The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti was an important figure in the transition from Baroque to Classical. His unique compositional style is strongly related to that of the early Classical period. He is best known for composing more than five hundred one-movement keyboard sonatas. In Spain, Antonio Soler also produced valuable keyboard sonatas, more varied in form than those of Scarlatti, with some pieces in three or four movements.
Baroque music generally uses many harmonic fantasies and does not concentrate that much on the structure of the musical piece, musical phrases and motives.
In the classical period, the harmonic functions are simpler. However, the structure of the piece, the phrases and motives, are much more important in the tunes than in the Baroque period. Another important break with the past was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and improvisational ornament and focused on the points of modulation and transition.
By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he enabled powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. To highlight these episodes he used changes in instrumentation, melody, and mode. Among the most successful composers of his time, Gluck spawned many emulators, one of whom was Antonio Salieri.
Their emphasis on accessibility brought huge successes in opera, and in vocal music more widely: songs, oratorios, and choruses. These were considered the most important kinds of music for performance and hence enjoyed greatest success in the public estimation. It is sometimes called Galant , Rococo , or pre-Classical , or at other times early Classical [ citation needed ].
It is a period where some composers still working in the Baroque style flourish, though sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present—Bach, Handel, and Telemann all composed well beyond the point at which the homophonic style is clearly in the ascendant. Musical culture was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older style had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C. Bach was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well and knew how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form.
By the late s there were flourishing centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of symphonies were composed and there were bands of players associated with theatres. Opera or other vocal music was the feature of most musical events, with concertos and symphonies arising from the overture serving as instrumental interludes and introductions for operas and church services.
Over the course of the Classical period, symphonies and concertos developed and were presented independently of vocal music. There was not yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new style. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough. Many consider this breakthrough to have been made by C. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C. Bach and Gluck are often considered founders of the Classical style.
The first great master of the style was the composer Joseph Haydn. In the late s he began composing symphonies, and by he had composed a triptych Morning , Noon , and Evening solidly in the contemporary mode.
As a vice-Kapellmeister and later Kapellmeister, his output expanded: he composed over forty symphonies in the s alone. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was only one among many. At the time, before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music that set him above all other composers except perhaps George Frideric Handel.
Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic contrast and more emotionally appealing melodies, with sharpened character and individuality. This period faded away in music and literature: however, it influenced what came afterward and would eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in later decades. The Farewell Symphony , No. In , Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deployed the polyphonic techniques he had gathered from the previous era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas.
Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director for a prince, had far more resources and scope for composing than most and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his music. This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his career, sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music.
His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets , in which the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among the instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody and what is harmony.
This changes the way the ensemble works its way between dramatic moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious interruption. He then took this integrated style and began applying it to orchestral and vocal music. Whereas Haydn spent much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a virtuoso.
Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of a large audience.
Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more chromatic chords and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally , a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. Mozart rapidly came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music. In Mozart, Haydn found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource; the learning relationship moved in two directions.
There Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness that had been brewing for the previous 20 years. Listen to classical music radio channels The easiest way to discover the plethora of past and current composers is to listen to classical music radio channels. Classical Webcast has a vault of different channels which you can listen to online for free.
Search for the emotion in each piece Classical music song titles are rarely overly-descriptive. Close your eyes and visualise Imagination is a huge part of listening to classical music for beginners. Or search for them on YouTube or Spotify and see if you can listen to any more of their stuff online.
Read threads on classical music forums Many people find classical music helps them make sense of their everyday lives. Read threads on classical music forums like this one on Reddit to discover how particular pieces of music take on a special meaning to different people.
If you learn how individual songs mean so much to others, you might find they take on a new meaning to you. Attend a classical music concert Classical music concerts take place throughout the year across the globe. They provide you with an excellent way of seeing how the genre still plays a part in the modern world and see new performers play pieces composed by the masters hundreds of years ago.
To discover a classical music concert near you, just Google it. Music often had a 'programme' or story-line attached to it, sometimes of a tragic or despairing nature, occasionally representing such natural phenomena as rivers or galloping horses. The next hundred years would find composers either embracing whole-heartedly the ideals of Romanticism, or in some way reacting against them.
Of the early Romantic composers, two Nationalists deserve special mention, the Russian Glinka of Russlan and Ludmilla fame and the Bohemian Smetana composer of the popular symphonic poem Vltava or 'The Moldau'.
However, the six leading composers of the age were undoubtedly Berlioz , Chopin , Mendelssohn , Schumann , Liszt and Verdi. With the honourable exceptions of Brahms and Bruckner , composers of this period shared a general tendency towards allowing their natural inspiration free rein, often pacing their compositions more in terms of their emotional content and dramatic continuity rather than organic structural growth.
This was an era highlighted by the extraordinarily rapid appearance of the national schools, and the operatic supremacy of Verdi and Wagner. The eventual end of Romanticism came with the fragmentation of this basic style, composers joining 'schools' of composition, each with a style that was in vogue for a short period of time. Breiner Naxos 8. The period since the Great War is undoubtedly the most bewildering of all, as composers have pulled in various apparently contradictory and opposing directions.
Typical of the dilemma during the inter-war years, for example, were the Austrians, Webern and Lehar, the former was experimenting with the highly compressed and advanced form known as 'serial structure', while simultaneously Lehar was still indulging in an operetta style which would not have seemed out of place over half a century beforehand.
So diverse are the styles adopted throughout the greater part of the present century that only by experimentation can listeners discover for themselves whether certain composers are to their particular taste or not. However, the following recordings serve as an excellent introduction and will certainly repay investigation:. Keyword Search in Albums. Medieval c. Renaissance c. Baroque c. Classical c. Early Romantic c. Late Romantic c. Post 'Great War' Years c.
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Keyword Search. Composition Title. Disc Title. Catalogue No. Introduction to Classical Music.
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