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In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.

Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...

A major glossy magazine that used to be devoted largely to music -- but long ago fell under the spell of Hollywood celebrity -- still continues to cover music, specializing in listicles that seem designed mainly to provoke ire in those who care more about music than does said magazine (named after a classic blues song, in case you can't guess without a hint). This summer it unleashed a list of songs that, with that aging publication's ironically weak sense of history, managed to overlook the vast majority of the history of song. To put it bluntly, if you're claiming to discuss the best songs ever written and you don't even mention Franz Schubert, you're an ignoramus. My ire over this blinkered attitude towards music history festered for months, so I finally decided to do something about it by writing about some of the timeless songs omitted in the aforementioned myopic listicle.

Writers often worry about the dangers of outside influence, but what about the non-literary inspirations they are far more comfortable admitting to? Andrew O'Hagan talks to six novelists about their passion for a second artform

The divine counsels decided, once upon a time, that influence is bad and that too much agency is the enemy of invention. Harold Bloom can't be blamed for that: he certainly pointed to the danse macabre of influence and anxiety, but to him the association was perfectly creative. Elsewhere, writers have always been blamed for being too much like other writers, or too much like themselves, and even now, in the crisis of late postmodernism, we find it hard to believe that writers might live happily in a state of influence and cross-reference. Yet anybody who knows anything about writers knows that they love their sweet influences.

What I've noticed, though, is that the influences...