Composer timeline
Music through the ages
Welcome to our composer timeline! Below is a guide to the key periods that make up the chronology of Western classical music, and the most famous composers associated with each. Spanning hundreds of years and numerous styles, this is not a complete list of every composer (that would be a very long list indeed…) but it’s a great starting point. If you want to discover more about a composer, you can head to their Wikipedia page by clicking on their name below. Don’t forget to click on the arrows to scroll through the full timeline in each section! If you’d like to find out a little more about where each composer is from, head to our composer map.
As you look through the composer timeline, you’ll notice that some composers can be found in multiple periods. Naturally, musical styles don’t always have clear beginnings and endings, and several composers straddle the gap between the end of one period and the start of the next (we’re looking at you, Beethoven). If you’re in any doubt, look for the individual period info under the date of each composer.
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Medieval
So this is where it all started! Kind of…
Whilst people had been making music in Europe for centuries, it was during the Middle Ages that things really started to move forward. Compositions could be shared more widely, thanks to the development of notation (the way that music is written down). Previously, music was generally only taught by ear.
Early Medieval music often consisted of a simple, sung melody or chant – usually religious in subject – and didn’t necessarily feature a clear rhythm. As time went on, basic harmony was introduced, although this was often just the same melody at a different pitch. Bach would not have been impressed!
Renaissance
The Renaissance (which literally means “rebirth”) was a huge movement in Europe that many people see as the start of the modern age. Arising from the Middle Ages – a period of cultural darkness where education was largely restricted to the rich and controlled by the church – people started to take a strong interest in the ancient civilisations of Rome and Greece. This rediscovered knowledge influenced everything from art, music and poetry to architecture and science. Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous names from this period, partly because he influenced almost every area that he studied!
In music, composers really began to shape the art form we know today. Notation gradually became more consistent and was more widely available thanks to the development of printing. Until this point, music was generally written in a religious setting. However, towards the end of the Renaissance composers started writing secular music – such as songs called madrigals – with themes including love and nature.
Baroque
Following on from the Renaissance, the Baroque period also covered styles of art, architecture and literature as well as music. It can be seen as the start of what is known as the “Common Practice” age, where various musical rules and conventions were set in place and largely survived until the end of the 1800s. As with Baroque architecture, the music from this period featured a lot of decoration. The composer would often write a bass part along with a series of numbers suggesting the chords, which musicians would then use to improvise (like jazz… on a harpsichord).
It was during the Baroque period that opera first became a major form of music. Composers began to create pieces for larger groups that later became known as orchestras (although the instrumentation wasn’t standardised). Keyboard instruments also started to play a much larger role, but didn’t yet have pedals or the ability to play different dynamics.
Classical
Compared to the heavily ornamented (and partially improvised) music of the Baroque period, the music in the Classical era was in many ways more straightforward and lighter in tone. This was the Age of Enlightenment, where science blossomed and religious views were challenged for the first time. Architecture in this period favoured simple, symmetrical patterns (again looking back to the Greeks and the Romans) and music followed suit with clear rules. These dictated how pieces were to be structured, the way they should progress from one key to another, and the instruments that should play each part.
The structure and size of the orchestra became more consistent during this period, and new forms of instrumental music became popular. Examples include the string quartet and the symphony (a favourite of Classical legends like Mozart and Haydn, who wrote over a hundred of them). This period also saw the birth of the piano, at last!
Romantic
Like the periods before, Romanticism wasn’t just about music. The typical Romantic figure rebelled against enlightened thinking, and sought to return art, literature and music to the mysterious, supernatural and dramatic emotional qualities associated with the Middle Ages. Stories became darker, often set in remote, wild locations, and happy endings became few and far between (a far cry from the light-hearted nature of many Classical operas…).
Over time, the music of this period gradually broke free from the rigid rules of previous eras and began to favour emotion over form. Composers pushed the boundaries of what was considered “acceptable” harmony, and orchestras got larger (and larger, and LARGER). Music became more programmatic – describing a story or picture – as opposed to existing for its own sake.
Modern
At this point in the composer timeline, the term “modern” might seem little confusing. It’s actually describing music that was first being written over a century ago! Modernism generally includes composers at the turn of the 20th Century who started to question (and break away from) the rules of harmony and rhythm that had stayed roughly consistent since the Renaissance. Unlike the previous periods, there were lots of sub-genres with wildly contrasting results…
Whereas the Romantic composers had pushed the boundaries of the Classical rules, many Modernist composers abandoned them completely! Serialism, for example, followed an almost mathematic formula that had no regard for conventional tonality (and still sounds pretty “out there” today to most people). From the 1920s on, however, some composers bucked this trend completely and started writing what became known as Neoclassical music, looking back to the Classical era as a model. Meanwhile, other composers sought to further Romantic ideas.
Contemporary
We have reached the future. All bets are off! With composers pushing the Modern era to the limits of what counts as music, you may be wondering what could possibly follow it? The short answer is literally anything, but two trends stick out – fewer notes and more electronic elements.
Minimalism was a style that developed midway through the 20th Century and – as its name suggests – featured simple repeated patterns with little melodic movement. This created an almost hypnotic quality that eventually influenced popular dance music such as Techno (bet you didn’t see that coming). On the other end of the scale, composers started to use electronic elements in their music (instruments and otherwise) to create all manner of sounds. Experimentation was a key factor in the works of people like John Cage, famous for creating a piece of music with literally no music. He also became known for sticking objects into a piano to create new, experimental sonic landscapes.
As our composer timeline reaches its conclusion, music knows no limits. Composers have the ability to draw on such a range of styles and genres (including the explosion of popular music styles) that anything is possible!
