what is classical music essay

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What is classical music? You know it when you hear it — or you think you do — but the more precisely you try to answer the question, the more elusive the answer gets.

One of the first things you learn when you're introduced to classical music is that the term "classical" most properly describes music composed from about 1750 to 1820. That includes the work of Haydn and Mozart, but only most of Beethoven. It doesn't include Bach — or Wagner. It definitely doesn't include Debussy or Copland, though you'll hear plenty of all of those artists on Classical MPR and other classical music stations.

The term "classical music" first began to appear in the early 19th century, and gained popularity among music lovers who regarded the period from Bach (technically, a Baroque composer) to Beethoven as a shining era in music history. The later 19th century ultimately became known as the Romantic Era, but when it came to telling the general public what their local orchestras were playing, Berlioz and Brahms were slipped in under the broad "classical music" rubric. Eventually, 20th-century composers from Stravinsky to Stockhausen crowded under the umbrella as well.

Musicologists can stay up all night talking about the shape and trajectory of classical music, debating questions like the importance of the score, the role of improvisation, and the nature of musical form. Where you come down on these questions determines who precisely you think falls into the broadly defined genre of "classical music." Renaissance troubadours? Frank Zappa? Duke Ellington? Yes, no, maybe?

Everyday enjoyment of classical music doesn't require you to strain your brain with such fine distinctions, but it definitely helps to understand that classical music is a living tradition that's being defined and redefined every day. Although Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and their contemporaries will always have pride of place in the world of classical music, the long history of what we now consider classical music didn't begin with them and certainly didn't end with them.

The classical music tradition lives on in composers writing scores for performance by orchestras, for chamber ensembles, for solo performers — and also in unexpected places. Even if you never listen to "classical music," you're constantly hearing music that's been influenced by the classical tradition, from precisely composed video-game scores to Beatles songs influenced by avant-garde composers to heavy-metal guitarists stealing chords (maybe without even knowing it) from Richard Wagner.

Many of you are lifelong classical music enthusiasts, and some of you are new listeners or casual fans. However well you know classical music, we want to help you know it better — and hear it in a new way.

• Learning to Listen to Baroque Music
• Learning to Listen: Back to School
• Learning to Listen: Introduction to Musical Form

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A brief history of classical music

Friday, February 24, 2023

A guided tour of the key composers and artistic movements that have made classical music the rich art-form that today still entrances, moves and uplifts

Johann Sebastian Bach

The birth of classical music

Fixing a date for ‘the beginning of classical music’ is as elusive as pin-pointing the millennium in which dinosaurs became extinct. 1000 AD merely provides a convenient starting point for the birth of modern Western music. It was around that date when the idea first occurred of combining several voices to sing a melody; it was the time, too, when the Church, for so long the most important influence and inspiration on the development of music, recognised a need to standardise the single-line unaccompanied chants that had been used for centuries in sacred ceremonies.

Gregorian chant

This early Christian music, derived from Greek songs and from the chanting used in synagogues, had evolved into what we now call plainsong, plainchant or Gregorian chant, the traditional music of the Western Church – a single melodic line, usually sung without accompaniment. (The Gregorian chant melodies sung today date from after the death of Pope Gregory in 604 AD.) Without any accepted written system to denote the pitch or length of a note, the scoring of music was inevitably a haphazard affair.

The invention of music notation

Guido d’Arezzo, a Benedictine monk whose life as a teacher and musical theorist usefully coincided with the Church’s need for musical unification, is generally credited with the introduction of a stave of horizontal lines by which one could accurately record the pitch of notes. He also came up with what we now call the tonic sol-fa system, used by singers, in which notes are named by their position in the scale, as opposed to being named after letters of the alphabet (a practice derived from the ancient Greeks).

Still there was no method of notating the length of a note. Without this, it is difficult to see how any sense of rhythm could be measured. Some scholars say that this was defined by the natural accentuation and emphasis of speech patterns and that therefore no special device was needed – the singers (without a conductor, of course) provided their own ‘flow’ and expression.

Saint Hildegard of Bingen (born c 1098) left an extraordinary legacy of works from around this time, many of which have been recorded frequently, with one of the most outstanding recordings being ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’, a Gramophone Award-winning album from Gothic Voices with Emma Kirkby and Christopher Page, which has remained one of the best-sellers in the Hyperion catalogue for 40 years. David Fallows once noted in Gramophone that ‘part of her genius is the way she uses a relatively restricted melodic vocabulary with astonishing resource ... I keep hoping to find a medieval melodist who is quite as interesting.’

● Alleluias – a specialist's guide : for many people, the term ‘alleluia’ brings to mind the eponymous Handel chorus, but, as Peter Quantrill argues, there are many and varied examples of the genre through the ages and into the 21st century.

The rules of harmony

With two of the three main elements of music – i.e. Melody and Rhythm – in the process of being codified, the idea of Harmony came into the world. Naturally, not all the singers in a choir would have the same vocal range, a problem for the comfortable unison singing of the psalms. So voices began to be divided according to natural range, chanting the Plainsong in parallel lines at two pitches, five notes apart (C-G for example) The gap between the two notes is called an interval, thus the singers sang the interval of a perfect fifth. From this apparently simple concept, but which took so long to implement, the idea grew that while one line sang the Plainsong (the ‘tenor’ or ‘holding’ part), others could weave another tune around it.

Rules were drawn up as to which part of the service could use which type of intervals. Gradually, the interval of a third (C-E), for long considered to be a dischord, was allowed. Within the moderately short time-scale of a century, we have Pérotin of Notre Dame – one of the early masters of Polyphony – writing music for three and four voices.

Pérotin of Notre Dame

Secular music: the troubadours

Parallel to the development of liturgical (Church) music ran the flowering of the secular music of the troubadours, the poet-musicians who sang of beautiful ladies, chivalry, spring and suchlike. These were the successors of the court minstrels, employed to sing the great sagas and legends, who themselves had their less-educated counterparts in the jongleurs, itinerant singers and instrumentalists. Nobly-born for the most part, the troubadours came from Provence and Aquitaine (the trouvères , their northern counterparts, and the minnesingers of Germany were almost contemporary). Only about 60 manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère poetry survive today and few of them contain musical notation which, again, have indications only of pitch but not of note length.

Troubadours

These 200 years witnessed the birth of harmony, of modern musical notation, the dance and song craze which pervaded Europe during the time of the Crusades and the complex structure of the troubadours’ poetry – more than enough to ignite the imagination of Renaissance man.

The Renaissance

The study and use of chords is what we call Harmony. Diaphony – ‘two-voiced’ music – dominated all musical composition till the 13th century; this two-part singing as applied to plainchant was also called organum . Voices would sing an octave apart (C-C), a perfect fifth (C-G), a perfect fourth (C-F) or a major third (C-E) apart.

Polyphonic music: The New Art

Polyphony is also concerned with the sounding of more than one note, but through melody – the word means ‘many-sounds’, ‘many-voiced’. The addition of a third, fourth or more independent musical lines sung or sounded together was the next obvious development, and it was the extraordinary Philippe de Vitry, a French bishop, musical theorist, composer, poet and diplomat, who showed the way forward in a famous book called The New Art – Ars Nova (as opposed to the Ars Antiqua of Guido d’Arezzo). Time-signatures indicated a rhythm for the music and improvements in notation symbolised note lengths – the ancestors of our minim, breve and semibreve. Guillaume de Machaut (another French priest, poet and composer) took de Vitry’s ideas a stage further and wrote both secular songs and settings of the Mass (1364 – the earliest known complete setting by one composer) with three and four polyphonic voices.

● Recommended recording review: 'Machaut – The lion of nobility' (Orlando Consort)

Though France was the musical centre of Europe at this time, Italy was developing its own ars nova independently with music that reflected the warmth and sensuality of the country, in contrast to the more intellectual Gallic writing. England, less affected by ars nova , did not make a significant contribution to any musical development until the arrival of John Dunstable. Living in France as the court composer to the Duke of Burgundy (the younger brother of Henry V), Dunstable used rhythmic phrases, traditional plainchant and added other free parts, combining them into a flowing, mellifluous style. Nearly 60 pieces of his music still survive.

Guillaume Dufay

Dunstable in turn influenced the Burgundian composers Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois, whose music can be said to be the stylistic bridge between ars nova and the fully developed polyphony of the 15th century. The technical aspects of musical composition and the almost mathematical fascination with note combination began slowly to open the door to the personality of a composer being reflected in his music.

● Top 10 Renaissance composers : our beginner's guide to the greatest composers of the Renaissance period.

Out of the church

By the middle of the 15th century, the royal palaces and the great houses of the noblemen had usurped the Church as the single most important influence on the course of music (in 1416, Henry V of England employed more than 30 voices in the Chapel Royal while the Papal Chapel had only nine). One by-product was the closer relationship between secular music and the music of the Church, a cross-pollination which benefited the development of both. The musicians who passed through the Burgundian court disseminated its style and learning to all points of the European compass.

Josquin Desprez and expressive music

The most noticeable advances during this period were the increased freedom composers gave to their vocal lines and the difference in the treatment of the texts they set. Previously, words had to fit the music; now the reverse was the case and this is no better illustrated than by the work of one of the next generation of composers to become renowned throughout Europe, Josquin Desprez. His music incorporates a greater variety of expression than any previously – there are even flashes of quirky humour – and includes attempts at symbolism where the musical ideas match those of the text. With various voices singing in polyphony, it is difficult to follow the words; where the subject called for the words to be heard clearly, Josquin wrote music that had the different voices singing different notes but the same words at the same time – chordal music, in other words.

Not surprisingly, Josquin has been called ‘the first composer whose music appeals to our modern sense of art’. After him, it is easy for our ears to follow the development of music into the language which is familiar to us today through the works of the great classical composers of two centuries later.

Josquin Desprez

The 16th century witnessed four major musical phenomena: the polyphonic school reached its zenith, the tradition of instrumental music was founded, the first opera was produced and music began to be printed for the first time. For most people, the opportunity to see and read music had simply not been there; musicians could now, for the first time, stand around a score printed in a book and sing or play their part. Limited and expensive though it was, music was now available. No wonder it flourished so rapidly.

A musical explosion

It’s hard to conceive now of the central importance of the Christian Church at this time. The buildings which the men of the Renaissance erected with such splendour and confidence symbolised the age of ‘re-birth’ and the music of the time rose to fill the naves of the great European cathedrals. Palestrina in Italy, Lassus in the Netherlands and Byrd in England carried on from where Josquin had left off to produce complex and richly expressive works which took the art of polyphonic writing for the voice to new heights and demonstrated man’s ability to express his faith with a glory and fervour that no previous century had matched.

Giovanni Palestrina

Counterpoint

How was this rich cloth of musical gold woven? One distinguished writer on music, Percy Scholes, drew an illuminating analogy on musical ‘fabric’ when discussing the music of Palestrina. ‘Woven’ he felt, was an appropriate word for this kind of composition. ‘The music consists of the intertwining of a fixed number of strands. And as [the composer] weaves he is producing a ‘woof’ as well as a ‘warp’. Looked at as warp the composition is a horizontal combination of melodies; looked at as woof it is a perpendicular collection of chords. The composer necessarily has both aspects in his mind as he pens his piece, but the horizontal (or ‘warp’) aspect is probably uppermost with him. Such music as this we speak of as ‘Contrapuntal’ or as ‘in Counterpoint’. The ‘woof’ (= perpendicular, ie ‘Harmonic’) element is there, but is less observable than the ‘warp’ (= horizontal, i.e. ‘Contrapuntal’). A moment’s thought will show that all Contrapuntal music must also be Harmonic, and a second moment’s thought that not all Harmonic music need be Counterpoint.’

It had taken 1000 years from the earliest Plainsong for the tradition to develop into the elaborate, highly sophisticated art form, which produced such masterpieces as Palestrina’s  Stabat mater , Victoria’s  Ave verum Corpus  and Byrd’s  O Quam Gloriosum .

● Recommended recording review: Byrd Edition, Volume 13 - Infelix ego (The Cardinall's Musick / Andrew Carwood)

The madrigal and the birth of opera​

Now, new preoccupations challenged composers. The reverent, lush choral works of the Church, mainly from Northern Europe, became fertilised by the lively, sunny dances and songs of the south. The secular counterparts of the church musicians led to the madrigal, a contrapuntal setting of a poem, usually about 12 lines in length, and whose subject was usually amorous or pastoral. The emphasis was on the quality of word-setting and the form proved remarkably popular if short-lived – especially in England (perhaps because of our great literary heritage) where the likes of Gibbons, Weelkes and Morley were the madrigal’s finest exponents.

The madrigals, like the liturgical motets and settings of the Mass, were all for unaccompanied voices – that was how the vast majority of music produced up to this time was conceived. It wasn’t until the end of the 14th century that instrumental music began to emerge as an art-form in its own right. The recorder, lute, viol and spinet had played their part in dance music and in accompanying voices (occasionally replacing them) but now composers such as Byrd, Gibbons, Farnaby and Frescobaldi began to write music for specific instruments, though it must be said that the art form did not truly flourish until the Baroque era. Musicians would join together to play a series of varying dance tunes, forming a loosely-constructed suite; or a player might improvise his own tune round another’s – a ‘fancy’ or ‘fantasia’; or they might compose variations on a tune played over the same repeating bass line – ‘variations on a ground’ as it’s called. Other innovations were by the Italians Andrea Gabrieli ( c 1510-86) – the first to combine voices with brass instruments – and his nephew Giovanni (1557-1612), whose antiphonal effects for choirs of brass instruments might have written for our modern stereo systems.

William Byrd

And it was from Italy that the next important step in musical history was taken. Indeed Italy was the country – actually a collection of small independent states at the time, ruled by a number of affluent and cultured families – which would dominate the musical world for a century and a half from 1600. Such was the power of Italian influence at this time that music adopted the language as its lingua franca. To this day, composers almost universally write their performance directions in Italian. One particular word, opera, described a new art form: that of combining drama and music. No one had thought of the concept till the end of the 16th century.

In the late 16th century, artists, writers and architects became interested in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. In Florence, a group of the artistic intelligentsia became interested in how the ancient Greek dramas were performed. Experimenting with declaiming the more poetic passages and using a few chords of instrumental music to accompany other passages in natural speech rhythm, the idea of music reflecting, supporting and commenting upon dramatic action was born:  dramma per musica  (‘drama by means of music’), a play with a musical setting.

Claudio Monteverdi

Into the ring then came one of the supreme musicians of history, Claudio Monteverdi . He did not write the first opera (that honour goes to Jacopo Peri and his  Dafne , now lost, of 1594 or 1597) but with one work,  Orfeo (1607) he drew up the future possibilities of the medium. Solo singers were given a dramatic character to portray and florid songs to sing, there were choruses, dances, orchestral interludes, scenery. Opera was a markedly different entertainment to anything that had gone before but, more importantly, it was a completely new way of using music. The earliest known opera by a woman is La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina by Francesca Caccini, written to celebrate the visit of Archduke Karl of Styria to Florence during the carnival season of 1625, and Caccini's masterpiece. Caccini was the first professional female composer, and there is a fine recording of La liberazione by La Pifarescha led by Elena Sartori on Glossa.

The Baroque period

Monteverdi’s successors such as Pier Cavalli and Marc’Antonio Cesti developed a type of flowing, lyrical song inspired by the flow of spoken Italian – bel canto (‘beautiful singing’) which in turn encouraged the prominence of the singer. Dramatic truth soon went out of the window in favour of the elaborate vocal displays of the opera soloists – composers were only too happy to provide what their new public wanted – and no class of singers were more popular than the castrati. Feted wherever they appeared, the castrati, who had had their testicles removed as young boys to preserve their high voices, were highly paid and immensely popular, a not dissimilar phenomenon to The Three Tenors of today (with two small differences). The practice of castration to produce an entertainer, an extraordinarily barbaric concept, was only halted in the early 19th century. The last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, actually survived until 1922 and made a dozen or so records in 1902.

St Paul had written that women should keep silent in church. They were therefore not available for the taxing high lines in church music. If the origins of the castrati could be laid firmly at the door of the Church, similar dogma can also be held responsible for the slow progress of instrumental composition. From the earliest times the Church had voiced its disapproval of the practice. St Jerome had declared that no Christian maiden should know what a lyre or flute looked like (let alone hear what they sounded like). The weakening of the Church’s authority after the Reformation encouraged composers in the writing of instrumental music for groups, music moreover that took into account the relative strengths and colours of the different instruments, another new concept. The same change of emphasis led also to a flood of brilliant instrumental soloists. Among them was a brilliant Italian-born violinist named Jean-Baptiste Lully who went to France in 1646. Here he worked for King Louis XIV, the extravagant builder of Versailles who employed 120 musicians in various bands. An orchestra of ‘Twenty-four Violins’ provided music at the French court; with Lully’s addition of flutes, oboes, bassoons, trumpets and timpani, the modern orchestra began to emerge.

Barbara Strozzi (1619-77) was one of the most widely-published composers of her time and her secular songs have a central place in many singer's repertories centuries later. There are dozens of good recordings of Strozzi's music to explore, but most recently the 2023 Gramophone Concept Award-winner 'Battle Cry: She Speaks' by Helen Charlston and Toby Carr featured the compelling ‘L'Eraclito amoroso’ and ‘La travagliata’. In her review, Alexandra Coghlan noted Charlston's 'articulation that pulls us up short, swift shifts of tone and colour that catch the mercurial play of musical light through Strozzi’s monologues'. 

The sonata forms

Another important by-product of the Italian opera was the introduction of the sonata – the term originally simply meant a piece to be sounded (played), as opposed to sung (cantata). Although it quickly took on a variety of forms, the sonata began with the Italian violinists imitating the vocal display elements of opera – a single melody played against a harmonised background or, if you like, accompanied by chords. This was a huge difference from the choral works of a century before driven by their polyphonic interweavings. Now there was music which, even if there was no background accompaniment, the listener’s ears could supply the harmony mentally – you could tell where the tune was going to resolve, you could sense its shape and destination more easily. With the musical emphasis on harmony – a key feature of the coming century and a half – rhythm began to take an increasingly important part. Chordal patterns naturally fall in sequences, in regular measures or bars. Listen to a chaconne by Purcell or Handel and you realise that the theme is not a tune but a sequence of chords. Measuring the beats in a bar ( one -two or one - two-three or one -two-three-four – the emphasis always on the first beat) gives the music a sense of form and helps its onward progress. Phrases lead the ear to the next sequence like the dialogue between two people, exchanging thoughts in single words, in short sentences or in long paragraphs. Sing a simple hymn tune like All people that on earth do dwell and you are aware of what music had now acquired – a strong tonal centre.

Henry Purcell

Makers of musical instruments responded by adapting and improving instruments: the great Italian violin makers Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri, the Ruckers family of Antwerp with its harpsichords and the Harris family of England building organs.

A final contribution to this period was made by Italian opera. The use of the orchestra in opera naturally led to the expression of dramatic musical ideas – one reason why the Italian orchestra developed faster than elsewhere. Round about the start of the 18th century composers began to write overtures in three sections (fast-slow-fast), providing the model for the classical sonata form used in instrumental pieces, concertos and symphonies for the next 200 years and more.

Thus this ‘homophonic’ period, emphasising music with a single melody and harmonic accompaniment, melted seamlessly during the 17th century into the Baroque era of Vivaldi , Bach and Handel .

● Top 10 Baroque composers

The concerto is born

The concerto developed from the dance suites popular in Italy at the beginning of the 17th century, known as the sonata da camera . Originally a composition that contrasted two groups of instrumentalists with each other, the form developed into the concerto grosso (‘great concerto’) of which the first leading exponent was Arcangelo Corelli. Here a group of solo string instrumentalists alternate with the main body of strings in a work, usually of three or four movements. Geminiani, Albinoni, Torelli, Handel and others contributed to the form. The solo concerto was but a short step from here where a soloist is contrasted with (later pitted against) the orchestra. No concertos of this period have achieved the popularity of Vivaldi’s whose 500 essays in the genre (mainly for strings but sometimes for wind instruments) are the product of one of the most remarkable musical minds of the early 18th century. The Four Seasons , among the best known and most frequently-played pieces of classical music, illustrates the new concept.

● Top 10 Vivaldi recordings : 10 of the best Vivaldi recordings, including Gramophone Award-winners and Editor's Choice albums

Northern Europe provided the springboard for the rapid development of keyboard music: the North German school of organ music, founded by Frescobaldi and Sweelinck a century before, with its interest in contrapuntal writing, laid the way for the likes of Pachelbel and Buxtehude whose line reached its peak in the great works of Bach. Meanwhile Rameau and Couperin in France were producing short descriptive harpsichord pieces (as well as operas) in a style that is called ‘rococo’ – from the French rocaille , a term originally alluding to fancy shell and scroll work in art. It was predominantly diverting rather than elevating and rococo usefully defines the character of lighter music written in the Baroque period, especially when contrasted with the works of the two musical heavyweights of the time, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.

Bach in his own time was considered old-fashioned, a provincial composer from central Germany. But his music contains some of the noblest and most sublime expressions of the human spirit and with him the art of contrapuntal writing reached its zenith. The 48 Preludes and Fugues for The Well-Tempered Clavier explore all the permutations of fugal writing in all the major and minor keys; his final work, The Art of Fugue (left incomplete at his death) takes a mathematical delight in the interweaving of contrapuntal variations on the same theme. Yet the technical brilliance of Bach’s music is subsumed in the expressive power of his compositions, in particular his organ music, church cantatas and the great St Matthew Passion and Mass in B minor. His instrumental music is evidence that he was by no means always the stern God-fearing Lutheran – the exuberant six Brandenburg Concertos show that he was well acquainted with the sunny Italian way of doing things and many of his most beautiful and deepest thoughts are reserved for the concertos and orchestral suites. His influence on composers and musicians down the years has been immeasurable. For many he remains the foundation stone of their art.

● Recommended recording review: Bach's St Matthew Passion (Pygmalion / Raphaël Pichon)

Bach’s great contemporary, Handel, also came from Germany but in contrast was a widely travelled, man-of-the-world who settled in England and became a shrewd entrepreneur and manipulator of musical affairs. In instrumental forms, such as the  concerto grosso , Handel was equally at home writing in homophonic or polyphonic style and introduced a variety of wind/string combinations in his colourful scoring. He developed the typical 17th-century dance suite into such famous (and still immensely popular) occasional works as  The Water Music  and  Royal Fireworks Music . Opera was a field into which Bach never ventured but Handel – between 1711 and 1729, – produced nearly 30 operas in the Italian style until the public tired of these when, ever the pragmatist, he turned to oratorio. An oratorio is an extended setting of a (usually) religious text in dramatic form but which does not require scenery or stage action. Handel’s have an immense dramatic and emotional range and often employ daring harmonies, never mind the unending stream of glorious melodies and uplifting choruses.

George Frideric Handel

Bach was the last great composer to be employed by the church, fittingly, for the church had been the mainspring for the progress of polyphonic music and Bach was the  ne plus ultra  of the style. Henceforward, musical patronage came from the nobility and the nobility preferred music that was elegant, entertaining and definitely not smacking of anything ‘churchy’. Following the 17th century’s example of the French court and Italian principalities, every European duke worth his salt aspired to his own orchestra and music director. One such was the court of Mannheim where an orchestra under the direction of Johann Stamitz raised orchestral playing to a standard unheard of previously. A new era, breaking away from the contrapuntal writing of the later Baroque, was ushered in.

● The 50 best Johann Sebastian Bach recordings

● The 50 greatest George Frideric Handel recordings

The Classical era

The term ‘Classical Music’ has two meanings: used to describe any music which is supposedly ‘heavy’ (as opposed to pop or jazz as in ‘I can’t stand classical music’) and also a certain period in the development of music, the Classical era. This can be summarised as music which is notable for its masterly economy of form and resources and for its lack of overt emotionalism. If Bach and Handel dominated the first half of the 17th century,  Haydn  and  Mozart  are their counterparts for the latter half and represent all the virtues of the Classical style.

● Top 10 Classical era composers : the Classical era was dominated by many of the greatest composers in the history of music, including Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and Schubert

This can be traced back to a generation or so before the birth of Haydn to the rococo style of Couperin and Rameau and, more powerfully, in the invigorating keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti whose more than 500 short sonatas composed in his sixties demonstrate a brilliance that only Bach equalled. Scarlatti, though, writing on a smaller scale, had the specific intent of delighting and instructing his pupil, the Queen of Spain. His near-contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann brought the rococo style to Germany. Lighter and even more fecund than Bach, Telemann was held in far greater esteem in his lifetime than Johann Sebastian. Despite his stated credo (‘He who writes for the many does better work than he who writes only for the few… I have always aimed at facility. Music ought not to be an effort, an occult science’) the two greatly admired each other to such an extent that Bach named his son Carl Philipp Emanuel after Telemann and chose him as godfather.

Georg Philipp Telemann

CPE Bach’s music represents a cross-roads between the Franco-Italian rococo and the emerging classical schools – indeed, in some of his keyboard music he seems to anticipate Beethoven. His piano sonatas, making use of the expressive powers of the newly invented pianoforte, lead us to redefine the term ‘sonata’ as used in the previous century. Now the sonata became a formalised structure with related keys and themes. These Bach developed into extended movements, as opposed to the short movements of the Baroque form. Listening to CPE, perhaps the most original and daring composer of the mid-18th century, one becomes aware of the serious and comical, the inspired and the routine, lying side by side with engaging unpredictability.

Parallel to this was the work of Johann Stamitz. His music is rarely heard today yet he and his son Carl (1746-1801) were pioneers in the development of the symphony. This form had grown out of the short quick-slow-quick one-movement overtures or sinfonias of Italian opera. Stamitz, in the employ of the Mannheim court, had one of the most distinguished orchestras in Europe under his direction. The symphonies he wrote were to be the pattern for those of Haydn and Mozart – in them we can see, as in CPE Bach’s sonatas, use of related keys, two contrasted first movement subjects (themes) and the graceful working out and development of material. He was the first to introduce the clarinet into the orchestra (and was probably the first to write a concerto for the instrument), also allowing the brass and woodwind greater prominence. His orchestral crescendos, a novel effect at this time, were said to have excited audiences to rise from their seats.

Italy had dominated the musical world of the 17th and early 18th centuries with its operas and great violinists. From the middle of the 18th century, the centre of musical pre- eminence moved to Vienna, a position it would retain until the last of the Hapsburg emperors in the early years of the 20th century. The Hapsburgs loved music and imported the best foreign musicians to court; the imperial chapel became a second centre of musical excellence. Equally important was Vienna’s location at the centre of Europe. With the Viennese court as its focus, all kinds of influences met and mingled from nearby Germany, Bohemia and Italy.

Sonata form and the symphony

There is less than half a century between the death of Handel (1759) and the first performance of Beethoven ’s Fidelio  (1809). Bach and Handel were still composing when Haydn was a teenager. To compare the individual ‘sound world’ of any of these four composers is to hear amazingly rapid progress in musical thinking. Without doubt, the most important element of this was the development of the sonata and symphonic forms. During this period, a typical example generally followed the same basic pattern: four movements – 1) the longest, sometimes with a slow introduction, 2) slow movement, 3) minuet, 4) fast, short and light in character. Working within this formal structure, each movement in turn had its own internal structure and order of progress. Most of Haydn’s and Mozart’s sonatas, symphonies and chamber music are written in accordance with this pattern and three-quarters of all Beethoven’s music conforms to ‘sonata form’ in one way or another.

Joseph Haydn

Haydn’s contribution to musical history is immense, he was nicknamed ‘the father of the symphony’ (despite Stamitz’s prior claim) and was progenitor of the string quartet. Like all his well-trained contemporaries, Haydn had a thorough knowledge of polyphony and counterpoint (and, indeed, was not averse to using it) but his music is predominantly homophonic. His 104 symphonies cover a wide range of expression and harmonic ingenuity. The same is true of the string quartets. With its perfect balance of string sound (two violins, viola and cello), the implicit economy in the scoring, the precision and elegance in the handling of the medium, the string quartet is the quintessential Classical art form.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart composed 41 symphonies and in the later ones (try the famous opening of No 40 in G minor) enters a realm beyond Haydn’s – searching, moving and far from impersonal. This is even more true of the great series of piano concertos, among music’s most sublime creations, where the writing becomes deeply involved – the slow movement of the A major Concerto (K488) is grief-stricken, anticipating the writing of a future generation. It was Mozart, too, who raised opera to new heights. Gluck had single-handedly broken away from the ossified, singer-dominated Italian opera and shown in works such as  Orfeo ed Euridice  (1762) that music must correspond to the mood and style of the piece, colour and complement the stage action; arias should be part of the continuous action and not merely stuck in to display the singer’s vocal talents. Mozart went further and in his four masterpieces  The Marriage of Figaro ,  Così fan tutte ,  Don Giovanni  and  The Magic Flute  revealed more realistic characters, truer emotions (and, of course, incomparably greater music) than anything that had gone before. Here, for the first time, opera reflected the foibles and aspirations of mankind, themes on which the Romantic composers were to dwell at length.

● The 50 best Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart recordings

● Haydn - the poor man’s Mozart?

Revolution in the air

‘The Old Order Changeth’: for the first half of the 19th century, Europe, taking its cue from the French Revolution and American War of Independence, was imbued with a spirit of general political unrest, culminating in the 1848 uprisings. Nationalism, the struggle for individual freedom and self-expression were reflected and indeed created by all the arts – the one fed off the other. The neat, well-ordered regime of the periwig and minuet gave way to the impetuous, passionate world of the tousle-headed revolutionary.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven coupled his genius for music with profoundly held political beliefs and an almost religious certainty about his purpose. With the possible exception of Wagner , no other composer has, single-handedly, changed the course of music so dramatically and continued to develop and experiment throughout his entire career. His early music, built on the Classical paths trod by Haydn and Mozart, demonstrates his individuality in taking established musical structures and re-shaping them to his own ends. Unusual keys and harmonic relationships are explored, while as early as the Third Symphony ( Eroica ), the music is vastly more inventive and cogent than anything Mozart achieved even in a late masterpiece like the  Jupiter . Six more symphonies followed, all different in character, all attempting new goals of human expression, culminating in the great  Choral  Symphony (No 9) with its ecstatic final choral movement celebrating man’s existence. No wonder so many composers felt daunted by attempting the symphonic form after Beethoven and that few ever attempted more than the magic Beethovenian number of nine.

● How Beethoven’s symphonies changed the world : Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies have influenced every generation of composers since they were written. Riccardo Chailly talks to Philip Clark about the enduring power of the symphonies

His chamber music tells a similar story, building on the classical form of the string quartet, gradually making it his own (listen to the Middle Period  Razumovsky  quartets) until the final group of late quartets which contain music of profound spirituality and deeply felt personal statements – light years from the recent world of his illustrious predecessors. The cycle of 32 piano sonatas reflect a similar portrait of his life’s journey; the final three of his five piano concertos and the sublime Violin Concerto are on a par with the symphonies and quartets. His single opera  Fidelio , while not a success as a piece of theatre, seems to express all the themes that Beethoven held most dear – his belief in the brotherhood of man, his disgust at revolutionaries-turned-dictators, the redeeming strength of human love. All this was achieved, romantically enough, while he himself struggled with profound deafness. Beethoven’s unquenchable spirit and his ability to use music to express himself places him in the forefront of man’s creative achievements. ‘Come the man, come the moment’ – Beethoven’s lifespan helpfully delineates the late classical period and the early Romantics. His music is the titanic span between the two.

Franz Schubert

Those who followed revered him as a god.  Schubert , the next great Viennese master, 27 years younger but who survived him by a mere 18 months, was in awe of Beethoven. He did not progress the symphonic or sonata forms, there was no revolutionary zeal in his make-up. What he gave was the gift of melody. Schubert is arguably the greatest tunesmith the world has ever known and in his more than 600 songs established the German song (or Lied) tradition. From his  Erlkönig  (1815) onwards, Schubert unerringly caught the heart of a poem’s meaning and reflected it in his setting. For the first time, too, the piano assumed equal importance with the vocal part, painting a tone picture or catching the mood of the piece in its accompaniment.

The Romantic piano

And it was the new iron-strung pianos which came to be the favoured instrument of the first part of the Romantic era. A bewildering number of composer-pianists were born just after the turn of the century, the most prominent of whom were  Liszt , Chopin , Schumann and  Mendelssohn . Of these, Mendelssohn relied on the elegant, traditional structures of Classicism in which to wrap his refined poetic and melodic gifts. Many of his piano works (his  Songs Without Words , for example) and orchestral pieces ( Hebrides  Overture and  Italian  Symphony, No 4) describe nature, places, emotions and so forth. Schumann, too, favoured such short musical essays with titles like  Traümerei  and  Des Abends  to evoke a mood or occasion – ‘characteristic pieces’ they were called, ‘programme music’ later on. The undisputed master of the romantic keyboard style was Frédéric Chopin. Almost his entire oeuvre is devoted to the piano in a string of highly individual and expressive works composed in the short period of 20 years. Fifty years after his early death in 1849, composers were still writing pieces heavily influenced by him. Chopin rarely used descriptive titles for his work (beyond such labels as Nocturne, Berceuse or Barcarolle). The technical and lyrical possibilities of the instrument were raised to new heights in such masterpieces as the Four Ballades, the final two (of three) piano sonatas and the many short dance-based compositions. Most of these derived from his homeland of Poland and, as a self-imposed exile living in Paris, Chopin was naturally drawn to expressing his love of his country. Nationalism of a much more fervent kind was to be a key factor in the music of composers writing later in the Romantic tradition (Chopin himself, incidentally, disliked being labelled ‘a Romantic’).

Louise Farrenc's three symphonies, as Richard Wigmore wrote in Gramophone , ‘represent a double triumph: over sexual prejudice, in an age when female creative artists suffered from so many social constraints, and over the French establishment’s resistance to a quintessential German genre.’ Farrenc's First Symphony was written in 1841 and her Third in 1847, and have been given an outstanding recording by Insula Orchestra and Laurence Equilbey (must read: Laurence Equilbey on Louise Farrenc the symphonist ), about which Wigmore wrote: ‘these are among the earliest symphonies, if not the earliest, by any female composer. Yet when you listen to them Farrenc’s sex is irrelevant. This is music whose inventiveness and melodic fecundity can stand comparison with virtually any mid-19th-century symphony, and Equilbey and her forces prove ideal, committed advocates.’

But to truly define ‘the Romantic era’ in music, we have to look at the three composers who dominated the musical world for the second and third quarters of the 19th century and who pushed music onward to the dawn of the next: Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner.

● Top 10 Romantic composers

● Forgotten Romantic violin concertos

The Romantic era

Rebellion and freedom of expression lie at the heart of the Romantic movement in music, literature, painting and architecture, a self-conscious breaking of the bonds and belief in the right of the artist. Liszt, Byronic in looks and temperament, the greatest pianist of the day, gave us the solo piano recital, the ‘symphonic poem’ – the extended orchestral equivalent of Schumann’s ‘characteristic pieces’ – and a bewildering variety of music in all shapes and forms. The B minor Piano Sonata, in which all the elements of traditional sonata form are subsumed into an organic whole, is one of the cornerstones of the repertory; his final piano works anticipate the harmonies of Debussy, Bartók and beyond. While all of his music is by no means profound – there’s a great deal of gloss and glitter – his adventurous scores and his patronage and encouragement of any young composer who came to him made him one of the most influential musical geniuses of the entire century.

● Top 15 Liszt recordings : A beginner's guide to the music of one of the great composer-pianists

Franz Liszt

Berlioz was not a pianist. Perhaps that is why he is the most important composer of the period in terms of orchestral writing. He based his music on ‘the direct reaction of feeling’ and could summon up with extraordinary vividness the supernatural, say, or the countryside or ardent lovers. Like Liszt, he never wrote a formal symphony: Liszt’s  Faust Symphony  and Berlioz’s  Symphonie fantastique  are ‘programmatic’ and rely on their literary inspiration for their structure. Berlioz wrote on an epic scale, employing huge forces to convey his vision: the  Grande Messe des Morts , for example, requires a tenor solo, brass bands and a massive chorus as well as an expanded orchestra. Théophile Gautier, whose  Nuits d’été  Berlioz set to music, summed Berlioz up thus: ‘[He] represents the romantic musical idea, the breaking up of old moulds, the substitution of new forms for unvaried square rhythms, a complex and competent richness of orchestration, truth of local colour, unexpected effects in sound, tumultuous and Shakespearean depth of passion, amorous or melancholy dreaminess, longings and questionings of the soul, infinite and mysterious sentiments not to be rendered in words, and that something more than all which escapes language but may be divined in music.’ Technical improvements in the manufacture of orchestral instruments – the brass and woodwind especially – helped composers like Berlioz achieve their ends, for the modern instruments provided a wider range and variety of sound. This additional colour in the composer’s orchestral palette encouraged more extended (sometimes seemingly formless) works. The prop of the symphonic structure was needed less, though, writing this at the beginning of the 21st century, many still enjoy the challenges of composing in that form.

● Hector Berlioz – music's great revolutionary : Tim Ashley is joined by four great advocates of the composer to celebrate the self-taught, revolutionary musician whose eccentric genius is only now being fully recognised

Hector Berlioz

The third Titan of the Romantics was the most written- and talked-about composer of all time:  Richard Wagner . As intelligent and industrious as he was ruthless and egocentric, Wagner’s great achievement was  The Ring of the Nibelungen , a cycle of four operas which took opera from the realm of entertainment to a quasi-religious experience. Influenced by Beethoven, Mozart (held to be the first truly German operatic composer) and Meyerbeer (whose sense of epic theatre, design and orchestration impressed him), Wagner’s vision was to create a work that was a fusion of all the arts – literature, painting and music. He called his vision ‘music-drama’.

Some of his ideas had been anticipated 40 years earlier by Carl Maria von Weber, one of the first to insist on total control of all aspects of the production of his work and who, as early as 1817, wrote of his desire to fuse all art forms into one great new form. Weber’s opera  Der Freischütz , the first German Romantic opera, was a milestone in the development of these ideas, using German mythology as its subject.

Richard Wagner

Wagner decided that the music must grow from the libretto (he supplied his own), that there must be no display arias for their own sake, inserted just to please the public; the music, like the opera’s narrative flow, must never cease, for the music is equally important in the telling of the story and commenting on the action and characters; leitmotivs, short musical phrases associated with different characters and moods, would recur throughout the score to underpin and bind the whole work. The orchestral contribution was at least as important as the vocal element. But Wagner was more than just an operatic reformer. He opened up a new harmonic language, especially in the use of chromaticism (see page XXXI). This had not only a profound influence on succeeding generations of composers but led logically to the atonal music of the 20th century.

Not all composers fell under Wagner’s spell.  Brahms  was the epitome of traditional musical thought. His four symphonies are far nearer the style of Beethoven than those of Mendelssohn or Schumann, and the first of these was not written until 1875, when Wagner had all but completed  The Ring . Indeed Brahms is by far the most classical of the German Romantics. He wrote little programme music and no operas. It’s a curious coincidence that he distinguished himself in the very musical forms that Wagner chose to ignore – the fields of chamber music, concertos, variation writing and symphonies.

● The 50 best Johannes Brahms albums

● Top 10 Wagner recordings

Verdi v Wagner

It was only in old age that  Giuseppe Verdi  adopted some of Wagner’s musical ideas. The Italian represents the culmination of the different school of opera. Wagner’s operas are the descendants of Beethoven and Weber; Verdi’s developed from the comic masterpieces of Rossini and the Romantic dramas by Bellini and Donizetti. With the famous trilogy of  Rigoletto  (1851),  Il trovatore  (1853) and  La traviata  (1853), Verdi combined his mastery of drama with a flow of unforgettable lyrical melodies, creating masterpieces of the genre of which the public has never tired.  Don Carlos  (1867),  Aida  (1871),  Otello  (1887) and  Falstaff  (1893) show a development and tirelessly searching mind that remain among the great miracles of music.

Giuseppe Verdi

One thing that Wagner and Verdi had in common was their fierce patriotism. In his own lifetime, Verdi was held as a potent symbol of Italian independence, while Wagner espoused the dubious theories which made him such hero of the Third Reich. During the course of the century, Western music, now dominated by German tradition and forms, began to be more and more influenced by the rise of nationalism. Composers wanted to reflect the character and cultural identity of their native lands by using material and forms which derived from their own country. Russia was the foremost in the surge of nationalism that now fertilised the Late Romantic era. Glinka was the first important Russian composer to use Russian subjects and folk tunes in his opera A Life for the Tsar. Influenced by the Italian tradition, it nevertheless succeeded in conveying typical Russian song and harmony and had a profound effect on Borodin, Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov – the so-called ‘Mighty Five’ (or ‘Mighty Handful’ – though Cui is hardly ‘mighty’ compared with the genius of his peers).

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Tchaikovsky, the most accomplished of all his Russian contemporaries, paid lip-service to the Nationalists, composing largely in the German tradition. Elsewhere in Europe, nationalist schools of music arose: in Bohemia there were Smetana,  Dvořák  and  Janáček ; in Scandinavia,  Nielsen ,  Grieg  and Sinding; in Finland, Sibelius, whose seven symphonies developed the medium in a highly arresting and individual way; in Spain, Albéniz, Granados and de Falla. Britain and the United States were slow in developing a nationalist school: Parry and  Elgar  wrote firmly in the German manner and it was not until the later arrival of  Vaughan Williams  and  Holst  that a ‘British’ (or at any rate ‘English’) sound began to emerge. America was a curious case. Its first native composer of any note, Gottschalk, used indigenous native rhythms for his (mainly) piano works as early as the 1850s – South American, New Orleans and Cuban elements are boldly to the fore. It took another half century before any music directly derived from American folk material began to assert itself in the form of jazz.

The dates for each period of music must be treated flexibly. The Romantic period embraces a wide divergence of personal styles and represents a long and rapid period in Western music’s development. In common with every aspect of life, the art developed at an ever-increasing pace. Parallel to the growth of Nationalism, came the Italian  verismo  school of opera, the school of Realism or Naturalism epitomised by the works of  Puccini , Leoncavallo and Mascagni, whose subjects were drawn from contemporary life presented with heightened violence and emotions. During the closing years of the period, emerging under the influence of Wagner, came the neo-Romantics whose use of massive symphonic structures and elaborate orchestration is heard in the music of  Bruckner ,  Mahler , Scriabin and the early works of Richard Strauss.

● How Vaughan Williams found his voice through folk song

● The 50 best Mahler albums

The Nationalists

Towards the end of the century there was a reaction against the excesses of the Romantics – the too-obvious heart-on-sleeve approach, the emotional over-indulgence, the extra-musical programmes and philosophies began to pal. Just as the Baroque period had melted into the Classical period, the Classical drifted into the early Romantic era, so the close of the 19th century saw a tendency toward bold experimentation in new styles and techniques. Coinciding with the French Impressionist movement in painting and poetry, came Impressionist music, epitomised by the daring (at the time), personal harmonic idiom of Claude Debussy. Here emphasis was put not on the subject of a piece of music but on an emotion or sensation aroused by the subject. His music is just as closely organised as anything in the classical German manner but, using the whole-tone scale and fresh harmonies, Debussy conjures up a sensuous, atmospheric spell in his piano music and orchestral works. The fastidious Maurice Ravel followed in his footsteps with exotic evocations of light and colour, later tinged with jazz references.

By the turn of the century, it was no longer possible to define a dominant general musical trend. Under its many fragmented divisions we can only label the successor of the Classical and Romantic periods somewhat lamely ‘Modern Music’.

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky studied with one of music’s great orchestrators, Rimsky-Korsakov. He orchestrated some of Beethoven’s piano sonatas as an exercise; he worked at counterpoint and learnt about classical forms – in other words, a sound, traditional conservatoire training. In less than a decade, we find Stravinsky writing music that is a world away from that of his mentor.  The Firebird  (1909),  Petrushka  (1911) and  The Rite of Spring  (1913), his three ballet masterpieces, became progressively more adventurous: in  Petrushka  we find bitonal passages (ie music written in two keys simultaneously), dissonant chords, a new rhythmic freedom and a percussive orchestral quality; in  The Rite of Spring , a score which provoked a riot at its première, Stravinsky reduced all the elements of music to reinforce rhythm. Debussy and Schoenberg in certain of their works reduced music to the vertical effect of simultaneously sounding notes, so Stravinsky reduced melody and harmony to rhythm. As Alec Harman and Wilfred Mellers put it in their  Man and His Music : ‘Harmony without melody and rhythm, rhythm without melody and harmony, are static. Both the pandemonium of Stravinsky’s  Rite of Spring  and Debussy’s  Voiles  deprive music of the sense of motion from one point to another. Though they started from diametrically opposed points, both composers mark a radical departure from the traditions of European music since the Renaissance.’

● Stravinsky the conductor : Riccardo Chailly and Teodor Currentzis talk to Peter Quantrill about what can – and can’t – be learnt from Stravinsky’s own recordings

Stravinsky went on to write in a number of other styles throughout his remarkable career, dominating the musical world for 50 years, in the same way that his almost exact contemporary Pablo Picasso dominated his field. Arguably, no other composer this century has exercised a greater influence than Stravinsky – Debussy and Ravel were less wide-ranging, Sibelius and Bartók less daring, Schoenberg and Webern less accessible.

Arnold Schoenberg is Stravinsky’s only rival as the musical colossus of the age – to some he opened the door on a whole new world of musical thought that is as exciting as it is challenging; to others he is the bogey man of music, who sent it spiralling out of reach to the ordinary man in the street until, nearly one hundred years later, it has revealed itself as a cul de sac.

Since the Renaissance, all music had a tonal centre. No matter how far away from the tonic – the basic key – the music wandered, the listener was always conscious of the inevitability of a final return to that centre. Increasingly towards the end of the 19th century, music began to incorporate intervals outside the prevailing diatonic scale with the result that a work would feature an extraordinary amount of modulation. This is known as chromatic writing, since intervals from the chromatic scale (not the diatonic scale) are used to harmonise a piece. Listen, for instance, to Wagner’s later works and to those of Mahler and Richard Strauss which followed closely on their heels. Hearing them, it becomes less clear as to which key the piece is written in, its tonal centre less obvious. What Schoenberg did was follow logically on from this and ask ‘If I can introduce these chromatic notes into my music, can a particular key be said to exist at all? Why should any note be foreign to any given key? Harmony is simply the sounding together of notes, so why shouldn’t the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale be accorded equal significance?’

The Second Viennese School

The theories and music of the so-called Second Viennese School – in succession to the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart et al – put the listener’s expectations on a wrong footing. There are none of the familiar features of chords we recognise, tunes we can hum or rhythms we can tap our feet to. Only the traditional manner of indicating on the score individual notes, time-signatures and expression marks remain. Because the vast majority of the music we are exposed to when growing up is tonal, it is fairly easy to assimilate a Beethoven symphony on a first hearing. Because serial music is written in a completely foreign language with which most of us have no reference points, its effect is like listening to a Scandinavian epic poem spoken in Japanese. The music lover has to acquire a knowledge of the language – in other words, the musical technique involved in the composition – before it can be appreciated. There are comparatively few who have the time to study Scandinavian poetry in Japanese translation, as it were.

Not all composers were attracted to the new technique but dissonance, atonality and the abandonment of melody are strong features of many composers’ work this century. Very little serial or atonal music has established itself in the regular concert repertoire; still less has found its way into the hearts and affections of the ordinary music-loving public. This, to jump forward in time, is especially true of music written since the Second World War. A list of works from the pens of world-famous contemporary composers will elicit a blank response form the majority of people. The avant-garde of today is taking far longer to become assimilated than the avant-garde of previous centuries. Opinions are deeply divided over the merits of a composer like  Charles Ives , for example, whose polyrhythmic, polytonal works are far too complex for them ever to achieve popularity; Stockhausen, Birtwistle , Cage, Carter, Berio, Nono (the list is endless) will remain a closed book for most people. Yet each of these composers have a huge and fanatical following in certain quarters. Musical development will always, hopefully, have daring, fantastical innovators, examining new possibilities, expressing themselves in new and original ways. Whether they will ever find a broad, responsive and appreciative audience, only time will tell. Most new commissions have a premiere, a broadcast (if they’re lucky) and are then consigned to oblivion – in whatever musical language they’re written.

Sergei Rachmaninov

The other path taken by music this century is the one which retains its link with tonality and (increasingly, nowadays) with melody. Harsh and acid though some of Prokofiev’s music may be, his style is a tangible descendant of the Romantics. Shostakovich too, sharing Prokofiev’s love of the spiky, humorous and satirical, as well as the sombre and introspective, follows on from the same tradition.  Rachmaninov  to an even greater degree wrote in the late-Romantic vein, producing some of the most popular symphonies and concertos written this century. In France, the most important composers after Ravel and Debussy were Honegger, Milhaud and Poulenc, three disparate composers un-usefully grouped together as Les Six (the other three made negligible contributions) and all influenced by the whimsical and eccentric Eric Satie. The most significant French composer since the Impressionists is Oliver Messiaen who introduced elements of Indian music and bird-song into the language of Western music. Pierre Boulez, whose complex works are often based on mathematical relationships, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose scores for his innovative electronic music are represented by charts and diagrams, are both pupils of Messiaen.

Florence Price (1887-1953) was the first black woman to have a symphony – her First in E minor – performed by a major American orchestra and her highly distinctive music has seen a great revival of interest in recent years. A recording of Price's First and Third symphonies by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin was Gramophone 's Recording of the Month in the November 2021 issue and was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2022, and there is a phenomenal recording of the Violin Concerto from the same forces with soloist Randall Goosby – an Editor's Choice in June 2023 (must read: Florence Price – out of the shadows ).

No longer does one school of musical thought prevail. There seems little to link the socio-political operas of Kurt Weill and their brittle, haunting melodies with his contemporary Paul Hindemith and his dense, contrapuntal neo-classical idiom. Far less does  Aaron Copland , born only five years later in 1900, have any connection with either. The first conspicuously great American-born composer, Copland used in his music folk material, the sixths and sevenths intervals of the blues, echoes of cowboy songs, jazz and the memory of Jewish synagogues. His  Appalachian Spring  (1944) has been compared by one critic to Vaughan Williams’s  Pastoral Symphony .

Neglected for tar too long, Grażyna Bacewicz's string quartets were given an outstanding recording by the Silesian Quartet – a Recording of the Month in the August 2016 issue of Gramophone and winner of the Chamber Award the following year. As Richard Bratby summarised: ‘Bacewicz’s seven quartets, written between 1938 and 1965, really do create a whole imaginative universe. Taken individually, they’re fascinating; music of concentrated invention, life-affirming energy and superb technical skill (Bacewicz was a virtuoso violinist herself). Listened to as a cycle, they become a vivid portrait-in-the-round of Bacewicz’s life and times. You’ll hear the influences of Polish folk music, of Szymanowski and Bartók, and the post-war experiments of her younger contemporaries Lutosławski and Penderecki.’

The British legacy

The Purcell centenary of 1895 stimulated interest in the great heritage of England’s musical past; the English Folk Song Society was founded in 1898; the London Promenade Concerts were inaugurated in 1895 and suddenly, ‘the land without music’ found itself in the midst of a musical renaissance. No one deserves more credit for the revival of the nation’s musical fortunes than Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Vaughan Williams took as his creed the belief that ‘The Art of Music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of the nation’. English Tudor music, medieval tonalities and folk song attracted him, composing in what might loosely be called a romantic neo-classical style, using counterpoint, classical forms (such as the symphony and the fugue) and modern harmony. Holst was inspired similarly but also drew inspiration from the east – his most famous piece, The Planets , from the ideas of Chaldean astrology.

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was influential as a composer, a conductor, and as a member of the women's suffrage movement. Smyth's music is now finding strong advocates in the recording studio. A recording of Smyth's The Prison by the Experiential Orchestra and Chorus, under James Blachly, was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2021, while the second of her six operas Der Wald has been recorded for Resonus by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and John Andrews (must read: Ethel Smyth’s opera Der Wald - a journey of discovery )

Of the succeeding generation, the most important have been Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett and William Walton. Britten especially, with his many stage works, established English music on the international stage, writing for a wide variety of mediums including an opera for television ( Owen Wingrave ).  Peter Grimes ,  Billy Budd ,  War Requiem ,  Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings ,  The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra  – the list of works he composed since the Second World War now in the regular concert repertoire is remarkably high. Walton’s outstanding contributions were made before the war with  Façade ,  Belshazzar’s Feast , the Viola Concerto and the First Symphony. Tippett has had less lasting success compared with his two contemporaries but  A Child of Our Time  (1941), the Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) and the  Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli  (1953) will undoubtedly stay the course.

Of the more recent generations of British composers, it is still too early to say with any certainty who and what will be remembered in the great scheme of things 50 years hence. Elizabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle and the so-called Manchester School of Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr have their champions and devoted admirers; they do not always mix comfortably with the likes of Richard Rodney Bennett, Malcolm Arnold and George Lloyd – to name those born prior to the War and who each enjoy a loyal following.

Contemporary composers you need to discover today ...

Caroline shaw.

What were you doing when you were 30 years old? Caroline Shaw is unlikely to forget, for this was her age when she received the Pulitzer Prize for music. The year was 2013, and the accolade was for her   a cappella   piece   Partita   (2009-11) for eight voices. Composed for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth, of which she was (and still is) a member, the work was released on their Grammy-winning self-titled debut album in October 2012. It didn’t receive its full premiere until November the following year, when it was performed by the group at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.

Partita   for eight voices made Shaw the youngest ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music. And in 2019,   The Guardian   ranked it as the 20th greatest work of classical music since 2000. All this for good reason – the piece is a vocal joyride. It begins with spoken word: ‘To the side. To the side. To the side and around’ – followed by a wall of harmonised euphoria. It continues with tides of song gathering and then drifting apart; flooding in and falling back. The work as a whole is inventive and pulls out all the stops when it comes to what a mouth and a pair of lungs can do: speech, whispers, sighs, wordless melodies and sundry other vocal techniques. It was inspired by artist Sol LeWitt’s   Wall Drawing 305   – ‘born’, as Shaw says, ‘of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another’.

Read the full article: 'Contemporary Composer: Caroline Shaw'

Cultural considerations are not the only things that have recently brought a host of female composers to prominence. Half a century ago the wholly different talents of Lutyens, Maconchy and Thea Musgrave need not have feared comparison with their male contemporaries – a situation mirrored now with the emergence of a new generation on the new music scene, from among whom Anna Clyne is striking for the rapidity with which her output has evolved into a mature idiom always lucid in its compositional craft and immediate in its emotional impact.

Born in London, Clyne studied music at the University of Edinburgh then at the Manhattan School of Music where her tutors included Julia Wolfe – a founder member of the influential ensemble Bang on a Can, which commissioned and performed several of her earlier pieces. Clyne had begun composing around the age of 10, and although the first acknowledged works date from her early twenties, an essentially youthful delight in the discovering as well as realising of unusual combinations of sound is a constant across all her music that emerged at this time.

Read the full article: 'Contemporary composer – Anna Clyne'

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Every aspect of a traditional ‘classical’ composer’s craft requires a degree of compromise. Notation, no matter how meticulously realised, can never fully represent the work as conjured in the composer’s imagination; and no performance or recording can ever fully recreate every intention of a score – so it becomes a compromise upon a compromise. This isn’t to say, of course, that the whole business of writing and recording music is a fruitless exercise, it is simply that each element of the process that requires the music to be ‘translated’ into another medium moves the music further from the composer’s initial conception – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Advances in the affordability and accessibility of recording technology over the last few decades have made it possible to write and record entire albums’ worth of music from home, practically alone, on nothing more than a laptop. It’s a model that has been widespread in pop music for years, but there are also many composers who are self-producing recordings of great interest to   Gramophone   readers, and one of the most compelling and successful is Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Read the full article: 'Contemporary composer – Hildur Guðnadóttir'

Errollyn Wallen

An influential figure and inspirational role model for young musicians, respected and admired by fellow composers and performers, and recognised by the pillars of the British musical establishment, Errollyn Wallen is a leading figure in today’s classical music world. But the journey that she has taken has been nothing if not unconventional. Indeed, it could never have been any other way.

She was born in Belize, and at the age of two moved to London with her parents. She became a musician almost by accident, owing to the fact that she came from a musical family: her father was a fine amateur singer who wrote songs and introduced his young daughter to jazz, blues and the recordings of Ella Fitzgerald. Being a keen dancer, Wallen first experienced classical music at a ballet class when an accompanist suddenly started playing Chopin. She was absolutely mesmerised and immediately set about exploring classical music – in both its traditional and its more contemporary forms.

Read the full article: 'Contemporary composer – Errollyn Wallen'

Sofia Gubaidulina

As the Soviet system gradually lost its grip on power through the 1980s, a diverse range of compositional voices was released into the wider musical world. A generation of ‘unofficial’ composers, effectively an underground movement in the 1960s and ’70s, suddenly came to prominence. Western audiences were introduced to the sophisticated polystylism of Alfred Schnittke, the esoteric serialism of Edison Denisov, the serene tintinnabulation of Arvo Pärt – and to Sofia Gubaidulina. Her music was, and remains, difficult to categorise. She is a religious maximalist, who employs an often brutal modernist language to express and explore dimensions of her Christian faith. Her music always seems immediate and spontaneous, yet is underpinned by sophisticated mathematical procedures. And, while she embraces joy, hope and light in her music, she does so via extreme contrasts, often leading her listeners through dark and unsettling places on her very individual path to transcendence.

Gidon Kremer brought Gubaidulina’s music to international attention when he gave the premiere of her violin concerto   Offertorium   in Vienna in 1981. The Soviet authorities almost succeeded in preventing the concert from taking place, but it was made possible by Gubaidulina’s enterprising Western publisher, Jürgen Köchel, who smuggled the score out of the country to get it to Kremer. The premiere was a great success, and Kremer continued to spread the word in the following years, giving performances of the concerto with leading orchestras around the world.

Read the full article: 'Contemporary composer – Sofia Gubaidulina'

Jennifer Higdon

'Jennifer Higdon’s myriad accolades and accomplishments are impressive by any standard, but particularly in the world of contemporary classical music. She’s won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. Her music is in such high demand that she’s able to compose exclusively on commission. And her champions include top-tier soloists, ensembles and orchestras. According to a recent survey of US orchestras, Higdon is one of the most performed living American composers.

'Yet Higdon’s most striking achievement doesn’t fit so easily into a biography, and that’s how thoroughly her music has filtered into every stratum of classical music culture in the United States. Glance through the ‘Upcoming Performances’ page of her official website and you’ll find that her work is being played not only by the Houston Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra, but also by municipal, community, and high school ensembles across the country. On the surface, it appears to be a simple formula: Higdon writes music that audiences like to hear and musicians find gratifying to play. But is it really so simple?..'

Read the full article: 'Contemporary composer – Jennifer Higdon'

Lera Auerbach

'In an age of multitasking habits, polymodal perceptions and multisensory experiences, we are all now expected to become polymaths. As Vinnie Mirchandani put it in his preface to  The New Polymath  (Wiley: 2010): ‘[We] can no longer be just one person but a collection of many.’ But in trying to become too many people, what is lost? Identity, depth, talent? Genius, perhaps?

'Lera Auerbach is a polymath in the original sense of the word – as defined and defended by Renaissance writers and thinkers; but she is also very much an artist of her time. Apart from being a successful composer and concert pianist, she’s a painter, sculptor, librettist and author of several books of poetry and prose, but for Auerbach these extramusical activities are not exercises in dilettantism: all art forms are interconnected and designed to nourish and sustain each other...'

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Lera Auerbach'

Sally Beamish

'In a way, music was Sally Beamish’s first language. Her mother, a violinist, taught her to read and write notes at the age of four – before she could play an instrument, before she could even read or write words. She would draw little flowers or faces on the manuscript and her mum would interpret how the graphic notation might sound. ‘I always wanted to make my own stuff,’ she says. ‘I’ve made my own clothes, written stories, painted…’ When she started learning piano aged five, she constructed herself a little exercise book.

'Today Beamish is one of the UK’s busiest and most warmly respected composers, with commissions coming in thick and fast for scores ranging from large-scale ballet and oratorios to chamber, theatre and solo works. At 60 she already has a catalogue of more than 200 pieces and that number is rising fast: this year she has been writing three piano concertos, among several other projects. For many listeners, the great appeal of Beamish’s music is the space it finds between softness and steel – her knack of blending folk-flecked lyricism, emotional candour, a sense of the natural world and a propulsive way with rhythm plus real economy, directness, luminous orchestrations and rigour of craft. She’s the kind of composer who seems to know exactly what she wants a piece to say and finds the most compassionate and least fussy way of saying it...'

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Sally Beamish'

Augusta Read Thomas

'American classical music this past quarter-century has been dominated by the minimalist aesthetic that came to the fore as a reaction against the modernist thinking which had previously held sway. Currently it represents a virtual lingua franca in terms of its influence on mainstream composers. Others, however, have looked back (not in anger and still less out of nostalgia) to an era in which aspects of modernism were linked to a freely evolving tonality so that new possibilities were opened up for exploration. Only recently has this approach regained prominence, with Augusta Read Thomas being among its leading exponents.

'Born in Glen Cove, Long Island, in April 1964, Thomas studied at Yale University and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Chicago’s Northwestern University. To speak of influences is often unnecessarily subjective, yet two composers with whom she came into contact during this period were to leave their mark on her music in the most direct and positive sense. From Jacob Druckman (1928-96) she absorbed the value of instrumental colour as a formal and expressive component rather than just an external dressing, while in Donald Erb (1927-2008) she had the example of an orchestrator who was second to none in this respect among American composers of his generation. What this gave to Thomas’s music from the outset was its clarity of conception and precision of gesture (whether in the briefest of instrumental miniatures or in large-scale orchestral works), which act as the focus for her often intricate textures and iridescent harmonies – thereby ensuring that her work exudes an immediacy and a communicativeness whatever its degree of complexity and dissonance...'

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Augusta Read Thomas'

'Curiouser and curiouser. Listening to the music of Unsuk Chin can feel like an adventure in Alice’s Wonderland. We start in familiar territory, with simple and attractive musical ideas, but these gradually weave into complex and unsettling textures. Soon we are down the rabbit hole, and nothing is quite what it seems. The music appears stable, until a subtle change in harmony casts it in an entirely new light. Perspectives change, motifs and melodies twist and distort. Simplicity gives way to beguiling complexity. Then everything stops, often with a thump from the percussion, and we are left contemplating the bizarre turn of events. Was it all a dream?

'Unsuk Chin has been fascinated by  Alice in Wonderland  since childhood, and it has inspired much of her music, most notably her 2007  Alice  opera. But her take on the story is distinctive. The opera is full of moments of intrigue and wonder, but these are set against stark representations of the tale’s brutal absurdity – a fantastical yet always lucid conception, typical of Chin. As a Korean based in Germany, she has an outsider’s perspective on European culture, and her music regularly highlights its ingrained paradoxes. She is a voice of reason, bringing order to the surreal. Above all, she brings clarity, however complex her music becomes, with every note remaining audible, every motivation clear...'

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Unsuk Chin'

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir

Before notating her works conventionally via the five lines of the musical stave, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir literally draws them. The pristine pencil illustrations this process spawns are something to behold. One of them is reproduced on the cover – and inside the booklet, in a more complete version – of what was the first album to feature her music and her music alone: Rhízoma .

The drawing features a consistent yet bumpy horizon of two almost-horizontal lines in counterpoint. Beneath that, multiple roots gather towards a single, thick trunk before breaking into four branches, fraying outwards at their end points (it could be a forbidding volcano; it could be a weedy turnip). Thoughts in text form are scattered around in meticulous block capitals: ‘In constant development’ / ‘Bell like’ / ‘I predict that the duration of this piece will be approximately 12-14 minutes’.

Speaking at an open question-and-answer session in Copenhagen in January, Thorvaldsdóttir explained that she uses drawings like these as compositional aids, devices for ‘mapping where a piece is going’. But they contain vital structural clues for the rest of us. In the case of this particular drawing – an image of the piece Streaming Arhythmia (2007) – we can trace how the biology of subterranean roots or ‘rhizomes’ has influenced the development of the music. The sketch also bears an uncanny resemblance to the landscape of Thorvaldsdóttir’s Iceland: a barren and highly atmospheric terrain characterised by black rock, dark moss, starkly outlined volcanic peaks and a total lack of trees.

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Anna Thorvaldsdóttir'

Olga Neuwirth

The music of Olga Neuwirth ( b 1968) is richly allusive, moving freely between reference points as varied as Monteverdi, Weill, Miles Davis and Klaus Nomi. She has cited influences from Boulez to the Beastie Boys. Yet if there’s one artist whose aesthetic approach seems particularly close to hers, it isn’t a musician at all – it is film-maker David Lynch, the maverick director behind such cult classics as Twin Peaks (1990-91; 2017), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001). Bizarre juxtapositions, surreal narrative twists, vivid images of obscure significance: his films are not just strange but also uncanny – even inexplicable at times – as they journey into dreamlike worlds in which the standard rules of time, space and sense seem to drift away. Music may be a more abstract medium than film, but Neuwirth’s work proves its ability to be just as fascinatingly unfathomable. Her music is enthralling and provocative not despite its strangeness, but because of it.

The Lynch comparison is one that Neuwirth provoked herself when she turned Lost Highway , the film that some call Lynch’s very strangest, into an opera in 2002-03, in collaboration with her Nobel Prize-winning compatriot Elfriede Jelinek. It is hard to imagine a more audacious choice of film to receive the operatic treatment, but Neuwirth’s fragmentary, multidimensional music creates something that somehow does seem to be the kindred spirit of the original. At one point in both film and opera (some time before he inexplicably transforms into a car mechanic), the protagonist Fred explains why he doesn’t own a video camera. ‘I like to remember things my own way,’ he says. ‘How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.’ Perhaps the opera takes a similar approach in adapting the film, twisting it into new shapes – hyper-expressionist vocal acrobatics for one character, deadpan spoken word for another, eerie falsetto vocalise for a third – while retaining the plot and enhancing the noir undercurrent. In fact, perhaps that is what all opera does anyway, taking the kernel of a story and heightening its intensity through clipped lines of text and sweeping currents of music. To be sure, opera seldom portrays events ‘the way they happened’.

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Olga Neuwirth'

Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) was one of the foremost women composers on the planet and one of the leading creative figures of her generation of either gender; a truly original artist with a very distinctive musical style and personal voice, developed and refined over decades. The awards she has received over the years are indicative of this, including the Kranichsteiner Prize (1986), the Nordic Council Music Prize (2000, for Lonh), the Grawemeyer (2003, for her first opera, L’amour de loin ), the Nemmers Prize in Composition (2007), the Wihuri Sibelius Prize (2009) and the Léonie Sonning Music Prize (2011).

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Kaija Saariaho'

Thea Musgrave

Asked once whether she had any advice for young composers, Thea Musgrave replied: ‘Don’t, unless you really have to; then you’ll do it anyway.’ Musgrave – the Scottish composer, conductor, pianist and teacher who turns 90 this month – has lived by her own advice. There’s a clear-sighted rationality to her approach, to the way she speaks about her music, to the way she adheres to deadlines and writes practical, non-fussy scores that endear her to commissioners and orchestral musicians.

But beneath the pragmatism, Musgrave’s music is all about drama. Whether in her searingly perceptive operas or her non-narrative instrumental works, she has long been fascinated by the innate drama of human behaviour: the psychological dance of conversation, interaction, confrontation and appeasement. She’s a composer who recognises that music mirrors life, that music can shape the way we live, that the emotional and even physical makeup of musicians is integral to the impact of any performance. To put it simply, her work speaks directly and compassionately about all of us. ‘There are basic human truths,’ she says, and it is those truths that she probes in her music.

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Thea Musgrave'

Roxanna Panufnik

There’s a different kind of revolution taking place in today’s contemporary music, and at its heart lies Roxanna Panufnik. Hers is not a radical revolution designed to overhaul the old order completely, à la Schoenberg or Cage. Instead, here is a quiet revolution that utilises music’s power to unite people from different cultures, religious backgrounds and political persuasions: a revolution that is more John Lennon than John Cage.

In Panufnik’s own words: ‘I’m on a mission to shout from the rooftops the beauty of all these different faiths’ music. It’s about bringing us together. Too often we don’t think about what we have in common, but instead about our tiny fraction of difference from each other.’

The importance of music’s social and political function was, of course, not lost on Roxanna’s father. The well-known, much admired and highly regarded Polish composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik (1914-91) was forced to escape the oppressive post-war climate of his native country in 1954. He arrived in London and some nine years later married author and photographer Camilla Jessel. Roxanna was born in 1968.

Read the full article:   'Contemporary composer – Roxanna Panufnik'

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Guide on How to Write a Music Essay: Topics and Examples

Let's Understand What is Music Essay

You know how some school assignments are fun to write by default, right? When students see them on the course syllabus, they feel less like a burden and more like a guaranteed pleasure. They are about our interests and hobbies and therefore feel innate and intuitive to write. They are easy to navigate, and interesting topic ideas just pop into your head without much trouble.

Music essays belong to the category of fun essay writing. What is music essay? Anything from in-depth analysis to personal thoughts put into words and then to paper can fall into a music essay category. An essay about music can cover a wide range of topics, including music history, theory, social impact, significance, and musical review. It can be an analytical essay about any music genre, musical instruments, or today's music industry.

Don't get us wrong, you will still need to do extensive research to connect your opinions to a broader context, and you can't step out of academic writing standards, but the essay writing process will be fun.

In this article, our custom essay writing service is going to guide you through every step of writing an excellent music essay. You can draw inspiration from the list of music essay topics that our team prepared, and later on, you will learn what an outstanding essay on music is by an example of a music review essay.

What are Some Music Topics to Write About

There are so many exciting music topics to write about. We would have trouble choosing one. You can write about various music genres, be it country music or classical music; you can research music therapy or how music production happens.

Okay, forgive us for getting carried away; music makes us enthusiastic. Below you will find a list of various music essay topics prepared from our thesis writing service . Choose one and write a memorable essay about everyone's favorite art form.

Music Argumentative Essay Topics

Music essays can be written about an infinite number of themes. You can even write about performance or media comparison.

Here is a list of music argumentative essay topics. These edge-cutting topics will challenge your readers and get you an easy A+.

• Exploring the evolution of modern music styles of the 21st century
• Is it ethical to own and play rare musical instruments?
• Is music therapy an effective mental health treatment?
• Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Creativity in electronic music
• The Relevance of traditional music theory in modern music production
• The Role of musical pieces in the Transmission of cultural identity
• The value of historical analysis in understanding the significance of music in society
• How does exposing listeners to different genres of music break down barriers
• Exploring the cognitive effects of music on human brain development
• The therapeutic potential of music in treating mental disorders

Why is Music Important Essay Topics

Do you know which essay thrills our team the most? The importance of music in life essay. We put our minds together and came up with a list of topics about why music is so central to human life. Start writing why is music important essay, and we guarantee you that you will be surprised by how much fun you had crafting it.  

• Popular Music and its Role in shaping cultural trends
• Music as a metaphorical language for expressing emotions and thoughts
• How music changes and influences social and political movements
• How the music of different countries translates their history to outsiders
• The innate connection between music and human beings
• How music helps us understand feelings we have never experienced
• Does music affect our everyday life and the way we think?
• Examining the cross-cultural significance of music in society
• How rock music influenced 70's political ideologies
• How rap music closes gaps between different racial groups in the US

Consider delegating your ' write my essay ' request to our expert writers for crafting a perfect paper on any music topic!

Why I Love Music Essay Topics

We want to know what is music to you, and the best way to tell us is to write a why I love music essay. Below you will find a list of music essay topics that will help you express your love for music.

• I love how certain songs and artists evoke Memories and Emotions
• I love the diversity of music genres and how different styles enrich my love for music
• I love how music connects me with people of different backgrounds
• How the music of Linkin Park helped me through life's toughest challenges
• What does my love for popular music say about me?
• How the unique sounds of string instruments fuel my love for music
• How music provides a temporary Release from the stresses of daily life
• How music motivates me to chase my dreams
• How the raw energy of rock music gets me through my daily life
• Why my favorite song is more than just music to me

Need a Music Essay ASAP?

Our expert team is quick to get you an A+ on all your assignments!

Music Therapy Essay Topics

One of the most interesting topics about music for an essay is music therapy. We are sure you have heard all the stories of how music cures not only mental but also physical pains. Below you can find a list of topics that will help you craft a compelling music therapy essay. And don't forget that you can always rely on our assistance for fulfilling your ' write my paper ' requests!

• The effectiveness of music therapy in reducing stress and pain for cancer patients
• Does pop music have the same effects on music therapy as classical music?
• Exploring the benefits of music therapy with other genres beyond classical music
• The potential of music therapy in aiding substance abuse treatment and recovery
• The Role of music therapy in Addressing PTSD and Trauma in military veterans
• The impact of music therapy on enhancing social interaction and emotional expression in individuals with developmental disabilities
• The use of music therapy in managing chronic pain
• Does musical therapy help depression?
• Does music reduce anxiety levels?
• Is music therapy better than traditional medicine?

History of Music Essay Topics

If you love analytical essays and prefer to see the bigger picture, you can always write a music description essay. Below you can find some of the most interesting topics for the history of music essay.

• The Significance of natural instruments in music production and performance
• Tracing the historical development of Western music theory
• How electronic music traces its roots back to classical music
• How the music industry evolved from sheet music to streaming services
• How modern producers relate to classical composers
• The Origins and Influence of Jazz Music
• How folk music saved the Stories of unnamed heroes
• Do we know what the music of ancient civilizations sounded like?
• Where does your favorite bandstand in the line of music evolve?
• The Influence of African American Music on modern pop culture

Benefits of Music Essay Topics

If you are someone who wonders what are some of the values that music brings to our daily life, you should write the benefits of music essay. The music essay titles below can inspire you to write a captivating essay:

• How music can be used to promote cultural awareness and understanding
• The benefits of music education in promoting creativity and innovation
• The social benefits of participating in music groups
• The Impact of Music on Memory and Learning
• The cognitive benefits of music education in early childhood development
• The effects of music on mood and behavior
• How learning to play an instrument improves cognitive functions.
• How music connects people distanced by thousands of miles
• The benefits of listening to music while exercising
• How music can express the feelings words fail to do so 

Music Analysis Essay Example

Reading other people's papers is a great way to scale yours. There are many music essay examples, but the one crafted by our expert writers stands out in every possible way. You can learn what a great thesis statement looks like, how to write an engaging introduction, and what comprehensive body paragraphs should look like. 

Click on the sample below to see the music analysis essay example. 

How to Write a Music Essay with Steps

Writing music essays is definitely not rocket science, so don't be afraid. It's just like writing any other paper, and a music essay outline looks like any other essay structure.

• Start by choosing a music essay topic. You can use our list above to get inspired. Choose a topic about music that feels more relevant and less researched so you can add brand-new insights. As we discussed, your music essay can be just about anything; it can be a concert report or an analytical paper about the evolution of music.
• Continue by researching the topic. Gather all the relevant materials and information for your essay on music and start taking notes. You can use these notes as building blocks for the paper. Be prepared; even for short essays, you may need to read books and long articles.
• Once you have all the necessary information, the ideas in your head will start to take shape. The next step is to develop a thesis statement out of all the ideas you have in your head. A thesis statement is a must as it informs readers what the entire music essay is about. Don't be afraid to be bold in your statement; new outlooks are always appreciated.
• Next, you'll need a music essay introduction. Here you introduce the readers to the context and background information about the research topic. It should be clear, brief, and engaging. You should set the tone of your essay from the very beginning. Don't forget the introduction is where the thesis statement goes.
• One of the most important parts of essay writing is crafting a central body paragraph about music. This is where you elaborate on your thesis, make main points, and support them with the evidence you gathered beforehand. Remember, your music essay should be well structured and depict a clear picture of your ideas.
• Next, you will need to come up with an ideal closing paragraph. Here you will need to once again revisit the main points in your music essay, restate them in a logical manner and give the readers your final thoughts.
• Don't forget to proofread your college essay. Whether you write a long or short essay on music, there will be grammatical and factual errors. Revise and look through your writing with a critical mind. You may find that some parts need rewriting.

Key Takeaways

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Nineteenth-century classical music.

"Antonius" Violin

Antonio Stradivari

• Dubois et Couturier

Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840)

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Cornet à Pistons in B-flat

Courtois frères

Christian Frederick Martin

Grand Pianoforte

Érard , made in London

Square Piano

Robert Nunns

Grand Piano

• Steinway & Sons

The Music Lesson

John George Brown

Giosue Esposito

Julian Alden Weir

• Lyon & Healy

Two Young Girls at the Piano

Auguste Renoir

Jayson Kerr Dobney Department of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The nineteenth century brought great upheaval to Western societies. Democratic ideals and the Industrial Revolution swept through Europe and changed the daily lives of citizens at all levels. Struggles between the old world order and the new were the root causes of conflicts from the Napoleonic Wars to the American Civil War . From New York, to London, to Vienna, the world was changing and the consequences can still be felt to this day.

The lives of musicians, composers, and makers of musical instruments were greatly altered by these social changes. In earlier times, musicians were usually employed by either the church or the court and were merely servants to aristocratic circles. Composers wrote music for performances in these venues, and musical instrument makers produced instruments to be played by wealthy patrons or their servant musicians. With the rise of the middle class, more people wanted access to music performances and music education.

A new artistic aesthetic, Romanticism , replaced the ideals of order, symmetry, and form espoused by the classicists of the late eighteenth century. Romantics valued the natural world, idealized the life of the common man, rebelled against social conventions, and stressed the importance of the emotional in art. In music, Romanticism, along with new opportunities for earning a livelihood as a musician or composer, produced two seemingly opposite venues as the primary places for musical activity—the large theater and the parlor.

Music as Public Spectacle One result of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of a middle class. This new economic strata consisted of a larger number of people with more disposable income and more leisure time than had ever existed before. Musical extravaganzas that triumphed the musician or composer gained popularity with the masses of concertgoers. Beginning with Beethoven, composers began to arrange large concerts in order to introduce their works to the public. As audiences desired more, composers wrote larger musical works and demanded more of performers and their instruments.

The “bigger is better” mentality led to new musical forms such as the tone poem and large-scale symphonic and operatic works . Orchestras grew, including larger string sections with a full complement of woodwinds, brass, and ever more percussion instruments. New types of orchestral winds ( 2003.150a–g ) and brass ( 2002.190a–n ) that allowed for greater facility and more accurate playing were introduced. Composers such as Hector Berlioz, and later Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner, continually pushed the limits of the available musical forms, performers, instruments, and performance spaces throughout the nineteenth century.

Musicians who could dazzle and amaze their audiences by their virtuosity became the first musical superstars. The two most famous nineteenth-century examples were the violinist Nicolò Paganini (1782–1840) and the pianist Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Both dazzled audiences throughout Europe with their performances, elevating the status of the musician from servant to demigod. Their fame grew throughout Europe, and their likenesses would be recorded in a variety of visual arts.

In order to withstand the virtuosic and often bombastic playing of these soloists, as well as to provide the type of volume needed in large concert venues, more powerful instruments were needed. Larger and louder violins like those by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) or Guarneri del Gesù (1698–1744)—preferred by Paganini—replaced the quieter and subtler violins of earlier masters like Jacob Stainer (ca. 1617–1683) or the Amati family. The demands of pianists like Franz Liszt pressed the technology and design of pianos to ever-larger instruments, eventually replacing the internal wooden structures of the eighteenth century with cast-iron frames that could withstand thousands of pounds of pressure.

Parlor Music Conversely, music gained popularity in the intimate nineteenth-century parlor. At the time, home life was centered in the salon, or parlor, where children played and learned with adult supervision, and where the family entertained company. Musical performances for small groups of people became popular events, and some composers/performers were able to support themselves financially by performing in these small venues and attracting wealthy patrons. Most famous among these was Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849).

Music in the parlor was of a very different sort than in the concert hall. Solo performances and chamber music were popular, and included everything from operatic and orchestral transcriptions to sentimental love songs and ballads. In the United States, hymns and folk songs by composers like Stephen Foster (1826–1864) supplemented the European repertoire.

With the rise of the parlor as the center of family life, music education became increasingly important. Children were often taught to play musical instruments as part of a well-rounded education; for girls, playing an instrument was more important than learning to read. When guests and potential suitors visited, the children and teenagers would entertain with performances of the latest popular works.

All sorts of musical instruments were used in the home, and at various times the guitar , harp ( 2001.171 ), concertina, and banjo were extremely popular. However, the most important musical instrument in the home was the piano, because it was useful as both a solo instrument and as accompaniment to a group of singers or instrumentalists. To accommodate home use, smaller pianos were created, first square pianos and later uprights. Small pianos took up less space and, although they were not as powerful as larger types, they were also less expensive. With the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, the mass manufacturing of musical instruments—especially pianos—provided a seemingly endless supply for the huge markets of both the United States and Europe. The piano would remain a central component of domestic life until it was replaced by the phonograph, radio, and television in the twentieth century.

Dobney, Jayson Kerr. “Nineteenth-Century Classical Music.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/amcm/hd_amcm.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Samson, Jim, ed. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Additional Essays by Jayson Kerr Dobney

• Dobney, Jayson Kerr. “ Archtop Guitars and Mandolins .” (September 2016)
• Dobney, Jayson Kerr. “ The Guitar .” (September 2007)
• Dobney, Jayson Kerr. “ The Piano: Viennese Instruments .” (March 2009)
• Dobney, Jayson Kerr. “ Military Music in American and European Traditions .” (October 2004)

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Classical music essay

The world has gotten too complicated. People have too many choices in their hands that sometimes they end up with the wrong priorities. This points out why there are many things today in the world that can use some changes to make lives more meaningful and worthwhile. In this regard, one thing that I would definitely change is the way people regard classical music and to make them appreciate more and benefit from the real wonders of music. More specifically, I want people in America to shift their disdain to classical music into a newfound love, so that they can enjoy the benefits it can bring to their lives.

People consider any sound that is refined, stylish and mostly instrumental as classical music. It is seen more as something appreciated only by the elite or the educated. This should not be the case. Classical music, as the term connotes, is part of the classics. It consists of creations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century composers, like Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven. This type of music is usually characterized by a beautiful melody and performed by an orchestra (“The Music of Bach”). Classical music, through the years, has taken on various permutations.

It can also be appreciated in the variations of the art songs, opera and oratorio. The art song consists of a poem performed by a trained singer with a classical music background. The creations of the poet, singer, composer and musician conspire for an art song masterpiece (“Lotte Lehmann Foundation”). The oratorio, on the other hand, is a musical creation that has a more philosophical or religious lyrics and context. It is performed by an orchestra with the soloists delivering the story line. Opera on the other hand is the art of singing a drama accompanied with the music of an orchestra.

Today, people are engrossed too much on the boisterous music of pop and rock that these classic art forms are often left to the enjoyment of a select few. The classical genres are far from being exclusive. The classical music just so happens to be not utilized and enjoyed by majority of the public. Evidently, people do not know that they are missing a lot. Why is there a need to change the perception of people with regard to classical music? Basically, American adults should put an end to their ignorance and disregard to the classical music.

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Majority of the people are missing a lot by not opening their minds and considering their options with regard to this artistic creation. For one, classical music is deemed to have a therapeutic affect to its listeners. Studies show that the sound waves produced by classical music are capable of bringing harmony to the psyche of a person, thus bringing more balance to the existence of a person (Heather). Classical music can also provide good exercise to the entire brain, thus making one more intellectually perceptive and mentally capable.

Findings of a study illustrate that an active listener of the classics tend to utilize their brain more compared to the listeners of pop (Heather). For example, there are many people who suggest to a pregnant woman to listen to classical music, particularly to Mozart. This is due to the proposed Mozart effect that aids in optimizing the potentials and brain of a child, even at the stage of infancy or before birth (Jones). There are studies also that establish how music can enhance the learning and people skills of a person.

It does not necessarily make one smarter right away, but it provides the proper disposition to make a person perform better. The relaxing and energizing effect of the harmony and melody of a classical music can very well tap any potential inherent in a person (Lehman). Classical music is really worth loving. The likes of opera, oratorio and art songs are more than just performances. They are wonderful creations of talented people that relate a story that invokes feelings and touches the psyche. In the end, it is more than just being ‘cultured’ as what most people perceive it to be.

The effects are beyond what have been addressed to the senses. The social, intellectual and psychological growth it brings to the person showcase inspiring musical prowess that are definitely to aim for.

Works cited

Heather, Simon. “The Healing Power of Sound. ” Positive Health. 2002. Positive Health Publications. 2 July 2006. < http://www. positivehealth. com/permit/Articles/Sound_and_Music/heather64. htm > Jones, Martin. “The Mozart Effect. ” Human Intelligence. 2003. Indiana University. 2 July 2006. < http://www. indiana. edu/~intell/mozarteffect2. shtml#music >

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Musicology for Everyone

(professional research for a general audience), is classical music dying, or still important today.

Wikimedia Commons

It seems that every year, at least one major article appears that either mourns classical music’s death or seeks to dance on its grave. What’s wrong with classical music? Can it still be important, or is it dying?

(Classical music comprises a wide spectrum of music, but this article only deals with orchestral music to keep focus.)

It seems that fewer and fewer people like it. They complain it’s old and boring music of long-dead composers. How can anything that old still be relevant today? (Never mind that plenty of people enjoy literature, theater, and visual arts of the same vintage.)

I remember a thread on an email list for music librarians. One librarian said that when he was a child, he figured Elvis Presley was classical music. Why? Because it was the boring, old-fashioned stuff his parents listened to.

Classical music fans, according to many critics, are overbearing, elitist, and snobbish. And, according to others, the audience has grown so small that its institutions can only survive with massive subsidies. In that case, classical music cannot be important.

What is classical music?

Strictly speaking, classical music means music written during the classical period, about 1750-1820.

Helpful? I didn’t think so. The best works of Haydn and Mozart hadn’t appeared yet in 1750. Handel lived past 1750, but he’s Baroque. Beethoven lived till 1827, and isn’t he a classical composer?

None of those composers knew they were writing classical music. Audiences found their music very attractive at first hearing, but connoisseurs heard new subtleties and delights the more they listened to the same pieces. Plenty of less sophisticated music appeared on all the same concerts, so everyone listened to and enjoyed the same kinds of music. But enjoyed it differently.

The whole idea of classical music didn’t come along till after the “classical” composers were all dead. But concert life ceased for about 20 years in the most influential cultural centers. Connoisseurs could hear music of these masters only with great personal effort, such as forming their own rehearsal orchestras to play it.

Other music lovers, who didn’t consider that repertoire important,  contented themselves with whatever music was most easily available. Which means they drifted into popular music.

What, for that matter, is popular music?

The orchestra at Vauxhall / Canaletto, 18th century. Very likely the birthplace of popular music.

The popular music industry was born during the classical period. Music became a commodity, a commercial venture. It’s based on the observation that the general public wants music that’s easy to understand and that they lose interest in songs they’ve heard too much.

So the popular music industry began to churn out a constant stream of new songs and other pieces. Each one was enough like everything else to be familiar, but different enough to be novel. It continues to operate much the same way to this day. Occasionally, of course, some of the novelties have been revolutionary in scope.

Popular music fans flock to buy products (sheet music at first, then recordings). And successful popular musicians, publishers, and promoters can make a lot of money.

We can therefore think of classical music as music that repays listening to the same music over and over—art music for connoisseurs. We can think of popular music as music intended for entertainment and amusement. Unpretentious music (usually) with no artistic aspirations.

These days, of course, we think of popular musicians as artists. That’s actually fairly new.

The relationship of popular and classical music

Please don’t think that I’m saying that classical music is somehow inherently superior. The past two hundred years have produced some wretchedly bad classical music and some wonderful popular music.

But a funny thing happens after a while. Popular tastes change. The general public moves on to something else. And the classical music world adds the most worthwhile (formerly) popular music to its repertoire. So classical music is important for preserving the best of popular music after it becomes old-fashioned.

Here is a partial list of music that started out as popular music and is now heard only in the context of classical music:

• Rossini’s operas
• Virtuoso music of Paganini and Liszt
• Strauss waltzes
• Operettas of Offenbach or von Suppé .
• Sousa marches
• Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers

Tin Pan Alley songs and Broadway musicals of the same era have not entirely become classical music, but they seem headed in that direction.

Again, it doesn’t take any special education or training to appreciate classical music. It just takes the desire to listen to music that repays repeated hearings. That lasts longer than the typical pop song. And has outlasted most of the other music of its time.

What’s wrong with classical music today?

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the music. Not everyone likes it, but then, not everyone likes anything. Not being universally liked is not a problem with the music.

But classical music faces real threats now.

In some cases, the problem comes from failure of classical music culture to keep up with the times. In others, it comes from administrators, corporate executives, and others showing contempt for what they have no interest in understanding.

Concert ritual

Audience for Tucson Pops Orchestra summer concert / Ken Bosma via Flickr

You go to an orchestral concert and the men are all wearing tuxes. The whole orchestra sits on stage playing random stuff. Then, when they’re quiet, another violinist comes out to great applause and tunes the orchestra. Finally, the conductor comes out to great applause and the concert begins.

The audience knows not to make a sound until a piece is over. And some pieces have three, four, or five separate movements. No clapping between movements!

Where else does anyone act that way? Nowhere!

People who aren’t used to all these rituals might find them intimidating. Who likes everyone to glare at them if they rustle their program too loudly or clap at the wrong time?

And where did all these ridiculous rules start, anyway?

As it turns out, wealthy people in the 19th century wanted to show off. Much of being at a concert was being seen at the right places by the right people. And all of them had servants, who wore tuxes as they worked. Orchestras started out as servants of the nobility, so they might as well dress like servants to keep their patrons comfortable.

These aristocratic beginnings have led many people nowadays to consider classical music elitist, or even racist.

But it has nothing to do with the music, really. Philippe Musard started the first promenade concerts in the 1830s to cater to a working-class audience. He and successors played some classical music because they knew that audience would enjoy it.

There seems no good reason to maintain practices that haven’t made cultural sense for generations. Unfortunately, much of society has a limiting objection to change: “but we’ve always done it that way.”

Music of dead white men

John Adams, a well-known and successful living composer of classical music / Wikimedia Commons

All the composers of classical music are all dead, or so it seems. Where is anything written today? That’s the chief evidence that classical music is dying.

Concert life resumed in the early 19th century specifically to give connoisseurs a chance to hear the great masters, especially Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven again. Beethoven wasn’t dead yet. These three masters above all came to be known as classical music. And classical music was important to a lot of people.

Beethoven had no immediate successors, but eventually a new generation began to provide new orchestral music. Concerts contained a mixture of the old masters, pieces by the established new masters, and music by new composers hoping for acceptance.

As time went on, however, the balance began to change. The new masters eventually died, but concert audiences still loved their music. Younger composers still provided new music, but the percentage of music by living composers began to drop.

After the Second World War, a new generation of composers led by Karlheinz Stockhousen, Pierre Boulez, Yannis Xenakis, and Milton Babbitt came on the scene. They had open contempt for classical music traditions and classical music audiences. Babbitt wrote a magazine article the editor titled “Who Cares if You Listen?” He hated the title, but it perfectly captures his attitude.

Arnold Schoenberg had already tried to force audiences to listen to twelve-tone music, but most people didn’t like it.

Not enough new music

Most of that truly offensive generation of composers are all dead now. Younger composers (including lots of women and people of color) have again started composing classical music with the hope that audiences will like it.

How many can you name? And if you know the names of some of them, how much of their music is really familiar to you?

Some orchestras, it’s true, stick to performing the old war horses. Many others program new music frequently. Lots of grant money is available to commission it.

But therein lies the problem.

By definition, classical music is written for people who appreciate hearing the same pieces a lot over their lifetimes. And for all the premieres, there aren’t nearly enough second performances.

When an orchestra presents a new piece, it ought to play it twice the first season and at least several times more over the following decade. Its audience will come to like some pieces but not others. Other orchestras ought to take note of successful pieces and present them to their audiences. And maybe some of the less successful ones, too. Who knows, but an audience in Texas may love a piece that didn’t impress an audience in Ohio.

If new classical music is important enough to commission, it ought to be important enough to promote and get the commissions performed widely and frequently enough for audiences to become familiar with it.

But there is one class of orchestral music nearly everyone already knows: movie music. Orchestras play it. And draw large audiences when they do.

Classical music on the radio

A radio studio / Oddbodz via Wikimedia Commons

Radio is by far the dominant medium people use to listen to classical music—not concerts, not recordings. And people are far more likely to hear music by unfamiliar composers over the radio. But will they hear the same piece often enough that they can begin to relate to it?

Nowadays, people can easily listen to classical music any time day or night if they subscribe to Sirius radio. Or if they get a classical music station through their cable subscription.

Unfortunately, the situation for traditional broadcasting is very different. There are fewer and fewer classical music stations available.

I used to live in the Chicago area and enjoyed two classical music stations, WFMT and WNIB. The latter was privately owned. It subsisted largely on subscriptions to its program guides. At about the turn of the century, the founding owner decided to retire and sold the station.

The new owners decided that one classical music station for Chicago was enough. Apparently it didn’t consider classical music or the station’s audience important enough to deserve a choice. They changed the format to rock. I guess there can never be enough rock stations.

At about the same time, I also enjoyed two all-news stations, WBBM and WMAQ. They wound up under the same ownership. That company decided that one news station for Chicago was enough and changed WMAQ to sports.

So part of the problem with commercial broadcasting is that corporate interests have no interest in what their audience wants to listen to. If they can make more money by dumping one audience for another, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Active opposition to classical music

When I was born, most people seemed to assume that classical music was somehow superior even if they didn’t much care for it themselves. At the very least, liking and supporting it generated no controversy. No one doubted that classical music was important.

In 1956, Chuck Berry introduced “Roll Over Beethoven,” declaring that everyone would start listening to rock instead. He always hated that his sister played classical music on the family piano, which kept him from playing what he wanted.

It took a while for Berry’s attitude to enter the establishment, but eventually it did.

Thirty or forty years ago. I read an article by an NPR executive who disapproved of classical music. He made it a matter of policy to get stations to change format. He was just one of a number of active opponents to classical music that arose about that time.

Of course, I can never find that articles I remember after all that time when I want to look at it again. But for whatever reason, more and more public radio stations started to abandon music for talk.

An aging audience

Children at the symphony / michale via Flickr

A lot of people look at audiences for classical music and notice a lot of gray heads. It looks like younger people have no interest in classical music. Younger people who decide to try it out might look around, feel out of place, and never attend another concert. Evidence that classical music is dying?

While it is true that the audience at symphony concerts is getting older and older, it is not true that you have to be old nowadays to like classical music.

Schools that still have orchestras have no trouble finding members. College and university music programs are graduating record numbers of students who play orchestral instruments.

I attended a concert in a library where the intended audience for a string quartet (another hoary classical music institution) was pre-school and school children . It played Beethoven, Britten, and Ravel—one 19th-century composer and two from the 20th century.

Actually, younger people might relate better to 20th-century composers—even Xenakis’ generation––than the great masters. It’s more like what they’re used to hearing. Not that Britten will ever supplant Beethoven, but the tastes of an aging audience shouldn’t limit what classical music means for everyone else.

By the way: I often see the criticism that concerts are so expensive younger people can’t afford to attend. And concerts by pop music icons are cheap?

That may be true of concert series by major orchestras. But it’s not hard to find cheap or free concerts. Look for community orchestras, college and university orchestras, or whatever high school orchestras are still left.

Music education

Pinellas County All County High School Orchestra, 2016 / screen shot from a video

And that last point explains why older people make such a large percentage of concert audiences.

Schools don’t teach as much music anymore. Like the decline in classical music on radio, this trend has developed over several decades. I don’t have space to try to explain why, but the decline in music education mirrors the decline in classical music on the radio.

Schools are under more and more pressure to have students score well on standardized tests. I suspect that has something to do with it. My ex-wife taught English as a Foreign Language for several years. She and teachers of other electives (the arts, foreign languages, gym) had to supervise the lunchroom. Teachers of real academic subjects got duty-free lunch times.

And of course, administrators who grew up without exposure to classical music and other arts don’t know much about it. When it comes to preparing budgets, it’s hard support constituencies that you don’t understand. But too many of them seem not to regard electives in general, not just classical music, important enough to support.

Signs of classical music’s health from a radio interview

In 2007, Neil Conan, host of the NPR program Talk of the Nation , considered the status and fate of classical music. His guests were Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; composer John Corigliano; and Fred Child, host of the radio program “Performance Today.” Among people who called in, Michael Cristie was then conductor of three professional orchestras.

Conan started the program announcing that Washington, DC public radio station WETA had reinstated classical music programming due to popular demand after two years of being news and talk only. That audience obviously kept letting the station know that they considered being able to listen to classical music important.

Dana Gioia’s perspective

Unidentified elementary school orchestra warming up for a concert / woodleywonderworks via Flickr

Gioia said that classical music is thriving, but that we need to be vigilant to keep it that way. He pointed to three trends: the broad decline of classical music on commercial radio stations, the decline of classical music on public stations, and the stability of the audience for classical music on radio. That is, stations have not stopped broadcasting classical music because their audiences have stopped wanting it. Audiences still consider it important.

Conan asked whether the government should subsidize listeners of classical music. Gioia responded that it’s part of the larger issue of whether airwaves should be subsidized. And he said that the marketplace puts a price on things, but some things are beyond price. In a democracy, the arts have a role in society that the market should not entirely determine.

I think that the whole vision of public radio is to provide in a sense those things which radio can provide for free to America and not be determined by the commercial environment. And for me those things are quality talk and quality music – especially the kind of the music like classical music and jazz and to a certain degree folk music – that isn’t really available in commercial formats. Diversity of programming I think should be one of the fundamentals of public radio.

Michael Christie’s perspective

Christie commented that there has never been a better time in the US for arts organizations, and classical music organizations in particular, to develop relevance with their audiences. All the organizations he led were always developing collaborative ventures to deal with local issues. But all the education and availability issues always came up against the fixed costs of providing the services: salaries, maintaining the venues, etc.

Ticket sales for all three orchestras were strong, and in Phoenix, the strongest in the history of the organization.

By the way, some critics of classical music say that classical music is dying and can’t survive without massive subsidies. Classical music has always needed subsidies. Opera has needed them since the first public opera theater opened in 1637. The need for the National Endowment of the Arts to promote and fund classical music does not mean it’s dying. It means it’s important.

John Corigliano’s perspective

Chief Musician Roberta Haworth helps a young student direct the Seventh Fleet Band during a rousing concert for the children of Sasebo Elementary School / US Navy photo via Wikimedia Commons

If classical music audiences recognize the names of only a few living classical composers, they surely include John Corigilano.

On his part of the program, he saw not so much the dying of classical music but its reestablishment in other venues than the concert hall. That is, young composers all have blogs and websites where they put their music. They use social media, iTunes, Sirius Satellite Radio.

Classical orchestral music may be declining some, but young classical musicians have many other healthy outlets. And, let’s remember, many other kinds of classical music for them to compose.

Fred Child’s perspective

Performance Today started on NPR and moved to Minnesota Public Radio. It presents a lot of contemporary music and young performers.

Child noted that a 10-year study by the Knight Foundation concluded that 25-30% of American adults describe themselves as having a relationship with classical music. A much larger portion than some people might have expected.

Modern composers of concert music introduce elements of popular culture, but then, classical composers always have. Think of all Beethoven’s variations on familiar tunes. So Childs insisted that “crossover” is nothing new and not a bad thing.

A 21-year-old woman called in to comment that she loves classical music even though her parents don’t listen to it. She encountered it through the local high school orchestra.  Just another reminder of the importance of music education in schools.

So is classical music dying? Of course not. It’s as relevant and important as ever. It just needs protection against threats that have arisen only recently.

Is classical music dying, or still important today? — 7 Comments

The fact that your article has drawn such little response may be an answer to the very question you pose. I am 91 and I still remember at age 15 playing a record of Ravel’s String Quartet over and over and over, because my middle name is Ravel. I hated it. And hated it. And hated it…and then, oh! I loved it. And I think that is the reason why today I would not presume to write off ANY new composition, and it is the reason I love the music of Nigel Westlake, Matthew Hindson, Carl Vine, Tim Dargaville, Donald Hollier and many other contemporary composers. One of the main reasons their music is not played enough is that many musicians find them too hard, and conductors are not prepared to put in the extra yards, when they can play the warhorses from memory! Not the fault of the music!

Unfortunately, I don’t get as much response as I’d like to very many posts at all, so I’m sure glad you dropped by.

You’re right, of course, that it takes hearing pieces several times to come to appreciate them. New music doesn’t get heard enough to become familiar. How else can we know if it’s good music or bad music?

Another feature of music–and this applies to classical too–is story. I partly got into classical music because the head teacher of my boys’ school began each Wednesday with a music lesson: he would talk about a piece and the story behind it, and then play a recording for us to hear on the school record player. This, for example, is how at 12 years old I first heard a recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 with real cannon and real bells. Story.

Yes. A lot of my posts are stories. Check out my program notes category. But we should be able to appreciate the music for its own sake, whether we know stories about it or not.

For me, growing up in Rochester, NY with the RPO’s music director Christopher Seaman, a delightful English gentleman with a cheerful disposition and a love of talking to his audiences in his regular pre-concert chats at the piano. He would tell the audience, “now, there’s this little bit here [and he plays a bit] that happens in the 3rd movement, and that is where all the magic happens.” I can tell you, I was listening the entire concert for that little bit he played. It became an inseparable part of a classical concert that I wanted that little music analysis beforehand to whet my appetite. Thanks for this wonderful article!

And thanks for your comment.

Thank you for this and other insightful and easy-to-read articles. Stumbled upon your blog when I Googled ‘Paganini devil’.

I enjoyed this article. As an economist, it made me think of a few things:

1. Your line “general public wants music that’s easy to understand and that they lose interest in songs they’ve heard too much”: this is in line with what’s outlined in The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (1976; 1992). When human needs are satisfied –> comfort = boredom –> seek new novelty to escape boredom –> ad infinitum. The book also distinguishes between “skilled consumption” (consumption that is deeply satisfying that is obtained by applying effort to learn a skill, like playing the classical guitar and enjoying playing music, or baking one’s own rich rye bread and eating it hot) and “unskilled consumption” (less deep satisfaction from consuming something by just listening to something passively on a radio, or buying buying and eating white bread from a store). People gain higher/deeper/spiritual satisfaction by learning to play or listening to good music. There’s certainly scope for government intervention/support here.

2. Classical music ought to be kept fairly fresh for new audiences and to sustain the interest of newcomers and established listeners. Radio stations ought to have programmes that play more accessible (or more melodic/catchy) classical music, folk music or orchestral light music that’s inspired by classical music. Some examples in my playlist: Antonio Carlos Jobim’s works; fellow Brazilian artist Guinga’s numerous albums; Trevor Duncan’s compositions for the film La Jetee (1962); Joe Hisaishi’s compositions for the films Hana-Bi (1997) and Sonatine (1993); Ettore Stratta’s Symphonic Tangos; Astor Piazzolla’s music, including his Cinco Piezas Para Guitarra for the solo guitar. While commercial stations might not be very interested in obscure but accessible and beautiful music – what economists call merit goods – focusing more on what it determines customers might demand and is therefore more profitable) – public radio stations ought to introduce and air what they believe might interest or benefit its listeners, even if demand for these types of music is not high. These stations should actively invite people who are musically educated and/or have eclectic musical taste to contact them and suggest good music that the radio stations can play.

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Essay on Music for Students and Children

500+ words essay on music.

Music is a vital part of different moments of human life. It spreads happiness and joy in a person’s life. Music is the soul of life and gives immense peace to us. In the words of William Shakespeare, “If music is the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” Thus, Music helps us in connecting with our souls or real self.

What is Music?

Music is a pleasant sound which is a combination of melodies and harmony and which soothes you. Music may also refer to the art of composing such pleasant sounds with the help of the various musical instruments. A person who knows music is a Musician.

The music consists of Sargam, Ragas, Taals, etc. Music is not only what is composed of men but also which exists in nature. Have you ever heard the sound of a waterfall or a flowing river ? Could you hear music there? Thus, everything in harmony has music. Here, I would like to quote a line by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest musicians, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”

Importance of Music:

Music has great qualities of healing a person emotionally and mentally. Music is a form of meditation. While composing or listening music ones tends to forget all his worries, sorrows and pains. But, in order to appreciate good music, we need to cultivate our musical taste. It can be cited that in the Dwapar Yug, the Gopis would get mesmerized with the music that flowed from Lord Krishna’s flute. They would surrender themselves to Him. Also, the research has proved that the plants which hear the Music grow at a faster rate in comparison to the others.

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Magical Powers of Music:

It has the power to cure diseases such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, etc. The power of Music can be testified by the legends about Tansen of his bringing the rains by singing Raag Megh Malhar and lighting lamps by Raga Deepak. It also helps in improving the concentration and is thus of great help to the students.

Conclusion:

Music is the essence of life. Everything that has rhythm has music. Our breathing also has a rhythm. Thus, we can say that there is music in every human being or a living creature. Music has the ability to convey all sorts of emotions to people. Music is also a very powerful means to connect with God. We can conclude that Music is the purest form of worship of God and to connect with our soul.

FAQs on Essay on Music:

Q.1. Why is Music known as the Universal Language?

Ans.1. Music is known as the Universal language because it knows no boundaries. It flows freely beyond the barriers of language, religion, country, etc. Anybody can enjoy music irrespective of his age.

Q.2. What are the various styles of Music in India?

Ans.2. India is a country of diversities. Thus, it has numerous styles of music. Some of them are Classical, Pop, Ghazals, Bhajans, Carnatic, Folk, Khyal, Thumri, Qawwali, Bhangra, Drupad, Dadra, Dhamar, Bandish, Baithak Gana, Sufi, Indo Jazz, Odissi, Tarana, Sugama Sangeet, Bhavageet, etc.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Concert Review — My Visit of the Classical Music Concert

My Visit of The Classical Music Concert

• Categories: Classical Music Concert Review

About this sample

Words: 1441 |

Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 1441 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Table of contents

Tchaikovsky romeo & juliet, fantasy-overture (1870) composed by: joseph giunta, works cited, tchaikovsky serenade for strings in c major, op. 48 (1881) composed by: joseph giunta, tchaikovsky violin concerto in d major, op. 35 (1881) composed by: joseph giunta, tchaikovsky polonaise & waltz from eugene onégin, op. 24 (1879) composed by: joseph giunta.

• Giunta, J. (Composer). (1870). Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliet, Fantasy-Overture. [Audio recording].
• Giunta, J. (Composer). (1881). Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48. [Audio recording].
• Giunta, J. (Composer). (1881). Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. [Audio recording].
• Giunta, J. (Composer). (1879). Tchaikovsky Polonaise & Waltz from Eugene Onégin, Op. 24. [Audio recording].

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