42: An overview of music history

I will do a much deeper dive into these periods at a later date, but for now I just want to get this out there to get that conversation started. It is best, funnily enough, to take a page out of the playbook of the ever-funny Dr. Sheldon Cooper teaching his friend Penny physics, and have our own sort of “on a warm summer evening in ancient Greece…” about the history of music.

Our journey begins about 600 AD, with a monk in a monastery in what is now Italy who has just become Pope and taken the name Gregory (he is I, of which there have been XVI—it was XIII who gave us the calendar, by the way). St. Gregory is on a mission for the first time to write down on paper the chants the monks use in the abbey where he came from. These are ancient chants passed from generation to generation, written for and within the abbey. The history of Western music in earnest begins here, with the chant tradition that now bears his name: Gregorian chant. This chant tradition, begun about 600 AD, and continuing to the present, has enjoyed the status as one of, if not absolutely, the highest forms of music to be used in the context of the celebration of the Mass. This music is what we call monophonic: there is one line, and everyone sings it—no harmony.

 We can now fast-forward to the Renaissance, about 1450 or so, give or take a few decades. Now, a new form of music begins to develop: the polyphony that will come to define the Renaissance. The great development of the Renaissance was precisely the idea that we could put together a group of musicians doing completely different but related, independent things, and now, the complexity and effort demanded to play and sing in this style well, rather than the simplicity of Gregorian chant, is what gives God glory and makes this style too one of the styles most fit for use in the Mass. It also bears recognizing that it is during this Renaissance period that: 1) Henry VIII breaks away from the Catholic Church and creates the Church of England, giving rise to an especially English branch to this polyphonic style and 2) around the same time, Martin Luther does the same, creating a German branch.

In 1598, a seismic change happened. We get the first opera. Jacopo Peri tells the myth of Daphne. In 1607, the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, which tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. “Orfeo” is important, since although “Dafne” beat it by a decade or so, it is the first opera that we still regularly perform. That we now have opera, in 1600-plus-or-minus-a-decade means, musicially, we have officially left the Renaissance and entered the Baroque period. It, together with its next 2 successors, the Classical and Romantic, will last us from now until the end of World War I. These 420 years, collectively, we will call the “Common Practice” period.

The Baroque period, ushered in by the dawn of the age of opera, was marked by three dominant forms: the concerto (a purely instrumental work, with a small group and a big group that play back and forth as if having a conversation, in “chapters,” if you will, which we call “movements”—usually 3 per concerto, arranged fast-slow-fast); the cantata, the catch-all term for music that is sung with the backing of an orchestra especially in a religious context; and the sonata, which is the catch-all term for basically everything that isn’t a concerto or a cantata, and, like a concerto in juxtaposition to a cantata, has no voices. Of course, there was opera too, the form that ushered in the period as distinct from the Renaissance.

The music of this period was still very deeply connected to the Church—though now not necessarily the Catholic Church, as prominent Lutheran and Anglican traditions began to spring up. Three masters sprung up from this period who dominated all the others: the Catholic (priest, actually) Antonio Vivaldi, the Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach, and the (in the service of the Anglican crown, though not Anglican himself) George Frederick Handel (born Georg Friedrich, but he became a British subject as an adult).

Bach and Vivaldi worked more closely with their respective churches—again, Vivaldi was a priest—than Handel did. Bach, a layman, was “kapellmeister” (literally “chapel master”, but it means “choir director” in this context) at various cities’ Lutheran parishes throughout eastern Germany, and it meant he was responsible for writing, copying, teaching, rehearsing, and performing the music for the Sunday worship services, plus whenever there was another extraordinary event in parish life. (Actually, I don’t think he ever lived anywhere that would not eventually be in the country of “East Germany,” not just “in the eastern parts of modern Germany.”) And Vivaldi, a priest, spent most of his career at an orphanage (in Italian, an “Ospedale”—related to the word “hospital”) for girls, teaching them to play string instruments and writing music for them. However, don’t be deceived by the fact that most of his students were young girls—Vivaldi wrote several hundred professional-grade masterpieces (and, of course, many works accessible to students, several of which I have played myself).

Baroque music, at its core, operates from the principle that God is magnificent, and a magnificent God deserves that, to borrow a term from how organs work, we “pull out all the stops” in worship and give God everything we have. It’s for this reason that a lot of Baroque music is extraordinarily complex, and even after having listened to this music since I was literally in utero—so 25-plus years now—on a nearly daily basis, the depth of this complexity still continues to amaze me.

The piano was invented by an Italian in 1709, although it took until the 1820s or so for the instrument to look like what we know now. The invention of the instrument—capable of playing both loudly and softly at will, in contrast to the harpsichord—plus the death of Bach in 1750 (and Handel in 1759, due to medical malpractice caused by a complete lack of understanding of proper hygiene in surgery by the same eye surgeon who made the same mistake [placing unclean fingers into open surgical wounds mid-operation] during the same procedure, that also had lead to Bach’s death) are hallmarks of the later parts of the Baroque period. Most scholars agree that Bach’s death in 1750 ended the Baroque period.

Following the Baroque came the Classical, which lasted until somewhere between 1800 and 1830, depending on who you ask. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (sidenote—look up his full name; it’s much longer) and Franz-Josef Haydn unquestionably typify this period, and, depending on what end-date you give the period, it includes quite a large chunk of the compositional career of Ludwig van Beethoven, who was absolutely pivotal in the transition out of the Classical and into the following Romantic period.

In the Classical era, something shifted. First, access to music was much more democratic; you didn’t have to be a high-ranking Church or government official to afford to go see great music because more and more, orchestras not tied to churches or courts were popping up, and more and more was being written for them. Opera and concertos continue to have an enormous influence, but cantatas like those Bach wrote on a weekly basis largely faded from view. Whereas the Baroque saw God in the intricacies of its music, the Classical largely saw beauty in simplicity, structure, and repetition. (Listen, for example, back-to-back, to the Baroque “Et resurrexit” from Bach’s Mass in B minor, and to Mozart’s Sonata Semplice for piano, and the contrast will become abundantly clear. One is a work for five voices in counterpoint, plus an orchestra; and the other is a piano sonata specifically written for young students.) Secondly, a new form was born, actually out of a purely instrumental movement that often began cantatas. Out of these little introductions called “sinfonias” grew up the form of the “symphony,” which by the late Romantics could have easily meant 200 or more performers involved.

Hadyn was the originator of the modern symphony, and he wrote 104. Mozart wrote 41, and Beethoven 9. (After Beethoven died having finished number 9, but not number 10, an urban legend began that finishing one’s ninth symphony means one’s death is imminent, or even that the act of attempting to write a tenth will bring about one’s death, since so many composers after Beethoven died in the same state—having finished nine symphonies, but either still working on, or not yet having started their tenths.)

Throughout Haydn and Mozart’s time, and for most of Beethoven’s career, of course, the symphony was entirely instrumental. As time passes, however, a trend begun in the Baroque of ensembles slowly growing, from a dozen to 2 dozen to 30 to 40 to 50 players continues. New instruments that had not been part of a standard orchestra before get added, and existing sections increase in size.

A great debate exists between the exact moment when the Classical became the Romantic because there isn’t a clear-cut generational split (like that caused by the deaths of Bach and Handel in the 1750s) to determine the timing. Based on Beethoven’s work, I make a strong case for the line being somewhere around 1803 or so. Listen to his first two symphonies, and you’ll feel like you’re hearing Haydn 105 and 106, or Mozart 42 and 43 (none of those actually exist).

But when Beethoven writes the Eroica, first dedicated to Napoleon, then to “the common man” after he crowns himself Emperor of France, at the same time that he’s dealing with processing the beginning of a journey with deafness that will last him the rest of his life, something clearly and irreversibly has changed. 1, 2, (and, funnily enough, 8), sound nothing like 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9. 1 and 2 represent a Beethoven who is still learning from Mozart and Haydn and distinctly copies their style, where 3 onward (even including 8, but that’s another story) shows a distinctly Beethovenian style completely foreign to Haydn or Mozart. It’s because of this that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve thought of the transition as having happened progressively earlier, until I’ve been settled at “between Beethoven 2 and 3’s premieres, so sometime between 1803 and 1805.”

It is worth noting the invention of the metronome around 1810, give or take a few years. The inventor of this device was actually a friend of Beethoven’s, and the second (traditionally slow) movement of his Eighth Symphony is largely interpreted as a nod to the new timekeeping invention. The fact that we now have a device to which we can say “emit X clicks per minute” allows us to rely less on vague Italian markings like “andante” (which means essentially “at a tempo of beats per minute corresponding to footfalls when you walk”; the size and frequency of the steps of a 7’2” NBA center will be wildly different from a 4’8” Olympic gymnast’s) and instead allows composers to have much more precision: “Play this at  =100,” and so on.

The last period of the “Common Practice” period is the Romantic, lasting from as early as “1802ish” and as late as “1830ish” to, roughly, the end of World War I. During this period, we see that, largely, the neatness and proportionality of the Classical era get cast aside in favor of injecting as much emotion into music as humanly possible. Whereas the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods relied heavily on strict adherence to tonality and embracing creativity, working constrained by having to stay “inside the lines” so to speak, in the Romantic, especially toward the end, that ironclad reliance on “the rules” breaks down as the period goes on. Orchestras get much larger (in the early Baroque, 20 was a big orchestra; Gustav Mahler writes his eighth symphony for hundreds of instrumentalists and singers, and it is nicknamed the “symphony of a thousand”), music gets more chromatic and even atonal (that is, we start by relaxing the rules of tonality, and by the end of the period could be said to have abandoned them completely), harmonies get much richer, loud music gets louder and soft music gets softer, and phrases go on much longer and not necessarily in neat groups of 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 bars at a time.

By far the most famous example of breaking “The Rules” in the Romantic era is the inclusion of voices for the first time in the symphony, which, up until 1824 and the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth, had been exclusively an instrumental domain, whether harkening back to the days of the “Sinfonia” as an introduction to a cantata, or if you define it more strictly as the form pioneered by Haydn and Mozart. In any case, symphonies just… didn’t have words, let alone a choir that’s almost the same size as the instrumental orchestra, and the inclusion of four soloists plus a four (and briefly five)-voice choir opened the floodgates.

Symphonies became vehicles for cultural or political identity expression (e.g., exploring what it means to “be [English/Russian/Czech/Finnish/German/etc.]” and express your love for your country in music expressly for that purpose) and for musical experimentation far beyond “the rules”. The idea that the tempo structure was {fast-slow-dance-faster} goes by the wayside, as does the idea that four movements is a standard set in stone. (Beethoven’s sixth has five, but all his others have four; a significant number of Mahler’s, for instance, have five, or even six.) Even the very idea that consonance is objectively good and that dissonances have to resolve a certain way into consonances, and so many other standards change or get completely thrown away. The Romantics would surely say that this happens because their goal is not to describe heaven or the world as they wish it would be, but to describe the world as it is now, as they experience it in real time—so not striving for perfection, but embracing and living in the mess of the real world, and translating that into music that doesn’t necessarily fit earlier molds.