Periods, Styles

The Classical period in Western music occurred from about 1750 to 1820, despite considerable overlap at both ends with preceding and following periods, as is true for all musical eras. more...

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Although the term classical music is used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music in this era, it can also occasionally mean this particular era within that tradition.

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 Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert all worked at some time in Vienna, comprising the First Viennese School.

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 the 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. (See also counterpoint and harmony.)

The new style was also pushed forward by changes in the economic order and in social structure. As the 18th century progressed, the nobility more and more became the primary patrons of instrumental music, and there was a rise in the public taste for comic opera. This led to changes in the way music was performed, the most crucial of which was the move to standard instrumental groups, and the reduction in the importance of the continuo – the harmonic fill beneath the music, often played by several instruments. One way to trace this decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the decline of the term obbligato, meaning a mandatory instrumental part in a work of chamber music. In the Baroque world, additional instruments could be optionally added to the continuo; in the Classical world, all parts were noted specifically, though not always notated, as a matter of course, so the word \"obbligato\" became redundant. By 1800, the term was virtually extinct, as was the practice of conducting a work from the keyboard.

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