Composer

Composer is a person who writes music that may be performed by others. Composers create melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and structures, and they may work across genres such as classical, film, opera, jazz, electronic, and contemporary classical. They often work with performers, conductors, and arrangers, and they use musical notation or digital tools to capture their ideas. The role requires creativity, theoretical knowledge, and sometimes collaboration across ensembles or orchestras. They may write original works or arrangements and may also supervise rehearsals or premieres. In many musical traditions, composers are recognized for their contributions to a musical language, innovations in form, and lasting influence.

Historically, the term is associated with Western art music, where composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky produced influential works spanning the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and early modern periods. In contemporary practice, composers create for concert music, film and television, video games, and multimedia, often working with performers, computer tools, and sound libraries. The profession is supported by schools of music and a copyright system that protects original works and performance rights.

In computing, Composer is a dependency manager for the PHP programming language. It automates installation and updating of software libraries and packages used in PHP projects. Introduced in 2011 by Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano, Composer operates via a composer.json file that declares project dependencies and version constraints, and a central repository called Packagist. It is widely used in the PHP ecosystem to manage libraries and autoloading, and to generate an autoloader.