1750 – 1820. Music from these two periods has different characteristics and can be identified easily. With the Baroque style, the melody, the rhythm and the mood of a piece of music stays relatively constant throughout. Also, distinctive is the use of the harpsichord that is predominately used during the Baroque period. The harpsichord was phased out and replaced with the invention of the piano during the Classical period.
However, texture is treated as flexibly as rhythm. Pieces shift smoothly or suddenly from one texture to another. Melody - Classical melodies are one of the most tuneful and easy to remember. The themes of even highly sophisticated compositions may have a folk or popular flavour. Occasionally, composer simply borrowed popular tunes, but more often, they wrote original themes with a popular character.
An Italian harpsichord maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), invented the fortepiano and continued to develop this instrument until the 1720s. In the 1730s, Gottfried Silbermann, a German constructor of keyboard instruments, took up the work of Cristofori and built several grand pianofortes based on Cristofori’s design. The classical fortepiano has lighter, thinner, less emphatic, more transparent and sustained tone color than the modern piano we have now. The lightness of its construction produced a crisper sound that is characteristic of the music written of this day. Cristofori’s pianos were not treasured in the beginning since his pianofortes were still very similar to the clavichords.
The majority of these songs are love, in all combinations of joy and pain. Later in the late middle ages began Ars nova which refers to a musical style which was big and France and few other countries. The music of the ars nova differed from the preceding era in several ways. There was a greater independence of rhythm, and Secular music gained polyphonic sophistication which was previously only found in sacred music. The Ars nova paved the way for new music in the renaissance era.
With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers. By about 1500, European art music was dominated by Franco-Flemish composers, the most prominent of whom was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521). Like many leading composers of his era, Josquin traveled widely throughout Europe, working for patrons in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-L'Escaut. The exchange of musical ideas among the Low Countries, France, and Italy led to what could be
“Sonata form in the Classical Era” The Classical era a huge time period that is considered one of the most important in music history. Some of the most famous compositions, music ideology, and composers have advanced at this time. One of the most important things that was mastered at this time was the use of Sonata Form. To bring everything into context it is important to look at Sonata Form as the structure its self and how some of the best composers at this time take this form and used it to create their own master pieces. Form is one of the most important variables that distinguish the Classical era in music to others such as the Baroque, where form was used still but not as distinguished, and the Romantic where composers began to slowly step away from the concrete structured systems.
Franz was like Mozart in that he was somewhat of a child prodigy. He showed remarkable talent with the piano as well as in sight reading music. Franz had a turning point in his career when at nineteen he came across the great violinist Paganini. Paganini would bedazzle audiences with his abilities on the violin. Franz vowed then, and there to be the pianist version of Paganini.
Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach was one of the most influential musicians of the Enlightenment. Trained by his father, J. S. Bach, he served on the Court of Frederick the Great, became musical director of five churches in Hamburg, and composed numerous oratorios, songs, symphonies, concertos and chamber music. It is in the second movement of the fourth of his Sechs Clavier-Sonaten fur Kenner und Liehaber (Six Clavier Sonatas for Connoisseurs and Amateurs) where the main characteristics of the empfindsam style are present. The empfindsam style, or sentimental style, is most closely associated with C. P. E. Bach. It is characterized by surprising turns of harmony, chromaticism, nervous rhythms, and free, speech like melody.
Western society references musical instruments for the purpose of dancing and creating praiseworthy music and dates as far back as ancient Israel, where King David’s Psalms encouraged followers to praise the lord with strumming of strings and the clashing of cymbals (Psalms 150). Music has only become more complex and integrated to culture since then, playing unique roles from era to era. As a whole, today modern and post-modern music is as important to societal functionality as it ever was, but in recent eras easier access to music itself has blurred the lines between what would have been known as accessible and egalitarian, and what is complex and dangerous. Certainly a modern analysis of the broad trends of music would reveal that social and political movements have motivated this progression, and composers are evidently now able to communicate their art through expression rather than the narrow metanarratives found in politics, complexity for the sake of complexity (The Composer as a Specialist) or beauty for the sake of beauty. If postmodernism rejects these narratives, the lines become nuanced and this might suggest an end of history for music – or perhaps a new development completely incomprehensible to today’s ear.
This movement shows itself in the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, and in both the sacred and secular dance and vocal music of the greatest composers of the era. During this period, people in the world when their own lives and their music reflected the exciting discoveries. Beginning of this period;the renessiance mostly used for religious purposes but at the end of this period,the renessiance was more mundane purposes,has become an entertainment tool. I think that The Renaissance,is the most lyrics periods in the history of western and artists of all kinds in Western Europe became more aware of the classical past and the world beyond the narrow confines of medieval theology.In this