Ten composers, from Schubert's parlor songs to Tchaikovsky's ballets, who turned the 1800s into music's most emotional century. When Beethoven died in 1827, he left European music a dangerous inheritance: the idea that a composer was not a servant but a visionary, and that a symphony could carry the weight of a soul.

Ten singers, players, and studio visionaries who turned the sound of Kingston into the heartbeat of the world, from ska and rocksteady through roots reggae and dub. No island has ever exported more music per square mile than Jamaica.

Ten singers, songwriters and one guitar-playing producer who, between the 1950s and the 1970s, turned a radio barn dance in Nashville into the capital of American song. For about a quarter of a century, the center of country music could be found in a single city and, on Saturday nights, in a single room.

Ten voices from a single furious decade, 1986 to 1996, when rap grew from block-party novelty into the defining American art form of its generation. Every art form has a moment when its grammar gets written, and for hip-hop that moment stretched from roughly 1986 to 1996.

Ten singers, guitarists, and harmonica players who took a music born in Mississippi cotton country and turned it into the foundation of nearly everything we listen to now. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, a narrow floodplain in northwest Mississippi produced a body of music out of all proportion to its size.

Ten voices, from Caruso to Pavarotti, that turned opera from a night at the theater into a sound the whole world could own. For three centuries, an opera singer's art vanished the moment the curtain fell.

Ten singers who understood, before almost anyone else, that in the age of MTV a song was only half the work. At 12:01 a.