St Petersburg Union of Composers Veniamin Yefimovich Basner, V.A. Gavrilin, L.A. Desyatnikov, A.A. Kneifel, A.N. Kolker, S.M. Slonimsky, B.I. Tishchenko, V.A. Uspensky, G.I. Ustvolskaya, Y.A. Falik, I.I. Schwarz and A.B.Zatin became members of the Leningrad Department of the Union of Composers. These composers and musicians played an outstanding role in the musical life of the city in the last third of the 20th century. Since 1964, the St. Petersburg Musical Spring festival has been held annually. Since 1989, the Children's Musical Festival has been organised which includes children's competitions: the Bruk and Taymanov memorial Competition of Piano Duets, Brother and Sister, and the Gavrilin Competition
20th-century music gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism which revived the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles. There were three distinct "schools" of neoclassicism, associated with Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Arnold Schoenberg. Similar sympathies in the second half of the century are generally subsumed under the heading "postmodernism". A compositional tradition arose in the mid-20th century—particularly in North America—called "experimental music". Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage (1912–1992). According to Cage, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen", and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an