Why a history of music?

When you play a Bach minuet, a Chopin waltz or a Scott Joplin rag, you open a window onto another time. Every piece bears the marks of the age that produced it: the instruments available, the places where people played, the audience it was meant for, the ideas in the air. Knowing this history is not about reciting dates: it helps you understand what you hear and play what you practise better.

Two families in dialogue

People often distinguish two families, and the site's timeline shows them side by side:

• Art music (also called "classical" in the broad sense): written in scores, composed by trained musicians, performed in church, at court, at the opera and later in the concert hall. It has an author and a fixed version, and it can be played exactly as written centuries later.
• Popular music: songs, dances, tunes for festivals and for work, then ragtime, blues, jazz, tango, rock… For a long time it was passed on orally, from person to person, without a score. It changes with every generation, and often nobody knows who wrote it.

No wall has ever separated these two families. Art-music composers constantly drew on the dances and songs of their time: the Baroque suite is made of dances, Haydn slips peasant tunes into his symphonies, Chopin writes mazurkas, Bartók tours villages recording songs. In return, jazz and popular song borrowed the harmony and instruments of art music.

Written and oral

What we know of early music depends almost entirely on what was written down. Europe's earliest surviving music notation in any quantity dates from the 9th century; before that, European music left only descriptions, pictures and a few rare fragments. Music that was not written — that of peasants, street musicians, village dances — is almost lost for the early centuries. Only with Edison's phonograph (1877) could sound itself be recorded.

Here is a tune every French child knows and nobody learned from a score: it travelled by word of mouth, from one generation to the next.

M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=100
K:C
C C C D | E2 D2 | C E D D | C4 |]
w: Au clair de la lu-ne, mon a-mi Pier-rot

Periods, not boxes

Historians divide European art music into broad periods: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Classical period, Romanticism, then the movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. These labels are handy, but they were applied after the fact: Bach did not know he was "Baroque". The dates are rough landmarks, and periods overlap: in 1820, the old Classical style and young Romanticism share the same concert halls.

Listening "like a historian"

Faced with an unfamiliar piece, ask yourself five simple questions. They will often let you guess the period to within a few decades.

1. Which instruments? Voices alone, a lute, a harpsichord, a piano, an orchestra, an electric guitar?
2. Which texture? A single melody (monophony), several equal voices interweaving (polyphony), or a melody accompanied by chords?
3. Which harmony? Simple, expected chords, or rich, sliding, sometimes dissonant colours?
4. Which rhythm? A free pulse following the words, a steady dance, a syncopated (off-beat) rhythm?
5. Which form? Verses and a chorus, a theme that keeps returning, large contrasting sections?

At the end of the course, a summary lesson takes up these questions again with a table covering every period.

Listen

• A Gregorian chant, then a harpsichord piece by Couperin, then a Mozart sonata, then a Chopin nocturne: listen to one minute of each and note what changes.
• A traditional song from your region sung by two different performers: notice the small differences in tune and words, a sign of oral transmission.