Richard Yardumian

Richard Yardumian (April 5, 1917 – August 15, 1985) was an Armenian-American classical music composer. His personal style drew on Armenian themes and the counterpoint of Bach. Many of his works are organized around a method of twelve-tone composition, unrelated to that of Schoenberg, based on stacks of alternating major and minor thirds, which he invented and called the "chromatic quadratic" method; early works using this method were highly chromatic, while later works are more polymodal.