A. Kori Hill
In classical music, we’ve developed a system for categorizing music by specific eras. This helps us understand particular works stylistically and chronologically.
First up is the Baroque era. This is roughly between 1600–1750. Composers from this era include Antonio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Ignatius Sancho. It is in this era that we start to see the instruments and repertoire that we most closely associate with classical music: concertos, sonatas, violins, flutes, cellos, orchestral ensembles, etc.
In music from this period, there tends to be an emphasis on breath and line. Instrumental music for strings requires a lot of breath between phrases (bows on this time were not as long and straight). And in music for organ, harpsichord, and voice, there is a big embrace of ornamentation and improvisatory, run-on phrases.
Next is the Classical period (yes, a bit confusing), which runs from 1750–1820. Here is where we get Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Ludwig van Beethoven. This era is defined by a move towards symmetry and balance in phrases and structure, less ornamentation, and more codification of compositional techniques.
For example, Haydn began to use sonata form in the first movement of his symphonies, a choice that hundreds of composers after him would imitate. Beethoven came of age during this period, and you can hear in his early works this attention to phrase symmetry and clear texture.
The Romantic period runs from 1820–1910, and scholars and critics often position Beethoven as the one to usher in this period. The Romantic era is all about emotion, intensity, density, and length. Beethoven’s music gets longer; Richard Wagner writes 5-hour operas (or, in the case of The Ring, 15 hours); Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Richard Schumann, and Johannes Brahms, and many, many others see Beethoven as a model for how to compose a symphony (and poor Johannes took twenty years to write his first one).
After the Romantic era, the categorization gets a little messy. Some folks call the period from the 20th century to the 21st century the Modern era. It was during this period that some composers broke with the standards of the Romantic period. We get Dmitri Shostakovich composing a five-movement violin concerto; Igor Stravinsky incorporating “primitive” Russian folk music in his score for the ballet The Rite of Spring; John Cage writing 4’33”; and Arnold Schoenberg exploring the possibilities of serialism.
Music written by living composers is sometimes called contemporary or new music, so you could say that now we’re in the New Music era or Contemporary Music era. But I need to point out something. Organizing music into eras is useful; it helps with organization and memorization. But it also leads us to focus on the few that we consider extraordinary and necessarily reflect the standard of the time. Yes, some twentieth-century composers were breaking with conventional tonality. But some of these same folks kept writing concertos (see Bela Bartok), and some embraced conventional tonalities from other traditions (see Florence Price).
What do we miss when we let the creative choices of a few define an entire segment of a tradition? As you learn about the different eras of classical music history, be sure to remember that this gives you only a sliver of a bigger, diverse picture.
