Musopen: Music History: Classical

History of the Classical period

The Classical period in Western music occurred from about 1730 and 1820, despite considerable overlap at both ends with preceding and following periods, as is true for all musical eras. Although the term classical music is used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music in this tradition, it can also occasionally mean this particular era within that tradition.

The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. Among its composers were Muzio Clementi, Johann Ladislaus Dussek and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, though probably the best known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (as they all worked in Vienna, Austria, this period is often referred to as "Viennese Classic"). Beethoven is also listed as either a Romantic composer, or a composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic.

The Classical style as part of a larger artistic change

In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move to a new style in architecture, literature, and the arts generally, known as Classicism. While still tightly linked to the court culture and absolutism, with its formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy, the new style was also a cleaner style, one that favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and colors, and simplicity rather than complexity. The remarkable development of ideas in "natural philosophy" had established itself in the public consciousness, with Newton's physics taken as a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms, and articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity worked its way into the world of music as well, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period, and towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony – a combination called homophony – was preferred. This meant that playing of chords, even if they interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part, became a much more prevalent feature of music, and this in turn made the tonal structure of works more audible.

Since polyphonic texture was no longer the focus of music, but rather a single melodic line with accompaniment, there was greater emphasis on notating that line for dynamics and phrasing. The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more important, and also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre, more important in establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.

This led to the Classical style's gradual breaking with the Baroque habit of making each movement of music devoted to a single "affect" or emotion. Instead, it became the style to establish contrasts between sections within movements, giving each its own emotional coloring, using a range of techniques: opposition of major and minor; strident rhythmic themes in opposition to longer, more song-like themes; and especially, making movement between different harmonic areas the principal means of creating dramatic contrast and unity. Transitional episodes became more and more important, as occasions of surprise and delight. Consequently composers and musicians began to pay more attention to these, highlighting their arrival, and making the signs that pointed to them, on one hand, more audible, and on the other hand, more the subject of "play" and subversion – that is, composers more and more created false expectations, only to have the music skitter off in a different direction.