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  • Classical Period

    The dates of the Classical Period in Western music are generally accepted as being between about 1750 and 1830. However, the term classical music is used colloquially to describe a variety of Western musical styles from the ninth century to the present, and especially from the sixteenth or seventeenth to the nineteenth. This article is about the specific period from 1750 to 1830.

    The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. The best known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert; other notable names include Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Soler, Antonio Salieri, Fran√Іois Joseph Gossec, Johann Stamitz, Carl Friedrich Abel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Ludwig van 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, Mauro Giuliani, Friedrich Kuhlau, Fernando Sor, Luigi Cherubini, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Carl Maria von Weber. The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese Classic or Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik), since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven all worked at some time in Vienna, and Franz Schubert was born there.

    In the middle of the 18th century , Europe began to move toward a new style in architecture, literature, and the arts, generally known as Classicism, which sought to emulate the ideals of Classical antiquity and especially those of Classical Greece. 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 вАФone 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 be both well-articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity worked its way into the world of music, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period, towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony вАФa combination called homophonyвАФ 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. This, in turn, made the tonal structure of works more audible.

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