Music genres until 1900

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Higher topic: Music genre
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Jewish temple music from 950 BCE

Model of the Second Temple in Jerusalem

Listen icon.pngKing David's Lyre; Echoes of Ancient Israel
<mp3player>https://youtu.be/kiA86HI-GLU</mp3player>

Jewish Temple Music

According to the Mishna, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments, and the choir of twelve male singers.
Biblical and contemporary sources mention the following instruments that were used in the ancient Temple:
- the Nevel, a 12-stringed harp;
- the Kinnor, a lyre with 10 strings;
- the Shofar, a hollowed-out ram's horn;
- the chatzutzera, or trumpet, made of silver;
- the tof or small drum;
- the metziltayim, or cymbal;
- the paamon or bell;
- the halil or big flute.


Medieval music 500-1400

Christian and Muslim playing lutes

Listen icon.png1 Hour Relaxing Medieval Music <mp3player>https://youtu.be/w9NKgdSDwkM</mp3player>

Medieval music

Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century. Establishing the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance is difficult; the usage in this article is the one usually adopted by musicologists. (Wikipedia 2016)


Renaissance music 1400-1600

Gerard van honthorst - the concert - 1623.jpg

Listen icon.pngDances and Music from the Italian Renaissance <mp3player>https://youtu.be/739R9G0qDH8</mp3player>

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance. The music of the period was significantly influenced by: the rise of humanistic thought; the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of ancient Greece and Rome; increased innovation and discovery; the growth of commercial enterprise; the rise of a bourgeois class; and the Protestant Reformation.
From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school.
Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, along with a flourishing system of music education in the area's many churches and cathedrals, allowed the training of hundreds of singers and composers. These musicians were highly sought throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, where churches and aristocratic courts hired them as composers and teachers. By the end of the 16th century, Italy had absorbed the northern influences, with Venice, Rome, and other cities being centers of musical activity.
Music, increasingly freed from medieval constraints, in range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation, became a vehicle for new personal expression. Composers found ways to make music expressive of the texts they were setting. Secular music absorbed techniques from sacred music, and vice versa.
Popular secular forms such as the chanson and madrigal spread throughout Europe. Courts employed virtuoso performers, both singers and instrumentalists.
Music also became more self-sufficient with its availability in printed form, existing for its own sake.


Baroque music 1600-1750 CE

Musical feast given by the cardinal de La Rochefoucauld in the Teatro Argentina in Rome in 1747 on the occasion of the marriage of Dauphin, son of Louis XV

Listen icon.png10 Favorite Baroque Composers <mp3player>https://youtu.be/1ZuKXzddVok</mp3player> Baroque music

Baroque music is a style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era followed after the Renaissance, and was followed in turn by the Classical era.
Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to. Key composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Arcangelo Corelli, Tomaso Albinoni, François Couperin, Denis Gaultier, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Johann Pachelbel.
The Baroque period saw the creation of tonality, an approach to writing music in which a song or piece is written in a particular key. During the period, composers and performers used more elaborate musical ornamentation, made changes in musical notation, and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established the vocal forms of opera, cantata, oratorio and the instrumental forms of the solo concerto and sonata as musical genres. Many musical terms and concepts from this era are still in use.


Bel canto 1690s-present

The bel canto-era composer Gioachino Rossini: portrait painted circa 1815 by Vincenzo Camuccini

Listen icon.pngMaria Callas: Rossini - Il barbiere di Siviglia, 'Una voce poco fa' <mp3player>https://youtu.be/qGX48G9BmE0</mp3player>

Bel canto

Bel canto (Italian, "beautiful singing") refers to the art and science of vocal technique which originated in Italy during the late seventeenth century and reached its pinnacle in the early part of the nineteenth century during the Bel Canto opera era. Rossini (1792-1868), Bellini (1801-1835), and Donizetti (1797-1848) best exemplify this style, which flourished from approximately 1805 to 1830.
Bel canto singing characteristically focuses on perfect evenness throughout the voice, skillful legato, a light upper register, tremendous agility and flexibility, and a certain lyric, "sweet" timbre. Operas of the style feature extensive and florid ornamentation, requiring much in the way of fast scales and cadenzas. Bel canto emphasizes technique rather than volume: an exercise said to demonstrate its epitome involves a singer holding a lit candle to her mouth and singing without causing the flame to flicker.
Aside from the bel canto era and the bel canto style of opera, singers can use a bel canto method of singing even in verismo, Wagnerian, Verdian, and modern styles.


Classical period 1730-1820

Mozart

Listen icon.pngFranz Joseph Haydn: Trumpet Concerto in D (Maurice André) <mp3player>https://youtu.be/bo3w7R_1tPs</mp3player>

Classical period (music)

The dates of the Classical period in Western music are generally accepted as 1750 to 1820. The term classical music is also colloquially used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music that feature choirs, or symphony orchestra instruments.
The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. The best known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven; other notable names include Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi, Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Beethoven is also sometimes regarded either as a Romantic composer or a composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic; Franz Schubert is also something of a transitional figure, as are Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Luigi Cherubini and Carl Maria von Weber.
The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese Classic or Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik), since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert all worked at some time in Vienna, comprising the First Viennese School.


Romantic music 1815-1910

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich is an example of Romantic painting.

Listen icon.png The best pieces of the Romantic era <mp3player>https://youtu.be/vXvv4pirQ4E</mp3player>

Romantic music

Romantic music is a musicological term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in European music history, from about 1815 to 1910. It was related to Romanticism, the European artistic and literary movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century. The Romantic movement held that not all truth could be deduced from axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition.
Romantic music as a movement refers to the expression and expansion of musical ideas established in earlier periods, such as the classical period. Romanticism describes the expansion of formal structures within a composition, making the pieces more passionate and expressive. Because of the expansion of form (those elements pertaining to form, key, instrumentation and the likes) within a typical composition, it became easier to identify an artist based on the work. For example, Beethoven favored a smooth transition from the 3rd to 4th movement in his symphonies, and thus his pieces are more distinguishable. Overall, composers during this time expanded on formal ideas in a new and exciting way.
The Romantic period was preceded by the classical period, and was followed by the modernist period.