Composition school
group of composers or a style of composition purportedly shared by a group of composers

A composition school is a group of composers or a style of composition purportedly shared by a group of composers, often from the same area or who studied in the same place. The membership of almost all groups is assigned by others and disputed. Older groups tend to be larger and are all assigned, while more contemporary groups tend to be more specific and may be self identified.
For example, the title "mighty handful" was coined by music critic Vladimir Stasov in 1867 to describe the composers also referred to as The Five—first by Balakirev in 1870 (Garden 2001), while the "Boston Six" were grouped by others and may include ten members. The international members of the Darmstadt School all attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. The Franco-Flemish School (1400–1630) is split into five generations, each of which have at least three members, while Les Six (1920) contains six members.
See also
Prima pratica
Seconda pratica
References
Garden, Edward. 2001. "Five, the [Moguchaya kuchka; Mighty Handful]". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Composition school” as group of composers or a style of composition purportedly shared by a group of composers. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2250943. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1867, 1870, 2001 and 1400.
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This entry incorporates text from “Composition school” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.