Week 31 - Periods in Western Music History

Stuff done this week:

- Went to the library and borrowed several books on Medieval music and musical instruments.
- Read the course material and started on my first assignment. Through my research I should try to find dates for each of the main historical periods of music. These are:
Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Twentieth Century.

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What I learned:

I am hesitant to use Wikipedia as a source, for it is a source that is constantly liable to be updated. So I found some sources in the library. Sources are listed at the bottom of this page, using the Harvard referencing system. The coming period I shall try to find more sources.

1. Music History

A history of Western Art Music can be approached in several ways I suppose. But the most conventional way is to describe it in sets of defining time periods. From literature, we identify five (or even six) principal periods:

1. Middle Ages (500 - 1500)

This refers to a period from 500 to 1430 (Randel, 2003) or 1500 (Latham, 2003).
Latham (2003) states that many music historians would argue for a shorter span, but that absence of musical documents before c.900 is not a valid argument for starting at that point.

2. Renaissance (1430 - 1600)

A period from about 1430 (Randel, 2003) or second half of the 15th century (Latham, 2003) until about 1600 (Randel, 2003). Latham (2003) states that the Renaissance aesthetic and philosophical ideas may even have surfaced as early as 1350 (Italy).

3. Baroque (1600 - 1750)

This period extends from the end of the 16th century to ca. 1750.

The Baroque period is usually divided into three sub-periods (Randel, 2003):

• Early Baroque (ca. 1590 -1640), a period of experimentation
• Middle Baroque (ca. 1640 - 1690), a period of consolidation
• Late Baroque (ca. 1690 to mid-18th century), the appearance of large formal patterns

4. Classical (1750 - 1820)

Randel (2003) describes this as the period or style that has its tentative beginnings in Italy in the early 18th century and extends through the early 19th century.
Latham (2003) places the end end of the period some time between 1800 and 1830.

5. Romantic (1820 - 1910)

The Age of Romanticism is generally thought of as extending from the closing years of the 18th century to the early years of the 20th (Latham, 2003).
Randel (2003) identifies an:

• early, pre-Romantic phase before about 1850, and a
• late, neo-Romantic one from about 1890.

6. Twentieth Century (ca. 1910 - 2000)

Latham (2003) argues that this chronological category is rather vague. Music underwent profound aesthetic and technical changes early in the century, but only few scholars would argue that this period started as early as 1900. The shift of consciousness associated with Twentieth Century music has been located between 1907 (Schoenberg's "emancipation of the dissonance") and 1918 (the end of World War I). Scholars struggle to define the end of this period, as there is no real unified aesthetic that characterizes this period; it is so varied and eclectic.

In the upcoming blogs, I shall further describe these periods and their composers and instruments.

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Sources:

RANDEL, D. M. (ed.) (2003) The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 4th ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

LATHAM, A. (ed.) (2003) The Oxford Companion to Music. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.