The Six Eras of Music History

The 6 Eras of Music History

The Renaissance Period (1400-1600AD)

The Medieval Period (500-1400AD)

The Baroque Period (1600-1750AD)

By far the longest era of classical music, the Medieval music period stretches from 500AD to 1400, a time span of 900 years!

From 1400-1600 The Renaissance Era saw music become more expressive and complex.

The Baroque Era was the dominant style during the years 1600-1750.

Perhaps its most distinctive feature is the use of dense polyphony, where multiple complex melodies weave in and out of each other to impressive effect.

Important Renaissance composers, many of whom focused upon choral music, include Josquin des Prez, a Frenchman who wrote both secular and sacred works, Italian composer of religious works Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and the Englishman Thomas Tallis.

The era can be split into three mini-periods:

Early Medieval music (500-1150AD)

High Medieval music (1150-1300AD)

Late Medieval music (1300-1400AD)

Common practice harmony”, the functional tonal system that would remain prevalent through the Classical and Romantic periods, was also established.

Religious music was still ubiquitous, but secular music increased in popularity, as composers were allowed to write creative music for its own sake, and the invention of the printing press allowed for more widespread distribution.

The music was monophonic, meaning that it contained just a single melodic line, sung in unison, with no accompanying harmony parts or instrumental accompaniment.a

The Brandenburg Concertos are by Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest composers of all time:

The 20th Century (1900-Present)

The Classical Period (1730-1820AD)

The Romantic Period (1800-1910AD)

A vast range of totally new and radical music came out of the 20th Century, as composers reacted in different ways to the conventions and traditions of previous decades.

Following on from Beethoven’s developments, The Romantic Period (1800-1910) saw composers free themselves from the restrictive conventions of the Classical era, working on a grander scale with much more expressive and emotive content.

Confusingly, the word “Classical era” (capitalised) refers to this specific era (1730-1820), while “classical” (non-capitalised) refers to the whole western art music tradition that we are covering in this post.

One example of this was Impressionism, a movement in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, in which French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel used ambiguous tonality and unusual scales like the whole tone scale to suggest colour, mood and atmosphere.

The trend for programmatic works continued, with music inspired by nature, literature, legends, national identity and other non-musical stimuli.

Melody was now the order of the day: simple, elegant tunes and highly elegant tunes organised in neat, balanced phrases, in contrast to the complexity of the Baroque era.

German composer Richard Wagner was particularly influential in the development of opera, using much more adventurous harmony and increasing chromaticism, and pioneering the use of leitmotifs – musical phrases that represent specific characters.

A number of American composers, including Leonard Bernstein, George Gerswhin, looked towards jazz – then an exciting new artform – for inspiration.

Later on, minimalists like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich used minimal musical material, extensive repetition and electronic techniques, reflecting technological advances of the day.

Pioneered by Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, this was a chamber music format that most major composers would write for over the following centuries.