a Concertino for Bassoon and Chamber Orchestra.
10. Amadeo Roldán (1900–1939, Cuban)
Amadeo Roldán was a trailblazing Cuban composer and conductor who fused European modernist techniques with the rhythms, colours, and textures of Afro-Cuban music. Educated in Paris, Roldán absorbed impressionism and neoclassicism, but his genius lay in integrating traditional Cuban percussion, call-and-response patterns, and folk music melodies into symphonic and chamber works.
Pieces like Rítmicas and La Rebambaramba showcase his innovative use of rhythm and orchestration, celebrating Afro-Cuban culture on the concert stage. Though his life was short, Roldán’s pioneering synthesis of modernism and Caribbean identity profoundly influenced generations of Cuban composers, helping to define a distinctly national musical voice.
9. Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000, Argentinian)
Known as the 'Schubert of the Pampas', pianist and composer Carlos Guastavino lived a rather quiet life in a small apartment in downtown Buenos Aires. He never adopted any of the avant-garde styles favoured by other mid 20th-century composers, and mostly wrote songs for voice and piano, setting poems by Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges and Leon Benarós, as well as traditional Argentine folk songs, to simple melodies.
Guastavino’s gift for capturing emotions, places and objects of beauty is apparent in the hundreds of songs he wrote throughout his life. 'La rosa y el sauce' (The rose and the willow), 'Pueblito, mi pueblo' (My Little Town), 'Se equivocó la paloma' (The dove was mistaken) and 'Jeromita Linares' (named after an old Spanish neighbour) are lyrical gems.
8. Leo Brouwer (b. 1939, Cuban)
Classical repertoire imbued with Afro-Caribbean elements was simultaneously developing in the Spanish Caribbean. Leo Brouwer (b1939) was born in Havana, Cuba to a family of musicians. He learned the guitar in his early teens, then studied composition at Hartt College of Music in Connecticut and at the Juilliard.
His extensive catalogue for solo guitar shows diverse influences from Bach, Bartók and Astor Piazzolla to popular Cuban airs and Afro-Cuban rituals. His style has evolved from folklorist to avant-garde minimalism and has returned to a fusion that is lyrical, virtuosic and Afro-Cuban. His works for string quartet and string trio are edgy and remarkably complex, but they’re delightfully accessible.
7. Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960, Argentinian)
Osvaldo Golijov has been hugely influenced by Piazzolla, whose music he heard as a child in his native Argentina. Last Round was written on learning of Piazzolla’s death and Azul, for cello, hyper-accordion and orchestra, includes references to Piazzolla’s style.
Golijov’s music is complex and unique, reflecting his Jewish, Latin-American and classical heritage, and includes Ainadamar, the soul-rending chamber opera about the murder of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, and the La Pasión según San Marcos, which incorporates African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern sonorities, rhythms and instruments into a Christian passion.
6. Manuel Ponce (1882-1948, Mexican)
The Mexican Manuel Ponce (1882-1948), a piano child prodigy, began composing while still a teenager and studied first in Italy and then in Germany before 1910 – by the turn of the century, composers and performers frequently did advanced studies in Europe. From his teaching post at Mexico’s National Conservatory, Ponce called for a new national music that made use of popular Mexican songs and folksongs.
Ponce began to integrate Mexican canciones (songs) and rhythms into his sonatas, concertos and études, bringing into being a distinctive Mexican classical style. He’s especially known for his works for piano and guitar: the Sonata for Guitar and Harpsichord and Concierto del Sur for guitar are highly regarded. Ponce was often commissioned by the guitarist Andrés Segovia, who performed his work throughout his long career. With its strong folk influences, Ponce’s Violin Concerto (1942) is, however, perhaps his most ambitious, virtuosic work.
Best Latin American composers: the top five
5. Carlos Chávez (1899-1978, Mexican)
Ponce’s most illustrious student was unquestionably Carlos Chávez, who fused 20th-century styles with Mexican folk flavours. At one stage, Chávez attempted to reconstruct a pre-European Indianist music, as you can hear in his Sinfonía India based on three Indian melodies and incorporating a variety of unusual percussion instruments, and Xochipilli: an imagined Aztec music, which uses a pentatonic scale and primitive rhythms.
A friend of avant-garde composers Lou Harrison and John Cage, Chávez wrote successively more complex works for percussion, including the Toccata for Percussion and his late rhythmic masterpiece Tambuco (which we named among the best classical music from Latin America). His Piano Concerto, meanwhile, has a Bártokian feel to it – a complex fusion of folk music and dissonances in which the piano interacts with the orchestra and its individual instruments in abrupt rhythmic changes and tempos.
4. Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940, Mexican)
Chávez’s colleague Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) had his start as a talented violinist studying in both Mexico and the United States, and supporting himself playing for silent movies and in orchestras. As a composer he was even more radical than Chávez in his embrace of dissonance and vibrant colouring.
Revueltas found musical inspiration on street corners, markets and carnivals, and his music has a populist feel. He wrote short, delightful little pieces for children and was inspired by animals and circus performers. La Noche de los Mayas, a lively concert piece, was originally a silent film score, as was Redes, which accompanied the story of a fishing village visited by tragedy – it is ranked among the greatest, most poignant film scores of the 1930s.
But Revueltas’s masterpiece is Sensamayá, an orchestral work based on a poem by Cuban Nicolás Guillén, in which two ritualistic themes build obsessively to a riotous climax.
3. Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992, Argentinian)
A child prodigy, Astor Piazzolla studied the piano in New York from the age of four and taught himself to play bandoneón, the modified concertina used in Argentine tango orchestras. Astor was talented enough to play in Aníbal Troilo’s famed tango orchestra while studying with Alberto Ginastera (coming next), from whom he learned orchestration. During a year in France with Nadia Boulanger, Piazzolla was encouraged him to focus on the tango, which seemed to come from his soul. From them on, he pioneered a new, jazz-infused, dissonant and rhythmically complex tango.
He also composed several classical works which incorporate tango elements, among them a tango opera, María de Buenos Aires, a ballet and pieces for orchestra, of which his masterpieces are Four Seasons of Buenos Aires and the Concerto for Bandoneón and Orchestra.
2. Alberto Ginastera (1916-83, Argentinian)
While Chávez and Revueltas in Mexico, and Villa-Lobos and other Brazilian composers were developing a new music and the institutions to promote it, Alberto Ginastera (1916-83) inherited an established national musical scene in Buenos Aires. But it was Ginastera who achieved international recognition for his early works, which describe the expansive Argentine pampas and its gaucho (cowboy) culture.
He wrote two ballets, Panambí and Estancia, and shorter descriptive works like Malambo, based on an energetic, percussive cowboy dance. Ginastera studied at Tanglewood following World War II, after which his music became increasingly abstract; his distinctive string quartets, harp concerto, operas and orchestral works use sophisticated, avant-garde techniques while incorporating Argentine motifs and rhythms.
1. Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959, Brazilian)
Brazil glanced towards Paris for inspiration as nationalism began to sweep the country at the start of the 20th century. The young Heitor Villa-Lobos, who was taught the cello and clarinet by his father, steered clear of formal training on his road to establishing a Brazilian musical identity.
He supported himself playing the cello in theatres and with wandering street musicians called chorões, and later travelled to north-east Brazil to immerse himself in local sounds and rhythms. Villa-Lobos’s struggling career was given a boost by composer Darius Milhaud (one of the group of French composers known as Les Six), who was living in Rio.
Milhaud introduced him to the music of Debussy and to pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who performed regularly in Rio and Buenos Aires. Rubinstein championed Villa-Lobos’s early virtuosic piano suite A prole do bebê, which was booed in Brazil but seemed to go down well in Paris.
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In turn, Villa-Lobos wrote for Rubinstein the demanding Rudopoêma, which stands among the great piano works of the 20th century; he also wrote a Guitar Concerto for Andrés Segovia. Villa-Lobos’s music is rhapsodic, often slightly dissonant, with distinct sonorities, exotic rhythms and unusual instrumentation. He produced a steady stream of music for 50 years, from tone poems and quartets to the uniquely Brazilian Chôros (‘cry’) and neo-classical Bachianas brasileiras.
Pictured top: Astor Piazzolla. Pics: Getty Images (numbers 15, 8-5, 3-1) / Wikimedia Commons