Classical Music Eras: A History of Classical Music

Musicologists divide classical music into historical eras and stylistic subgenres. One way to examine classical music history is to divide it into seven periods:

1. 1. Medieval period (1150 to 1400): Music has existed since the dawn of human civilization, but most music historians begin cataloging classical music in the Medieval era. Medieval music is known for monophonic chant—sometimes called Gregorian chant due to its use by Gregorian monks. In addition to singing, Medieval musicians played instrumental music on instruments like the lute, the flute, the recorder, and select string instruments.
2. 2. Renaissance period (1400 to 1600): Renaissance-era music introduced polyphonic music to wide audiences, particularly via choral music, which was performed in liturgical settings. In addition to the lute, Renaissance musicians played viol, rebec, lyre, and guitar among other string instruments. Brass instruments like the sackbut and cornet also emerged during this era. Perhaps the most notable Renaissance composers were Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, John Dowland, and Thomas Tallis.
3. 3. Baroque period (1600 to 1750): During the Baroque era, classical music surged forward in its complexity. The Baroque era saw a full embrace of tonal music—music based on major scales and minor scales rather than modes—and it maintained the polyphony of the Renaissance era. Many of the instruments used by today's orchestras were common in Baroque music, including violin, viola, cello, contrabass (double bass), bassoon, and oboe. Harpsichord was the dominant keyboard instrument, although the piano first emerged during this era. The most renowned composers of the early Baroque era include Alessandro Scarlatti and Henry Purcell. By the late Baroque period, composers like Antonio Vivaldi, Dominico Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel, and Georg Philipp Telemann achieved massive popularity. The most influential composer to come from the Baroque era is Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed extensive preludes, fugues, cantatas, and organ music.
4. 4. Classical period (1750 to 1820): Within the broad genre of classical music exists the Classical period. This era of music marked the first time that the symphony, the instrumental concerto (which highlights virtuoso soloists), and the sonata form were brought to wide audiences. Chamber music for trio and string quartet was also popular during the Classical era. The signature classical composer is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, although he was far from the only star of the classical era. Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, and J.S. Bach's sons J.C. Bach and C.P.E. Bach were also star composers during this period. Opera composers like Mozart and Christoph Willibald Gluck developed the operatic form into a style that remains recognizable today. Ludwig van Beethoven began his career during the Classical era, but his own innovations helped usher in the next musical era.
5. 5. Romantic period (1820 to 1900): Exemplified by late-period Beethoven, the Romantic era introduced emotion and drama to the platonic beauty of Classical period music. Early Romantic works like Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 set a template for nearly all nineteenth-century music that followed. Many of the composers who dominate today's symphonic repertoires composed during the Romantic era, including Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Opera composers like Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, and Giacomo Puccini used Romanticism's emotional power to create beautiful melodic lines sung in Italian and German. The Romantic era also saw the creation of a new instrument in the woodwind family, the saxophone, which would gain special prominence in the century to come.
6. 6. Modern period (1900 to 1930): The Modern era of art and music came about in the early twentieth century. Classical composers of the early twentieth century reveled in breaking the harmonic and structural rules that had governed previous forms of classical music. Igor Stravinsky defiantly stretched instruments to their natural limits, embraced mixed meter, and challenged traditional notions of tonality in works like The Rite of Spring. French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel led a subgenre of twentieth-century music called Impressionism. Others like Dimitri Shostakovich, Paul Hindemith, and Béla Bartók stuck with classical forms like the piano concerto and the sonata, but challenged harmonic traditions. Perhaps most radical was the German composer Arnold Schoenberg who, along with disciples like Alban Berg and Anton Webern, disposed of tonality altogether and embraced serial (or 12-tone) music.
7. 7. Postmodern period (1930 to today): The art music of the twentieth century shifted starting in the 1930s and continuing into the post-World War II era, ushering in a style of music that is sometimes called postmodern or contemporary. Early purveyors of postmodern music include Olivier Messiaen, who combined classical forms with new instruments like the ondes martenot. Postmodern and contemporary composers like Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Górecki, György Ligeti, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and Christopher Rouse have blended the lines between tonal and atonal music, and they’ve blurred the lines between classical music and other forms like rock and jazz.

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