Music History
a Guide to Western Composers and their Music
from the Middle Ages to the Present
The Middle Ages
Around 500 A.D., western civilization began to emerge from the
period known as "The Dark Ages," the time when invading hordes of
Vandals, Huns, and Visigoths overran Europe and brought an end to
the Roman Empire. For the next ten centuries, the newly emerging
Christian Church would dominate Europe, administering justice,
instigating "Holy" Crusades against the East, establishing
Universities, and generally dictating the destiny of music, art and
literature. During this time, Pope Gregory I is generally believed
to have collected and codified the music known as Gregorian 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. Secular music was sung all over Europe by the
troubadours and trouvères of France. And it was during the Middle
Ages that western culture saw the arrival of the first great name in
music, Guillaume de 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.
These polyphonic traditions reached their culmination in the
unsurpassed works of Giovanni da 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, 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, 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 by Claudio 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. 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
German-born composer George Frideric 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 entertaining
serenades 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
Austro-Germanic 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-born Johannes Brahms
and the great Russian melodist Peter Ilyich Tchaikovksy.
The Twentieth-Century
