Periods

Medieval — From 600 to 1400

4 compositors registered

The Medieval Music is represented mainly by vocal compositions, religious or secular, marked in the first centuries by monody, notably represented by religious plainsong and in the secular domain by the courtly lyric of the troubadours and the trouvères.

Renaissance — From 1400 to 1600

6 compositors registered

Compared to Medieval, composers moved from Pythagorean temperament to meantone temperament in the tuning of fixed-tone instruments. The use of thirds and sixths became widespread. The vocal aesthetic model persisted, despite the emergence of specifically instrumental music. The genres of Renaissance music were essentially vocal: polyphonic song, lute song, motet, mass, madrigal, and instrumental canzone.

Baroque — From 1600 to 1750

7 compositors registered

The Baroque style is characterized in particular by the importance of counterpoint and then by a harmony that gradually becomes richer, by increased expressiveness, by the importance given to ornaments, by the frequent division of the orchestra with basso continuo, which is called ripieno, by a group of soloists which is the concertino and by the technique of the figured basso continuo as accompaniment of sonatas. It is a learned and sophisticated style.

Classical — From 1750 to 1800

10 compositors registered

Classical language is defined by very strict rules, great formal rigor, great harmonic simplicity, and a developed sense of melody. The principle of contrast, very dramatic, within the same piece is the driving element. In addition, the continuo bass disappears. We move from the use of “figures” (predominant in Baroque) to structuring based on “punctuated musical phrases”, and from “analogical” processes to those of “discursive logic.”

Romantic — From 1800 to 1900

24 compositors registered

The term Romantic music refers to a type of music that dominated Europe throughout the 19th century. This musical movement, with its varied forms and its emphasis on the expression of emotion, is part of the European aesthetic movement of Romanticism, which affected the arts and literature under the influence of England and Germany, where a new sensibility developed from the end of the 18th century.

Modernism — From 1900 to 1950

13 compositors registered

Only the chronology is significant, this period has no unity of style: it is the flowering of diverse experiences and aesthetics, often opposed to what was developing at that time as the triality “tonal music / modal music / atonal music”. With Debussy, there is a break in the writing of musical discourse, which not only frees itself from tonal constraints, but also lays the first stones of sequential music.

Contemporary — From 1950 to today

0 compositors registered

Contemporary music represents the various currents of classical music that emerged after the Second World War, some of which took new paths outside the tonal system. The emergence of mutations in the forms of writing suggests a new trend in composition. Above all: research into new forms of expression to arrive at new concepts (fundamental notions of acoustics, and sound and musical objects).