Baroque Era (1600-1760)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music
Baroque music is a period or style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1760. This era followed the Renaissance music era, and was followed in turn by the Classical era. Baroque music forms a major portion of the “classical music” canon, and is now widely studied, performed, and listened to. The term “baroque” comes from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning “misshapen pearl”. Key composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, Tomaso Albinoni, François Couperin, Giuseppe Tartini, Heinrich Schütz, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Pachelbel.
The Baroque period saw the creation of common-practice tonality, an approach to writing music in which a song or piece is written in a particular key; this kind of arrangement has continued to be used in almost all Western popular music. During the Baroque era, professional musicians were expected to be accomplished improvisers of both solo melodic lines and accompaniment parts. Baroque concerts were typically accompanied by a basso continuo group (comprising chord-playing instrumentalists such as harpsichordists and lute players improvising chords from a figured bass part) while a group of bass instruments—viol, cello, double bass—played the bassline. A characteristic Baroque form was the dance suite. While the pieces in a dance suite were inspired by actual dance music, dance suites were designed purely for listening, not for accompanying dancers.
During the period, composers and performers used more elaborate musical ornamentation (typically improvised by performers), made changes in musical notation (the development of figured bass as a quick way to notate the chord progression of a song or piece), and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established the mixed vocal/instrumental forms of opera, cantata and oratorio and the instrumental forms of the solo concerto and sonata as musical genres. Many musical terms and concepts from this era, such as toccata, fugue and concerto grosso are still in use in the 2010s. Dense, complex polyphonic music, in which multiple independent melody lines were performed simultaneously (a popular example of this is the fugue), was an important part of many Baroque choral and instrumental works.
Classical Era (1730-1820)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_period_(music)
The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. Classical music has a lighter, clearer texture than Baroque music and is less complex. It is mainly homophonic, using a clear melody line over a subordinate chordal accompaniment, but counterpoint was by no means forgotten, especially later in the period. It also makes use of style galant which emphasized light elegance in place of the Baroque’s dignified seriousness and impressive grandeur. Variety and contrast within a piece became more pronounced than before and the orchestra increased in size, range, and power.
The harpsichord was replaced as the main keyboard instrument by the piano (or fortepiano). Unlike the harpsichord, which plucked strings with quills, pianos strike the strings with leather-covered hammers when the keys are pressed, which enables the performer to play louder or softer and play with more expression; in contrast, the force with which a performer plays the harpsichord keys does not change the sound. Instrumental music was considered important by Classical period composers. The main kinds of instrumental music were the sonata, trio, string quartet, symphony (performed by an orchestra) and the solo concerto, which featured a virtuoso solo performer playing a solo work for violin, piano, flute, or another instrument, accompanied by an orchestra. Vocal music, such as songs for a singer and piano (notably the work of Schubert), choral works, and opera (a staged dramatic work for singers and orchestra) were also important during this period.
The best-known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert; other notable names include Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Salieri, Leopold Mozart, Johann Christian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Ludwig van Beethoven is regarded either as a Romantic composer or a Classical period composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic era. Franz Schubert is also a transitional figure, as were Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Luigi Cherubini, Gaspare Spontini, Gioachino Rossini, and Carl Maria von Weber. The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese Classic or Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik), since Gluck, Mozart, Haydn, Salieri, Schubert, and Beethoven all worked in Vienna.
Romantic Era (1780-1910)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_music
Romantic music is a period of Western classical music that began in the late 18th or early 19th century. It is related to Romanticism, the Western artistic and literary movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century, and Romantic music in particular dominated the Romantic movement in Germany. In the Romantic period, music became more explicitly expressive and programmatic, dealing with the literary, artistic, and philosophical themes of the time. Famous early Romantic composers include Beethoven (whose works span both this period and the preceding Classical period), Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Berlioz. The late 19th century saw a dramatic expansion in the size of the orchestra and in the dynamic range and diversity of instruments used in this ensemble. Also, public concerts became a key part of urban middle class society, in contrast to earlier periods, when concerts were mainly paid for by and performed for aristocrats. Famous composers from the second half of the century include Bruckner, Johann Strauss II, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Verdi, and Wagner. Between 1890 and 1910, a third wave of composers including Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini, and Sibelius built on the work of middle Romantic composers to create even more complex – and often much longer – musical works. A prominent mark of late-19th-century music is its nationalistic fervor, as exemplified by such figures as Dvořák, Sibelius, and Grieg. Other prominent late-century figures include Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Rachmaninoff and Franck.
Characteristics often attributed to Romanticism:
- a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature;
- a fascination with the past, particularly the Middle Ages and legends of medieval chivalry;
- a turn towards the mystic and supernatural, both religious and merely spooky; a longing for the infinite;
- mysterious connotations of remoteness, the unusual and fabulous, the strange and surprising;
- a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly, the frightful, and terrifying;
- fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences;
- a new attention given to national identity;
- emphasis on extreme subjectivism;
- interest in the autobiographical;
- discontent with musical formulas and conventions.
- the use of new or previously not so common musical structures like the song cycle, nocturne, concert etude, arabesque and rhapsody, alongside the traditional classical genres. Programme music became somewhat more common;
- a harmonic structure based on movement from tonic to subdominant or alternative keys rather than the traditional dominant, and use of more elaborate harmonic progressions (Wagner and Liszt are known for their experimental progressions);
- a greater emphasis on melody to sustain musical interest. The classical period often used short, even fragmentary, thematic material while the Romantic period tended to make greater use of longer, more fully defined and more satisfying themes;
- the use of a wider range of dynamics, for example from ppp to fff, supported by large orchestration;
- using a larger tonal range (exp. using the lowest and highest notes of the piano);
Early Romantic
Late Romantic
20th Century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_classical_music
20th-century classical music describes art music that was written nominally from 1901 to 2000. This century was without a dominant style and composers created highly diverse kinds of music. Modernism, impressionism, and post-romanticism can all be traced to the decades before the turn of the century, but can be included because they evolved beyond the musical boundaries of the 19th-century styles that were part of the earlier common practice period . Neoclassicism, and expressionism, came mostly after 1900. Minimalism started much later in the century and can be seen as a change from the modern to post-modern era, although some date post-modernism from as early as ca. 1930. Atonality, serialism, musique concrète and electronic music were all developed during this century. Jazz and folk music were important influences on many composers at this time.
At the end of the 19th century, the Romantic style was starting to break apart, moving along various parallel courses, such as Impressionism and Post-romanticism. In the 20th century, the different styles that emerged from the music of the previous century influenced composers to follow new trends, sometimes as a reaction to that music, sometimes as an extension of it, and both trends co-existed well into the 20th century. In the early part of the 20th century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th-century Romantic music, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most typical. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius are examples of composers who took the traditional symphonic forms and reworked them.
Neoclassicism was a style cultivated between the two world wars, which sought to revive the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of the 17th and 18th centuries, in a repudiation of what were seen as exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism. Because these composers generally replaced the functional tonality of their models with extended tonality, modality, or atonality, the term is often taken to imply parody or distortion of the Baroque or Classical style. Famous examples include Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Paul Hindemith (Symphony: Mathis der Maler) and Darius Milhaud also used this style. Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin is often seen as neo-baroque (an architectural term), though the distinction between the terms is not always made.
Impressionism started in France as a reaction, led by Claude Debussy, against the emotional exuberance and epic themes of German Romanticism exemplified by Wagner. In Debussy’s view, art was a sensuous experience, rather than an intellectual or ethical one. He urged his countrymen to rediscover the French masters of the 18th century, for whom music was meant to charm, to entertain, and to serve as a “fantasy of the senses”. Other composers associated with impressionism include Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Isaac Albéniz, Paul Dukas, Manuel de Falla, Charles Martin Loeffler, Charles Griffes, Frederick Delius, and Ottorino Respighi. Many French composers continued impressionism’s language through the 1920s and later, including Albert Roussel, Charles Koechlin, André Caplet, and, later, Olivier Messiaen. Composers from non-Western cultures, such as Tōru Takemitsu, and jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor also have been strongly influenced by the impressionist musical language.
Free dissonance and experimentalism: In the early part of the 20th century, Charles Ives integrated American and European traditions as well as vernacular and church styles, while using innovative techniques in his rhythm, harmony, and form (Burkholder 2001). His technique included the use of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones. Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific-sounding names. He pioneered the use of new instruments and electronic resources (see below).
Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, but it can also be viewed as a response to a deep-seated shift in societal attitude. John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th-century music, claimed with some justice both for modernism and postmodernism because the complex intersections between modernism and postmodernism are not reducible to simple schemata. His influence steadily grew during his lifetime. He often uses elements of chance: Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is composed for a prepared piano: a normal piano whose timbre is dramatically altered by carefully placing various objects inside the piano in contact with the strings. Currently, Postmodernism includes composers who react against the Avant-Garde and experimental styles of the late 20th century such as Astor Piazzolla.
Minimalism: In the later 20th century, composers such as La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Adams began to explore what is now called minimalism, in which the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features; the music often features repetition and iteration. An early example is Terry Riley’s In C (1964), an aleatoric work in which short phrases are chosen by the musicians from a set list and played an arbitrary number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth notes (quavers) behind them. Steve Reich’s works Piano Phase (1967, for two pianos), and Drumming (1970–71, for percussion, female voices and piccolo) employ the technique called phasing in which a phrase played by one player maintaining a constant pace is played simultaneously by another but at a slightly quicker pace. This causes the players to go “out of phase” with each other and the performance may continue until they come back in phase.