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

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 composer Claude
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, while Igor 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 twentieth-century'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.