Bruno Bettinelli (1913-2004) was an Italian composer and teacher.
One of the greatest italian composers of all time, Bettinelli is an author of symphonic, choral, opera, and chamber music. His younger works incorporated a contrapuntal neoclassicism, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Béla Bartók, not to mention the Italian composers Alfredo Casella, Goffredo Petrassi and Gian Francesco Malipiero.
His later music evolved constantly, incorporating new elements, such as atonality and 12-tone music, to blend it into a free chromatic language, always expressing formal structures and becoming one of the most personal achievements in Twentieth century italian music along with Casella, Malipiero, Ghedini, Dallapiccola and Petrassi.
Of particular note are his orchestral output which makes him the most important italian composers of symphonies of the second half of Twentieth century and his choral works, as he collected and set many traditional Italian folk songs that had heretofore only survived through oral tradition.