These are not intended to represent every musical composer from each musical era. It is a listing of the most renowned and commonly accepted composers of musical innovation and discovery during these periods. Many well known musical composers lived very short lives as was common to the life of the time. Certainly some composers lives would intersect different eras of musical discovery and some of those wrote compositions pertinent to both periods. This is not to say that composers of any period did not compose with the innovations of another period. They most certainly did and still do today. The entire reason for innovation is implementation into future works.
The futher back in time we go, the fewer records of historical persons and achievements will be found. While other musical achievers in the distant past, such as early innovators or church studies are mentioned in some publications, information on these is scarce and evidence of their works, often extinct. I hope you find the listing useful.
Medieval
900 - 1600
Renaissance
1420 - 1610
Baroque
1610 - 1790
Composer
Hildegard of Bingen
Léonin
Pérotin
Guillaume de Machaut
Lifespan
1098 - 1179
1150 - 1201
1160 - 1220
1300 - 1377
Composer
Guillaume Dufay
Josquin des Prez
Thomas Tallis
Andrea Gabrieli
Giovanni P. da Palestrina
Orlande D. Nassus
William Byrd
Tomás Luis de Victoria
Giovanni Gabrieli
Carlos Gesuauldo
John Dowland
Claudio Monteverdi
Orlando Gibbons
Heinrich Schütz
Lifespan
1397 - 1474
1440 - 1521
1505 - 1585
1510 - 1586
1525 - 1594
1532 - 1594
1543 - 1623
1548 - 1611
1553 - 1612
1561 - 1613
1563 - 1626
1567 - 1643
1583 - 1625
1585 - 1672
Composer
Heinrich Schütz
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Deitrich Buxtehude
Johann Pachelbel
Arcangelo Corelli
Henri Purceli
Alessandro Scarlatti
Tomaso Albirnoni
Antonio Vivaldi
Georg Philipp Telemann
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Domenico Scarlatti
Johann Sebastian Bach
George Friderick Handel
Christoph W von Gluck
Lifespan
1585 - 1672
1632 - 1687
1637 - 1707
1653 - 1706
1653 - 1713
1659 - 1695
1660 - 1725
1671 - 1751
1678 - 1741
1671 - 1751
1683 - 1764
1685 - 1757
1685 - 1750
1685 - 1759
1714 - 1787
Classical
1740 - 1810
Romantic
1790 - 1910
Modern
1900 - 2000
Composer
Christoph W von Gluck
Joseph Haydn
Johann Christian Bach
Luigi Boccherini
Antonio Salieri
Wolfgang A Mozart
Ludwig von Beethoven
Carl Maria von Weber
Lifespan
1714 - 1787
1732 - 1809
1735 - 1782
1735 - 1782
1750 - 1825
1756 - 1791
1770 - 1827
1786 - 1826
Composer
Ludwig von Beethoven
Carl Maria von Weber
Gioachino Rossini
Franz Schubert
Gaetono Donizetti
Hector Berloiz
Feliz Mendelssohn
Frédéric Chopin
Robert Schumann
Franz Lizst
Richard Wagner
Guiseppe Verdi
Jacques Offenbach
Bedřich Smetana
Anton Bruckner
Johann Straus II
Alexander Borodin
Johannes Brahms
Camille Saint-Saëns
Georges Bizet
Modest Mussorgsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Antonín Dvořák
Edward Grieg
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Gabriel Fauvré
Sir Edward Elgar
Giacomo Puccini
Gustav Mahler
Claude Debussy
Frederick Delius
Richard Strauss
Jean Sebelius
Franz Lehár
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Lifespan
1770 - 1827
1786 - 1826
1792 - 1868
1797 - 1828
1797 - 1848
1803 - 1869
1809 - 1847
1810 - 1849
1810 - 1856
1811 - 1886
1813 - 1883
1813 - 1901
1819 - 1880
1824 - 1884
1824 - 1896
1825 - 1899
1833 - 1887
1833 - 1897
1835 - 1921
1838 - 1875
1839 - 1881
1840 - 1893
1841 - 1904
1843 - 1907
1844 - 1908
1845 - 1924
1857 - 1934
1858 - 1924
1860 - 1911
1862 - 1918
1862 - 1934
1864 - 1949
1865 - 1957
1870 - 1948
1872 - 1958
Composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sergei Rachmaninov
Gustav Hoist
Arnold Schoenberg
Maurice Ravel
Béla Bartók
Alban Berg
Igor Stravinsky
Sergei Prokofiev
George Gershwin
Francis Poulenc
Kurt Weill
Aaron Copland
Michael Tippett
Dimitri Shostakovich
Oliver Messiaen
Benjamin Britten
Leonard Bernstein
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Steve Reich
Philip Glass
Lifespan
1872 - 1958
1873 - 1943
1874 - 1934
1874 - 1951
1875 - 1937
1881 - 1945
1885 - 1935
1882 - 1971
1891 - 1953
1898 - 1937
1899 - 1963
1900 - 1950
1900 - 1990
1905 - 1998
1906 - 1975
1908 - 1992
1913 - 1976
1918 - 1990
1928 - 2007
1936 - alive
1937 - alive