Classical Music
Classical music is also commonly known as art music – music with high aesthetic value. It is produced or rooted in the traditions of Western culture, including both religious and secular music. Here are the different styles […]
Classical music is also commonly known as art music – music with high aesthetic value. It is produced or rooted in the traditions of Western culture, including both religious and secular music. Here are the different styles […]
Classical music is also commonly known as art music – music with high aesthetic value. It is produced or rooted in the traditions of Western culture, including both religious and secular music. Here are the different styles and forms. Enjoy!
Medieval music was both sacred and secular. It consisted of songs, instrumental pieces, and liturgical music from about 500 A.D. to 1400. This era began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and ended sometime in the early fifteenth century. During the earlier medieval period, the liturgical genre, predominantly Gregorian chant, consisting of a single line of vocal melody, was monophonic and unaccompanied in free rhythm. By the end of the thirteenth century, the genre expanded to include secular topics, such as courtly love.
Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Music during this period were for worship purposes in both the Catholic and burgeoning Protestant Churches. They were also dance music and music for entertainment and edification of the courts and courtly lives. It was based on modes and were richer in texture in four or more parts, compared to Medieval music. Music during this period placed great emphasis on harmony and the flow of chords progressions.
Baroque music is a period or style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. Baroque music had long, flowing melodic lines and used lots of ornamentation such as trills and turns. It had contrapuntal texture where two or more melodic lines were combined and there was terraced dynamics, sometimes creating an echo effect.
These are the instruments used during this period:
It was during the 17th Century that the system of modes were replaced by the major/minor key system. Binary form was also created and gained popularity during this period. Other new forms and designs were Opera, Sonata, Oratorio, Suite, Fugue and Concerto.
Orchestra started to take shape during this period, mainly in the strings, and the violins became the dominant instrument, and most important in orchestras.
Music during this period emphasised on elegance and balance and had mainly simple diatonic harmony. Works were well-balanced, with simple melodies, supported by subordinate harmonies. There were significant uses of chords and homophonic with counterpoints. There was also a diverse range of mood and emotional expressions.
Romantic period was prominent in Europe around 1830 to 1900. The word romanticism was coined in England and was used to describe new ideas in painting and literature. This word was later adopted by musicians to describe the changes in musical style.
Beethoven pioneered Romanticism and expanded previously strict formulas for symphonies and sonatas and introduced a whole new approach to music. Music became expressive, often revealing the composers’ innermost thoughts and feelings about the different aspects of life. There were many expansive symphonies, virtuoso pianists, dramatic operas and passionate works which were greatly inspired by art and literature. Many revolved round these themes:
Piano solo is a musical composition written solely for piano, unlike piano concerto which is also a solo composition but accompanied by an orchestra or a large ensemble.
20th-century classical music describes art music that was written from 1901 to 2000) Musical style during this period was very different from the previous periods. Rhythm was complex, individual rhythms were used, and new rhythms and meters were common such as polyrhythms and polymeters. Melodies were often fragmented, dissonant and experimental.
These are some of the most celebrated and influential 20th-Century classical composers that everyone should know:
What force is more potent than love?
Stravinsky
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Rests always sound well.
Schönberg
Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one’s head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.
The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
As long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
A melody is not merely something you can hum.
I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.
In my view, the composer just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.
Prokofiev
When I hear about someone else’s pain, I feel pain too. I feel pain for everything – for people and animals.
Art destroys silence
Dmitri Shostaqkovich
I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.
Competitions are for horses, not artists.
Béla Bartók
You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
Charles Ives
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and giving life.
The only love affair I have ever had was with music.
Ravel
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
Life is a lot like iazz…it’s best when you improvise.
Gershwin
True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.
Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)
Rachmaninoff was a brilliant Russian pianist, conductor and composer who amazed his teachers with his jaw-dropping ability as a pianist and composer. He created a storm with his First Piano Concerto when he was just 18.
Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel.
Rachmaninoff
The best animations of all time that turned classical pieces alive.