Music History Timeline As is usual with information on the history of Western music, this site has been organized according to the eras of history:
The Middle Ages The Renaissance The Baroque Age The Classical Period The Romantic Era The Twentieth Century
The Middle Ages After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, Western Europe entered a time known as "The Dark Ages" — a period when invading hordes of Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths overran Europe. These years were marked by constant warfare, the absence of a Holy Roman Emperor, and the virtual disappearance of urban life. Over the next next nine centuries, the newly emerging Christian Church came to dominate Europe, administering justice, instigating "Holy" Crusades against the East, establishing Universities, and generally dictating the destiny of music, art, and literature. It was during this time that Pope Gregory I is generally believed to have collected and codified the music known as Gregorian Chant, Chant, which was the approved music of the Church. Much later, the University at Notre Dame in Paris saw the creation of a new kind of music called organum organum.. Secular music was performed throughout Europe by the troubadours and trouvères of France. And it was during these "Middle Ages" that Western culture saw the appearance of the first great name in music, Guillaume de Machaut. Machaut.
The Renaissance Generally considered to be from ca.1420 to 1600 , the Renaissance (which literally means "rebirth") was a time of great cultural awakening and a flowering of the arts, letters, and sciences throughout Europe. With the rise of humanism, sacred music began for the first time to break free of the confines of the Church, and a
school of composers trained in the Netherlands mastered the art of polyphony in their settings of sacred music. One of the early masters of the Flemish style was Josquin des Prez. Prez. These polyphonic traditions reached their culmination in the unsurpassed works of Giovanni da Palestrina. Palestrina. Of course, secular music thrived during this period, and instrumental and dance music was performed in abundance, if not always written down. It was left for others to collect and notate the wide variety of irrepressible instrumental music of the period. The late Renaissance also saw in England the flourishing of the English madrigal, madrigal, the best known of which were composed by such masters as John Dowland, William Byrd, Thomas Morley and others.
The Baroque Age Named after the popular ornate architectural style of the time, the Baroque period (ca.1600 to 1750) saw composers beginning to rebel against the styles that were prevalent during the High Renaissance. This was a time when the many monarchies of Europe vied in outdoing each other in pride, pomp and pageantry. Many monarchs employed composers at their courts, where they were little more than servants expected to churn out music for any desired occasions. The greatest composer of the period, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach, was such a servant. Yet the best composers of the time were able to break new musical ground, and in so doing succeeded in creating an entirely new style of music.
It was during the early part of the seventeenth century that the genre of opera was first created by a group of composers in Florence, Italy, and the earliest operatic masterpieces were composed byClaudio byClaudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi. The instrumental concerto became a staple of the Baroque era, and found its strongest exponent in the works of the Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. Vivaldi. Harpsichord music achieved new heights, due to the works of such masters as Domenico Scarlatti and others. Dances became formalized into instrumental suites and were composed by virtually all composers of the era. But vocal and choral music still reigned supreme during this age, and culminated in the operas and oratorios of of German-born composer George Frideric Handel. Handel.
The Classical Period From roughly 1750 to 1820 , artists, architechts, and musicians moved away from the heavily ornamented styles of the Baroque and the Rococo, and instead embraced a clean, uncluttered style they thought reminiscent of Classical Greece. The newly established aristocracies were replacing monarchs and the church as patrons of the arts, and were demanding an impersonal, but tuneful and elegant music. Dances such as the minuet and the gavotte were provided in the forms of entertainingserenades and divertimenti . At this time the Austrian capital of Vienna became the musical center of Europe, and works of the period are often referred to as being in the Viennese style . Composers came from all over Europe to train in and around Vienna, and gradually they developed and formalized the standard musical forms that were to predominate European musical culture for the next several decades. A reform of the extravagance of Baroque opera was undertaken by Christoph von Gluck. Johann Stamitz contributed greatly to the growth of the orchestra and developed the idea of the orchestral symphony. The Classical period reached its majestic culmination with the masterful symphonies , sonatas , and string quartets by the three great composers of the Viennese school: Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. During the same period, the first voice of the burgeoning Romantic musical ethic can be found in the music of Viennese composer Franz Schubert.
The Romantic Era As the many socio-political revolutions of the late eighteenth-century established new social orders and new ways of life and thought, so composers of the period broke new musical ground by adding a new emotional depth to the prevailing classical forms. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth-century (from ca. 1820 to 1900) , artists of all kinds became intent in expressing their subjective, personal emotions. "Romanticism" derives its name from the romances of medieval times -- long poems telling stories of heroes and chivalry, of distant lands and far away places, and often of unattainable love. The romantic artists are the first in history to give to themselves the name by which they are identified. The earliest Romantic composers were all born within a few years of each other in the early years of the nineteenth century. These include the great German masters Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann ; the
Polish poet of the piano Frédéric Chopin; the French genius Hector Berlioz ; and the greatest pianistic showman in history, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. During the early nineteenth century, opera composers such as Carl Maria von Weber turned to German folk stories for the stories of their operas, while the Italians looked to the literature of the time and created what is known as Bel canto opera (literally "beautiful singing" ). Later in the century, the field of Italian opera was dominated by Giuseppe Verdi, while German opera was virtually monopolized by Richard Wagner.
During the nineteenth century, composers from non-Germanic countries began looking for ways in which they might express the musical soul of their homelands. Many of these Nationalist composers turned to indigenous history and legends as plots for their operas, and to the popular folk melodies and dance rhythms of their homelands as inspiration for their symphonies and instrumental music. Others developed a highly personal harmonic language and melodic style which distinguishes their music from that of the AustroGermanic traditions. The continued modification and enhancement of existing instruments, plus the invention of new ones, led to the further expansion of the symphony orchestra throughout the century. Taking advantage of these new sounds and new instrumental combinations, the late Romantic composers of the second half of the nineteenth-century created richer and ever larger symphonies, ballets, and concertos. Two of the giants of this period are the German-bornJohannes Brahms and the great Russian melodist Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
The Twentieth-Century By the turn of the century and for the next few decades, artists of all nationalities were searching for exciting and different modes of expression. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg explored unusual and unorthodox harmonies and tonal schemes. French composerClaude Debussy was fascinated by Eastern music and the whole-tone scale , and created a style of music named after the movement in French painting
called Impressionism . Hungarian composer Béla Bartók continued in the traditions of the still strong Nationalist movement and fused the music of Hungarian peasants with twentieth century forms. Avant- garde composers such as Edgard Varèse explored the manipulation of rhythms rather than the usual melodic/harmonic schemes. The tried-and-true genre of the symphony, albeit somewhat modified by this time, attracted such masters as Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich, whileIgor Stravinsky gave full rein to his manipulation of kaleidoscopic rhythms and instrumental colors throughout his extremely long and varied career. While many composers throughout the twentieth-century experimented in new ways with traditional instruments (such as the "prepared piano" used by American composer John Cage), many of the twentiethcentury’s greatest composers, such as Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini and the Russian pianist/composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, remained true to the traditional forms of music history. In addition to new and eclectic styles of musical trends, the twentieth century boasts numerous composers whose harmonic and melodic styles an average listener can still easily appreciate and enjoy.
The Middle Ages The traditions of Western music can be traced back to the social and religious developments that took place in Europe during the Middle Ages, the years roughly spanning from about 500 to 1400 A.D. Because of the domination of the early Catholic Church during this period, sacred music was the most prevalent. Beginning with Gregorian Chant, sacred music slowly developed into a polyphonic music called organum performed at Notre Dame in Paris by the twelfth century. Secular music flourished, too, in the hands of the French trouvères and troubadours , until the period culminated with the sacred and secular compositions of the first true genius of Western music, Guillaume de Machaut.
Music had been a part of the world's civilizations for hundreds of years before the Middle Ages. Primitive cave drawings, stories from the Bible, and Egyptian heiroglyphs all attest to the fact that people had created instruments and had been making music for centuries.
The word music derives from the ancient Greek muses , the nine goddesses of art and science. The first study of music as an art form dates from around 500 B.C., when Pythagoras experimented with acoustics and the mathematical relationships of tones. In so doing, Pythagoras and others established the Greek modes : scales comprised of whole tones and half steps. With the slow emergence of European society from the dark ages between the fall of the Roman empire and the predominance of the Catholic Church, dozens of "mini-kingdoms" were established all over Europe, each presided over by a lord who had fought for and won the land. Mostly through superstitious fear, early Catholic leaders were able to claim absolute power over these feudal lords. The Church was able to dictate the progress of arts and letters according to its own strictures and employed all the scribes, musicians and artists. At this time, western music was almost the sole property of the Catholic Church.
Gregorian Chant The early Christian church derived their music from existing Jewish and Byzantine religious chant. Like all music in the Western world up to this time, plainchant was monophonic : that is, it comprised a single melody without any harmonic support or accompaniment. The many hundreds of melodies are defined by one of the eight Greek modes , some of which sound very different from the major/minor scales our ears are used to today. The melodies are free in tempo and seem to wander melodically, dictated by the Latin liturgical texts to which they are set. As these chants spread throughout Europe , they were embellished and developed along many different lines in various regions and according to various sects. It was believed that Pope Gregory I (reigned 590-604) codified them during the sixth-century, establishing uniform usage throughout the Western Catholic Church. Although his actual contribution to this enormous body of music remains unknown, his name has been applied to this music, and it is known asGregorian Chant . Gregorian chant remains among the most spiritually moving and profound music in Western culture. An idea of its pure, floating melody can be heard in the Easter hymn Victimae paschali laudes. Many years later, composers of Renaissance polyphony very often used plainchant melodies as the basis for their sacred works.
Notre Dame and the Ars Antiqua Sometime during the ninth century, music theorists in the Church began experimenting with the idea of singing two melodic lines simultaneously at parallel intervals, usually at the fourth, fifth, or octave. The resulting hollow-sounding music was called organum and very slowly developed over the next hundred years. By the eleventh century, one, two (and much later, even three) added melodic lines were no longer moving in parallel motion, but contrary to each other, sometimes even crossing. The original chant melody was then sung very slowly on long held notes called the tenor (from the Latin tenere , meaning to hold ) and the added melodies wove about and embellished the resulting drone. This music thrived at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and much later became known as the Ars Antiqua , or the "old art." The two composers at Notre Dame especially known for composing in this style are Léonin (fl. ca. 1163-1190) , who composed organa for two voices, and his successor Pérotin (fl. early13th century) , whose organa included three and even four voices. Pérotin's music is an excellent example of this very early form of polyphony (music for two or more simultaneously sounding voices), as can be heard in his setting of Sederunt principes. This music was slowly supplanted by the smoother contours of the polyphonic music of the fourteenth century, which became known as the Ars Nova.
The Trouvères and the Troubadours Popular music, usually in the form of secular songs, existed during the Middle Ages. This music was not bound by the traditions of the Church, nor was it even written down for the first time until sometime after the tenth century. Hundreds of these songs were created and performed (and later notated) by bands of musicians flourishing across Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, the most famous of which were the French trouvères and troubadours . The monophonic melodies of these itinerant musicians, to which may have been added improvised accompaniments, were often rhythmically lively. The subject of the overwhelming majority of these songs is love, in all its permutations of joy and pain. One of the most famous of these trouvères known to us (the great bulk of these melodies are by the ubiquitous "Anonymous") is Adam de la Halle (ca. 1237-ca. 1286) . Adam is the composer of one of the oldest secular music theater pieces known in the West,Le Jeu de Robin et Marion . He has also been identified as the writer of a good many songs and verses, some of which take the form of the motet , a piece in which two or more different verses (usually of greatly contrasted content and meter) are fit together simultaneously, without regard to what we now consider conventional harmonies. Such a piece is De ma dame vient! by this famous trouvère. Although secular music was undoubtedly played on instruments during the Middle Ages, instrumental dance music didn't come into its own until the later Renaissance.
Guillaume de Machaut and the Ars Nova Born: Champagne region of France, ca. 1300 Died: Rheims, 1377 Having had a clerical education and taken Holy orders, Machaut's career as a poet and composer took flight when he joined the court of John, Duke of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia around 1323, serving as the king's secretary until that monarch's death in battle at Crécy in 1346. Sometime before this, Machaut had settled in Rheims where he remained until his death, serving as canon in the cathedral there. His services as a composer were sought out by important patrons, including the future Charles V of France. His poetry was known throughout Europe and his admirers included Geoffrey Chaucer. Machaut is probably best remembered for being the first composer to create a polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass (the Ordinary being those parts of the liturgy that do not change, including theKyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei ). The new style of the fourteenth century, dubbed the Ars Nova by composers of the period, can be heard in the "Gloria" from Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame. This new polyphonic style caught on with composers and paved the way for the flowering of choral music in the Renaissance. Although today the Mass is probably his best-known work, Machaut also composed dozens of secular love songs, also in the style of the polyphonic "new art." These songs epitomize the courtly love found in the previous century's vocal art, and capture all the joy, hope, pain and heartbreak of courtly romance. The secular motets of the Middle Ages eventually evolved into the great outpouring of lovesick lyricism embodied in the music of the great Renaissance Madrigalists. Guillaume de Machaut is the first composer in Western music history who seemed to be conscious of his artistic achievements and of his place in history. To assure that place, Machaut saw to it that his work was painstakingly copied and artfully illustrated, the first known example of a composer thus preserving his own work for posterity.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance was a time of rebirth in learning, science, and the arts throughout Europe. The rediscovery of the writings of ancient Greece and Rome led to a renewed interest in learning in general. The invention of the printing press allowed the disbursement of this knowledge in an unprecedented manner. The invention of the compass permitted the navigation of the world's oceans and the subsequent discovery of lands far removed from the European continent. With Copernicus' discovery of the actual position of the earth in the solar system and Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church lost its grip on society and a humanist spirit was born. This spirit manifested itself in the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, and in both the sacred and secular dance and vocal music of the greatest composers of the era.
Dance music of the Renaissance Throughout the Renaissance instrumental dance music flowered and thrived, and was composed, or more likely improvised, by many people. Musicians whose names have come down to us collected much of this existing music and had it published in various volumes over the years. TheTerpsichore of Michael Praetorius (c.1571-1621) and the dance music of Tielman Susato (c.1500-1561) represent some of the outstanding examples of dance music from the late Renaissance. A piece such as La Spagna, (attributed to Josquin des Prez) is an excellent example of the buoyant rhythms and sounds of the Renaissance dance. Many of these dance forms were modified and developed by later composers and found their way into the Baroque dance suite .
the Golden Age of Polyphony Josquin des Prez Born: Hainault or Henegouwen (Burgundy), c. 1440 Died: Condé-sur-Escaut, August 27, 1521 Not much is known about the life Josquin des Prez, but it is generally agreed that he studied under the earlier Renaissance masterJohannes Ockeghem (c.1420-1495) , who was the first great master of the Flemish school of Renaissance composers. There are references to Josquin's having served at several courts in Italy and France, and at the Sistine Chapel in Rome. He died while serving as canon of the collegiate church at Condé. Among his surviving works are more than a dozen masses , a hundred motets , and a good deal of secular music. The serene, almost otherworldly choral sound of the Flemish school's style can be heard in the Gloria from Josquin's Missa L'homme armé. Flemish composers of the time often based the cantus firmus on a popular melody of the day, composing new music for the other voices in counterpoint to the tune. The simultaneous interweaving of several melodic lines (usually four: soprano, alto, tenor, bass ) in a musical composition is known as polyphony . Polyphonic music of the Renaissance could be very complex and intricate, often obscuring the words and the meaning of the text which had been set.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Born: Palestrina, near Rome, ca. 1525 Died: Rome, February 2, 1594 Palestrina spent much of his career in Rome, serving as organist and choir master at both the Sistine Chapel and at St. Peter's. A productive composer, he wrote over a hundred mass settings and over two hundred motets. At the same time, he managed a very successful furrier business, from which he died a very wealthy man. In keeping with the strictures of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to rid the music of the Catholic rite of the "worldly excesses" of the Protestant Reformation, Palestrina composed in a purer, more restrained style. Gone are the vocal lines based on popular melodies. Instead, each voice part resembles a chant melody, each with its own profile and crystalline line. In the opening Kyrie from Palestrina's most famous work, the Pope Marcellus Mass, one can at once hear the classic, pure lines of the text set clearly amidst the various voices of the choir. Palestrina's polyphonic writing is of such quality that many later composers (including Mozart,Beethoven, and Brahms) spent their early years studying counterpoint in the "Palestrina style" as set down in a famous textbook by J. J. Fux in 1725.
The English Madrigalists Around 1600 in England, composers and poets were collaborating on a body of music known as the English madrigal . The composer and lutenist John Dowland (1563-1626) , although concentrating mostly on melancholy ayres for solo voice with lute accompaniment, also wrote madrigals. Some of the best known of the English madrigalists include Thomas Morley (1558-1602) , Francis Pilkington (ca.1570-1638) , William
Byrd (1543-1623) , Orlando Gibbons(1583-1625) , and Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623) . Queen Elizabeth I herself was an accomplished lute player, and supposedly delighted in the songs and ayres of the madrigalists. Weelkes' madrigalCome, let's begin to revel't out is a prime example of this cheerful and sprightly part-song. The texts of many of these madrigals, however, deal with spurned or unrequited love, and are often sad, but very beautiful.
The Baroque Age
The Baroque was a time of a great intensification of past forms in all the arts: painting saw the works of Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and El Greco -- in literature it was the time of Molière, Cervantes, Milton, and Racine -- modern science came into its own during this period with the work of Galileo and Newton. In music, the age began with the trail-blazing works of Claudio Monteverdi, continued with the phenomenally popular music of Antonio Vivaldi and the keyboard works of such composers as Fran&cced;ois Couperin and Domenico Scarlatti, and came to a close with the masterworks of two of the veritable giants of music history, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.
The beginnings of Opera In the last years of the sixteenth century, a group of musicians and literati in Florence, Italy experimented with a new method of composing dramatic vocal music, modeling their ideas after the precepts of ancient Greek theater. Their intent was that this new music should prove more direct and communicative to an audience, as the complex polyphony of the Renaissance could very often obscure the text being sung. They instead set a single melodic line against a basic chordal accompaniment, and with this notion of homophony , a new era of music began. The Florentine Camerata called this new form of musical-dramatic entertainment opera . The first operas were private affairs, composed for the Italian courts. But when in 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, Italy, opera became a commercial industry, and the genre in which many composers throughout history first tried out new ideas and new techniques of composition.
Claudio Monteverdi Born: Cremona, (baptized May 15, 1567) Died: Venice, November 29, 1643
The son of a doctor, Monteverdi studied music at the town cathedral in Cremona, and attained his first position as composer and instrumentalist at the court of the Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua in 1591. In 1599 he married a singer at the court, Claudia de Cattaneis. The couple had three children before her untimely death in 1607. The composer remained a widower for the rest of his life. Although unhappy and grossly underpaid in Mantua, Monteverdi remained there until the death of Vincenzo in 1612, when he was relieved of his duties by the new duke. Soon after however, he was invited to serve as maestro di cappella at the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice, an extremely prestigious post. Monteverdi remained in Venice until his death in 1643.
Although required by his employers to compose much sacred music throughout his career, Monteverdi seemed most happy (and his art in greatest evidence) with secular music. Monteverdi composed and published dozens of madrigals throughout his life, and Zefiro torna is an excellent example of his art in that secular form. In this madrigal, Monteverdi uses the common technique of spinning out the melodic lines, one after the other, over a repeated bass figure. One of Monteverdi's undoubted sacred masterpieces are the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin , composed in 1610. Monteverdi's settings here vary between Renaissance polyphony and the newer homophonic sound of the Baroque. He was a master of both forms. The power and fervor of the writing can be heard in the"Lauda Jerusalem" from the Vespers of 1610, with the sound of instruments added to the choir. Internationally famous through the publication of his madrigals , Monteverdi scaled new artistic heights with the composition of his operas . His first was L'Orfeo, called by the composer a "fable in music," and was composed for the court of Duke Vincenzo in 1607. Many operas followed, but the music to them is unfortunately lost. Monteverdi's final opera, written in 1642 when he was in his seventies, remains one of the landmarks of the new genre and his undisputed masterwork. Although the manuscripts that have survived consist only of the bass line and vocal parts, comprising mostly dramatic recitativo (melodic declamations over the bass, to which the instrumentalists fill in appropriate harmonies), the ensemble passages are of exceptional beauty. The frankly erotic moments between Nero (originally a part for a castrato ) and Poppea (soprano ) contain music that can still move and amaze modern audiences, as can be heard in the final duet, "Pur ti miro" from L'Incoronazione di Poppea. Opera remained popular throughout the Baroque age, culminating in the stage works of George Frideric Handel. With his death in 1643, Monteverdi's music fell into oblivion, as it was the nature of the times to perform only the very newest music. (Public concerts as we know them did not generally come about until the musical scholarship of the nineteenth century.) With the early music movements of the twentieth century and the rediscovery of his madrigals and sacred music, Claudio Monteverdi has at last been recognized as one of the true masters of Western music.
The Baroque Concerto With the rise of purely instrumental music in the Baroque Age, there also arose a flowering of instrumental forms and virtuoso performers to play them. One of the earliest masters of the soon-to-be predominant form of the concerto was the Italian composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) . Corelli pioneered the form of the concerto grosso , in which the principle element of contrast between two independent groups of instruments is brought into play. The larger group is called the ripieno and usually consisted of a body of strings with harpsichord continuo , while a smaller group or concertino consisted of two to four solo instruments. The various sections of the concerto would alternate between fast and slow tempos, or movements . Later composers of the period such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi transformed this genre into the solo concerto , in which the solo instrument is of equal importance as the string orchestra.
Antonio Vivaldi Born: Venice, March 4, 1678 Died: Vienna, (buried July 28, 1741) Another Italian composer and virtuoso violinist, Antonio Vivaldi is remembered today for the enormous number of concertos he composed throughout his lifetime. He most likely learned the violin from his father, himself a violinist at St. Mark's in Venice. Antonio took holy orders to enter the Catholic Priesthood, and became known as "The Red Priest" due to the color of his hair. He became a teacher in Venice at the Ospedale della Pietà (a school for foundling girls) in 1703, and later became the director of concerts there. His music was extremely popular, and he traveled a great deal over Europe, spreading his fame as a violinist and composer. During the 1730s, however, his popularity began to abate and in 1738 he was dismissed from the Ospedale. Desperate, he eventually settled in Vienna in 1740, hoping to reclaim his fame. He didn't, and he died there the next year, to be buried in a pauper's grave. Vivaldi's most famous compositions are the concertos for one or more solo violins and string orchestra, although he composed a great deal of music in other genres, including cantatas , operas , trio sonatas and others. Indeed, Vivaldi's instrumental works lay the foundation for the development of the concerto into the Classical Period. Among his published collections of string concertos are included La Stravanganza, Op. 4, La Cetra, Op. 9, and the ever-popular The Four Seasons , comprised of four concertos, each depicting aspects of the seasons of the year. For instance, the third movement of the Concerto in F "Autumn" imitates the sounds of a hunt. Vivaldi followed the usual pattern of the era in his concertos by framing a melodious or dramatic slow second movement with fast and lively first and third movements. Of his more than 500 concertos, some 290 are for violin solo and strings, or for string orchestra alone. However, Vivaldi also composed a great number of concertos for other instruments and various instrumental combinations. One
such work is the sprightly Concerto in G major for two mandolins. The solo concerto reached its culmination during the later Classical Period in the concertos of Mozart and Beethoven .
Baroque music for the harpsichord With a vast amount of choral and chamber music to his credit, François Couperin (1668-1733) was recognized in his day as the leading French composer. But it is for his harpsichord music that Couperin is best remembered today. He composed a great manysuites (or ordres in French) consisting of dance movements and character pieces with such titles as "Butterflies," "Darkness," "Goat-footed Satyrs," and "The mysterious barricades". This is a charming and graceful music, beguilingly ornamented, and it opened a new direction for composers of keyboard music. The later French composer Jean Philip Rameau (1683-1764) also composed some fine keyboard and chamber music in the newgallant style. At the age of fifty, Rameau successfully embarked on a new career composing the type of lavish operas and ballets so popular at the time in France. But Rameau is best known today as the music theoretician who first rationalized chords and chordal relationships into the harmonic system still studied by today's music students.
Domenico Scarlatti Born: Naples, October 26, 1685 Died: Madrid, July 23, 1757 Domenico Scarlatti was the son of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) , himself a composer of a great many operas and cantatas. Domenico is known for being a harpsichord virtuoso and for the 555 or so sonatas he composed for that instrument. Having spent a great many years wandering about Europe evading the dominance and influence of his father, Scarlatti eventually settled in Lisbon, Portugal, where he found employment as teacher to the Infanta, Princess Maria Barbara. When the Infanta wedded the heir to the Spanish throne in 1729, Scarlatti was taken to Madrid where he spent the rest of his life. It was during this period that be began composing the little "exercises," pieces for harpsichord that he called sonatas . Regarded as one of the founders of modern keyboard technique, Scarlatti'ssonatas employed such new devices as hand-crossing, quick arpeggios, and rapidly repeated notes. These sonatas are by turns capricious, charming, melodic, and witty, and such works as the Sonata in D major, K. 491 point the way to the keyboard figurations of the Classical Period.
The Classical or Viennese Period
The Rococo The contrapuntal practices of the German Baroque began to give way in the first half of the eighteenth century to a highly ornamented style of melodic instrumental music, especially in France. This style has come to be called Rococo , after the same movement in the visual arts. The paintings of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau are prime examples of the visual style of the time. This refined but ornamented style could already be heard in the music of French composers Couperin and Rameau, and pervades the music of Italian composer Giovanni Pergolesi (1710-1736) . It is evident as well in the music of the two sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) and Johann Christian Bach (17351782). J. C. Bach eventually made his home in London and became known as the "London" Bach in order to distinguish him from his older brother. Johann Christian's many keyboard concertos had a profound influence on the eight year old Mozart when the two met in London in 1764. Likewise, C. P. E. Bach's expressive keyboardsonatas came to influence the piano sonatas of later composers Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. Each of these masters made the Austrian city of Vienna their home, thus equating the Classical style with the Viennese style.
With the increasing emphasis of the age on reason and enlightenment, the writings of thinkers like Voltaire, Diderot, and Jefferson served to fuel a sense of mankind's being in charge of its own destiny -- that through science and democracy, people could choose their own fate. Such prevailing philosphy and thought likely triggered such events as the French and American Revolutions. The results of these events brought to the artistic world an expanded freedom of thought, in which artists' creative impulses began to find a freer rein of imagination and felt less constrained to abide by the established "rules" of the preceding ages. Earlist among these thinkers in the realm of music was the "great reformer" of opera, Christoph von Gluck
The rise of the Symphony About the middle of the century in Mannheim, Germany, composer and conductor Johann Stamitz (17171757) and his followers began to develop the orchestra and the art of orchestration , basing their music on the Baroque homophonic style, but now with chords played in unison rather than contrapuntally. The Baroquefigured bass was now fully written out in specific parts for all of the instruments, rather than being left to the discretion of the players. Basing these larger works on the Baroque three-part sinfonia (overtures to operas) , other elements were introduced, such as the contrasts of dynamics and tempo within movements. This kind music became the basis for the Classical instrumental sonata , string quartet , and orchestral symphony , and reached its apex in the works of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The elegance and courtly grace of the early Classical period may well be best exemplified by the familiar strains of the Minuet from the String quintet op. 13, no. 4 by the Italian composer, Luigi Boccherini (17431805). Known during his lifetime as an exceptional cellist, Boccherini is not considered a composer of any real import today. But he did compose a great deal of chamber music and concertos of great charm and melodiousness. Later in the period and spanning the turn of the century, Viennese composer Franz Schubert further developed the symphony and string quartet in his own style, operating as he was under the shadow of the great Beethoven. Schubert also transformed the German Lied (song) into an art form.
Christoph Willibald von Gluck Born: Erasbach, near Weidenwang, July 2, 1714 Died: Vienna, November 15, 1787 Born in Bavaria, Gluck left home at the age of fourteen and spent several years in Prague. Eventully he acquired enough money to travel and study music in Vienna and in Italy. Here he became acquainted with the styles of Baroque opera and composed several operas in the prevailing style. Between 1745 and 1760, he travelled over Europe during which time he was able to make a survey of the state of opera at the time. A musical theorist as well as a composer, by 1761 Gluck had come to the conclusion that the important elements in ballet and opera should be the story and the feelings of the characters, not the ridiculous intrigues, mistaken identities, and myriad sub-plots that had become the stock-in-trade of the Baroque opera. Gluck intended to reform the opera of the late eighteenth-century by abolishing vocal virtuosity for its own sake and causing the music to serve the needs of the drama.
Gluck's first work to incorporate these new practices remains his most popular opera. Premiered in Vienna in 1762, it was based (perhaps not surprisingly) on the classic Greek subject of Orpheus, the greatest musician of legendary antiquity. The lament of Orpheus (castrato) upon losing his beloved wife to the Underworld a second time remains one of the most moving arias from early Classical opera "Che farò senza Euridice" from Orfeo ed Euridice.
The Viennese public, however, did not immediately take to Gluck's reforms or his music. It was not until the 1770s, having moved to Paris at the behest of Marie Antoinette, that Gluck experienced any popular success with his reform operas. His settings of the Greek legends of Iphigénie en Aulide in 1774 and its "sequel," Iphigénie en Tauride in 1779, caused a sensation. The operatic public, as well as the critics, were antagonistically divided between the merits of Gluck's reforms and the traditional Italian operas ofNiccolò Piccini (1728-1800) , whose works were extremely popular in Paris at the time. With the composition of his last operas in 1779, Gluck retired to Vienna where he had been invited to become court composer to Emperor Joseph II. He died there in 1787. Although his style of music was coming to an end and his ideals were just gaining a foothold at the time of his death, Gluck's operatic reforms did have a far-reaching impact on future composers, affecting the stage works ofMozart, Berlioz, and Wagner.
Franz Joseph Haydn Born: Rohrau, lower Austria, (baptized April 1), 1732 Died: Vienna, May 31, 1809 Born second of twelve children to a poor but music-loving family, at the age of eight Franz Joseph was accepted in the choir of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. In 1749, after enduring nine years at the cathedral, he was turned out when his voice broke. Without money, a job, or a home, the young man somehow survived by singing, playing the harpsichord where he could, and teaching, all the time practicing and continuing to study music. He also began composing and making connections, and was given his first professional position leading the orchestra of a Count Morzin of Bohemia. His first symphony led to his being engaged in 1761 as orchestra conductor to the Hungarian Prince Paul Anton Esterházy. Haydn spent thirty years in the employ of the Esterházys, virtually as a servant, but nevertheless composing some 90 symphonies, two dozen operas , a number of masses , and vast amounts of chamber music . His fame spread across Europe due to the publication of his music and, almost unknown to him, the immense popularity of his music set the standard of the musical tastes and techniques of the next half century. He met the young Mozart in 1781 and the two became close friends and admirers of the other's music.
When Prince Nicolaus Esterházy died in 1790 (he had succeeded Prince Paul in 1762 and had retained Haydn's services), Haydn was dismissed by his successor. With a generous pension and income from publications and pupils, Haydn moved to Vienna. He was invited to London by impressario J. P. Salomon for a series of concerts. During this visit and a second trip to England, Haydn composed his last twelve "London" symphonies, his crowning achievements in the genre. He was also asked to compose an oratorio in the style of Handel. He composed two, and his music transforms the majesty of the Baroque into that of the early nineteenth century with such choruses as "The Heavens are Telling" fromThe Creation, premiered in 1798. Known today as the "The father of the Symphony and the String quartet", Haydn actually invented neither, but did develop them into the forms that eventually swept throughout Europe. Joseph Haydn was evidently an unassuming man who seemingly without effort turned out literally hundreds of sonatas , quartets , symphonies , operas and concertos during his career. His music is always extremely well-crafted and seemingly simple and charming, but there are always flights of fancy and pure jokes amidst the classical veneer. The most famous example is the "surprise" in the second movement of his Symphony no. 94 in G major, but his humor can also be heard in the finale of the Symphony no. 82 , nicknamed "the Bear" as the bass drone and chortling bassoons in the finale conjured images of a dancing bear in the minds of the symphony's first audiences. Haydn's modernization of the Rococo string quartet turned it into the intimate form we know, in which all four instruments are treated with equal importance. The lateString Quartet, op. 76 no.3 gives an idea of the melodic elegance found in the 83 quartets composed by this master of the genre. By 1802, Haydn, now an old man, felt himself played out. He spent his last years enjoying the adulation that came his way from all over Europe. When in the spring of 1809, the French under Napoleon began their destruction of Vienna, Haydn suffered a quick decline and died on May 31.
Franz Schubert Born: Himmelpfortgrund (Vienna), January 31, 1797 Died: Vienna, November 19, 1828 Schubert's music neatly bridges the Classical and Romantic periods through its use of lovely melodies, inventive scoring, and nature imagery, wedded to the traditional classical forms while at the same time expanding them. In his tragically short life, Schubert composed operas, symphonies, sonatas, masses, chamber music, piano music, and over 600 songs. But regardless of the genre, his gift for creating beautiful melodies remains almost unsurpassed in music history. Schubert's music is also passionate, sometimes even dark, with an emphasis on major/minor key shifts and adventurous harmonic writing. Outstanding examples of his gift for melody can be found in the popular Piano Quintet in A major , which includes a set of variations on the tune of one of his popular songs, and from which it gets its nickname, "The Trout". Although left unfinished for unknown reasons, Schubert's stirring and beautiful Symphony no. 8 in B minor remains one of his most often heard and best-loved works. But it is his songs, or German Lieder , for which Schubert is best known. Through his choice of beautiful poetry by some of the best writers of the day, his inspired melodies, and his sometimes elaborate treatment of the piano part, many of Schubert's songs are miniature masterpieces of poetic and dramatic beauty. His two song cycles (groups of poems by a single or various authors selected because of thematic content, and usually published together), yield some of the finest examples of Schubert's Lieder . "Wohin?" from the song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) is an outstanding example of the almost limitless artistry of this composer. Schubert's Lieder would come to influence the song-writing of many later composers, including Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) .
The Romantic Era After Beethoven, composers turned their attention to the expression of intense feelings in their music. This expression of emotion was the focus of all the arts of the self-described "Romantic" movement. Whether in the nature imagery or passionate violence found in the paintings of Friederich, Delacroix, and Goya, the strange and fanciful literature of Edgar Allan Poe, or the adventure and myths of the great collections of fairy tales and folk poetry, the depiction in art of the beautiful, the strange, the sublime, and the morbid was the ruling credo of the period. In music, the nineteenth century saw the creation and evolution of new genres such as the program symphony , pioneered by Beethoven and now developed by Hector Berlioz; its off-shoot, the symphonic poem was developed by Franz Liszt; the concert overture , examples of which were composed by Felix Mendelssohn and virtually every composer thereafter; and short, expressive piano pieces written for the bourgeois salons of Europe by Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin. Italian operas were composed in the Bel canto traditions, and these
led directly to the masterworks of Giuseppe Verdi, while the idea of the German music drama was established by Richard Wagner. For inspiration, many Romantic composers turned to the visual arts, to poetry, drama and literature, and to nature itself. Using the classical forms of sonata and symphony as a starting point, composers began focusing more on new melodic styles, richer harmonies, and ever more dissonance , in the pursuit of moving their audiences, rather than concerning themselves with the structural discipline of Classical forms. Later composers of the nineteenth century would further build on the forms and ideas developed by the Romantic composers.
Italian Bel CantoOpera
Gioacchino Rossini Born: Pesaro, February 29, 1792 Died: Paris, November 13, 1868 Producing his first opera at the age of eighteen, Rossini composed dozens, many of which are still in the repertoire today, while others are being once again explored. Rossini excelled in the opera buffa , or comic opera of the day -- indeed, the music he wrote for these comic works has been described as "the perfect distillation of comedy into music." Whether in comic or serious opera, his vocal style reflected the highly embellished, virtuosic melodic line again in favor at the time. This style is apparent in the aria "Una voce poco fa" from The Barber of Seville, widely regarded as Rossini's masterpiece in the opera buffa genre. The overtures to Rossini's operas are extremely popular concert pieces and some, such as theWilliam Tell Overture, have been put to various commercial uses in recent years. This opera, Rossini's last, was written in 1829, and although he lived for almost another forty years, Rossini never composed another opera.
Gaetano Donizetti Born: Bergamo, November 29, 1797 Died: Bergamo, April 8, 1848 Inheriting the bel canto tradition from Rossini, Donizetti's operas are today mostly admired for their many attractive melodies and fine ensembles. Although he composed over seventy operas, only a handful have remained in the general repertory, but those are generally regarded as outstanding examples of the Italian Bel Canto period. Donizetti's most famous opera is surely Lucia di Lammermoor, based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott. The plot concerns a young girl who is tricked by her brother into thinking her lover has been unfaithful to her and forces her into a marriage of political convenience. During the wedding scene, Lucia's lover makes an unexpected entrance, and all the protagonists give vent to their varied emotions in the celebrated Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor. As was popular in Italian opera of the time, Lucia then goes mad, giving the prima donna an opportunity to display great acting and vocal skill in an extendedscena . The Italian operatic tradition was continued and taken to sublime heights later in the nineteenth century in the works of Giuseppe Verdi.
Carl Maria von Weber Born: Eutin, Oldenburg, November 18, 1786 Died: London, June 5, 1826 Weber figures prominently in history as the composer who established a German opera in his native land and successfully broke the chains of Italian traditions. He accomplished this in a variety of ways: the use of spoken dialogue in place of the Italian recitative ; the use of German myths and folklore, with an emphasis on nature, for the subjects of his operas; and his remarkable use of the instruments of the orchestra, rather than just the voices, to tell the story. The overtures to Weber's operas are dramatic renderings through music of the stories that are about to unfold, as in the overture to his most famous opera, Der Freischütz. The opera is about a hunter who, in order to marry the girl he loves, becomes a pawn in a bargain with the devil so that he may win a marksman's shooting contest. Taking Weber's ideas and musical idioms, composer Richard Wagner later evolved his ideas of a German Music Drama into the art from that would forever change the course of music.
Felix Mendelssohn Born: Hamburg, February 3, 1809 Died: Leipzig, November 4, 1847 Having shown exceptional musical talent at an early age, Mendelssohn was encouraged by his family to study music and to make it his career. At the age of seventeen, he composed an overture based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which was so successful that some years later he composed more music on the subject, resulting in a suite of pieces to be used in conjunction with productions of the play. Such a collection of pieces is known as incidental music , and the fleet and airy Scherzo from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is typical of the seemingly effortless and beguiling style of this composer. Mendelssohn responded to nature as did most composers of the period One of the results of nature's influence was theFingal's Cave Overture, also known as The Hebrides, which depicts the rocky, wind-swept coast and ancient caverns of Scotland. Mendelssohn's many travels also influenced two of his five symphonies, the third in A minor, known as the "Scotch" Symphony, and his popularSymphony no. 4 in A major, known as the "Italian" symphony, which incorporates melodies and dances that Mendelssohn heard while traveling in that country.
Robert Schumann Born: Zwickau, June 8, 1810 Died: Endenich, near Bonn, July 29, 1856 A master of the more intimate forms of musical compostitions, Schumann is unique in music history as being one of the great composers who concentrated on one musical genre at a time, with the bulk of his earliest compositions being for the piano. Schumann's piano music (and later his songs) remain supreme examples of the Romantic style of the second quarter of the nineteenth-century. Immensely influenced by literature and poetry, it is the dreamy nature of his music which most affects the listener, as can be heard in the fifth movement from the piano suite entitled Carnaval. Aside from three piano sonatas, most of his work for the instrument is in the form of suites comprising short, poetic pieces, each expressing a different mood. In 1840, Schumann was finally able to marry Clara Wieck, the daughter of his first music teacher, and who had opposed their union. Schumann's happiness found an outlet in the great number of Lieder he wrote during that year. The first number from his song cycle Dichterliebe , "Im wunderschönen Monat mai" (A Poet's Love: "In the beautiful month of May" ) is another example of the composer's harmonic and melodic style. In order to publicize his own music and to stimulate and improve the musical tastes of the burgeoning concert-going public, Schumann founded Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The New Journal for Music) in 1834, and remained active as its editor for ten years. In the pages of this publication, Schumann considerably raised the standards of music criticism and did much to promote the careers of young composers such as Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, and especially Johannes Brahms, who was to become a very close friend of Schumann.
Throughout his life, Schumann felt himself divided by two contrasting natures: the gentle, poetic, Apollonian side, which he called "Eusebius"; and the more forthright, dramatic and stormy side he named "Florestan". Because of this rift in his personality, he feared insanity for much of his life, and eventually did spend his last years in an asylum.
Franz Liszt Born: Raiding, near Ödenburg, October 22, 1811 Died: Bayreuth, July 31, 1886
Hungarian composer Franz Liszt began his career as the outstanding concert pianist of the century, who, along with the prodigious violinist Niccoló Paganini (1782-1840) , created the cult of the modern instrumental virtuoso . To show off his phenomenal and unprecedented technique, Liszt composed a great deal of music designed specifically for this purpose, resulting in a vast amount of piano literature laden with
dazzling scales, trills, arpeggios, leaps, and other technical marvels. In this vein, Liszt composed a series of virtuosic rhapsodies on Hungarian gypsy melodies, the best-known being the all too familiar Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. This kind of music is worlds apart from the generally more introspective, poetic music of pianist-composer Frédéric Chopin. Liszt is often credited with the creation of the symphonic poem : extended, single-movement works for orchestra, inspired by paintings, plays, poems or other literary or visual works, and attempting to convey the ideas expressed in those media through music. Such a work is Les Préludes, based on a poem in which life is expressed as a series of struggles, passions, and mysteries, all serving as a mere prelude to . . .what? The Romantic genre of the symphonic poem , as well as its cousin the concert overture , became very attractive to many later composers, including Saint-Saëns,Tchaikovsky, Dvorák, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) .
The Twentieth Century The years spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the earliest part of the twentieth were a time of great expansion and development of, as well as a dramatic reaction to, the prevailing late Romanticism of previous years. In music, as in all the arts, expression became either overt (as in the early symphonic poems of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) , the huge symphonies of Gustav Mahler, or the operas of Giacomo Puccini), or was merely suggested (as in the so-called "impressionist" music of Claude Debussy. The previous century's tide of Nationalism found a twentieth century advocate in the Hungarian Béla Bartók.
It was a time of deepening psychological awareness, with the works of both Nietzsche and Freud in circulation; and the horrors of the First World War brought death and destruction to the very doorsteps of many people living in Europe. Possibly in reaction to such influences, the expressionistic music of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples germinated and flourished for a time. Experimentation and new systems of writing music were attempted by avant-garde composers like Edgard Varèse and although none gained a foothold with the public, these techniques had a profound influence on many of the composers who were to follow. Twentieth-century music has seen a great coming and going of various movements, among thempost- romanticism , serialism and neo-classicism in the earlier years of the century, all of which were practiced at one time or another by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. More recently,aleatory or "chance" music, neo- romanticism , and minimalism have been in vogue by a handful ofAmerican composers. With the commercial dissemination of music through the various media providing music as a constant background, the general populace has largely dismissed much of the music produced using bold, new, or experimental styles, preferring to turn to the forms and genres (and often the composers) with which it is most familiar. Many of the greatest and best-known composers of this century, including Russian composers Sergei Rachmaninoff , Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich, and British composer Benjamin Britten, have been those who have written music directly descended from the approved models of the past, while investing these forms with a style and modernistic tone of their own.
Giacomo Puccini Born: Lucca, December 22, 1858 Died: Brussels, November 29, 1924 Continuing in the Italian operatic tradition of Verdi, Puccini is remembered for having composed several of the most popular operas in the standard repertoire. His works largely fall into the realm of verismo , or "realistic" opera, in which everyday characters live, love and suffer amidst contemporary settings. His works are noted for their gorgeous melodies, creative orchestration, and dramatic, even sentimental, plots. Puccini treats the orchestra as a continuous means of conveying the drama, witharias, duets and ensembles developing naturally out of the musical flow. Some of Puccini's best-loved operas include Madama Butterfly, Tosca, and La Bohéme. The love duet from Act I of La Bohéme is a fine example of Puccini's rich melodic style.
Edgard Varèse Born: Paris, December 22, 1885 Died: New York, November 6, 1965 Although born in France, Varèse lived and worked most of his life in the United States. A pioneer of the avant-garde movement in music, Varèse experimented with electronic music ,musique concré , and some highly original experimentation in the uses and organization of rhythm. The works for which he is best known are those in which he completely rejects traditional melody and harmony, instead building these compositions from blocks of sounds, relying on tone color, texture and rhythm. Varèse's most original work exemplifying this technique is probably Ionisation, which is scored for a huge percussion ensemble, piano, and sirens.
Benjamin Britten Born: Lowestoft, Suffolk, November 22, 1913 Died: Aldeburgh, December 4, 1976 Britten began his musical studies at an early age, and although his earliest works are mostly for instrumental forces, he is perhaps best known for his choral and vocal music, especially his operas. Much of his vocal music was composed for his life-long partner, the tenor Peter Pears, and their artistic collaboration is one of the greatest in music history. Britten's musical idiom is largely in a post-romantic style, with liberal doses of pungent dissonances.
Britten's greatest work is most likely his first opera,Peter Grimes, and the Four Sea Interludes are wellknown. Premiered in 1945, it was with this work that Britten scored his first international triumph. The opera tells the story of a social outcast, the fisherman Grimes, who, suffering at the hands of an unsympathetic society and in attempting to find acceptance by that society, brings about his own tragic downfall. The theme of the individual against society is one that recurs in many of Britten's operatic works.
A pacifist, Britten composed the War Requiem to express his hope that the world can lay war to rest. The work is comprised of a setting of the Catholic Mass, juxtaposed with nine poems by the English poet Wilfred Owen, a soldier killed during the last days of World War I. The Requiem is scored for chorus, orchestra, children's chorus, chamber orchestra, and three vocal soloists. Britten's intention was to have a Russian soprano singing the sections of the Latin Mass, while the English poems were to be sung by a British tenor and a German baritone. Source: http://www.ipl.org
