Periods

From the first surviving notation to the early fifteenth century. Most of what survives is single-line chant for the church; second and third lines were added on top of it later, and that is where polyphony begins. Notation learned to record pitch long before it learned to record rhythm, so early pieces often have no audible beat at all and move with the stress of the words instead. Little of it reaches a concert hall today, and the foundations of everything after it are here.

nothing scheduled · 0 composers · 0 works

Two centuries in which polyphony matured. Composers began treating every voice as equally important, entering one after another in imitation until the texture is an even web with no line playing lead. Sacred music leads, in masses and motets; on the secular side the madrigal translates what the words mean into what the notes physically do. The standard instrument is the human voice, and instrumental writing is still largely standing in for singers.

2 coming up · 3 composers · 3 works

The word was borrowed from jewellers, where it meant a pearl that came out lumpy, and it began as an insult. Across its hundred and fifty years European music acquired several things still in use: major and minor keys, a way of building harmony upward from a bass line, and the concerto's argument between one player and many. Ensembles are small, the lines stay separately audible, and a movement usually picks one affect and drives it the whole way rather than changing character.

24 coming up · 19 composers · 59 works

The decades in which music moved out of the chapel and the court and into public halls. Textures thin out: one melody over an accompaniment replaces the Baroque's parallel lines, and phrases start arriving in pairs, a question and an answer, so an amateur listener can follow. The symphony, the string quartet and the solo concerto took their lasting shape here, and sonata form became the general-purpose way to tell a musical story. It is still the frame most concert programmes hang on.

55 coming up · 10 composers · 142 works

Across a century the orchestra grew from about thirty players to well over a hundred, brass and percussion joined the standard complement, and harmony travelled further before consenting to come home. Composers began asking music to be about something in particular: a poem, a landscape, a life. At the same time the piano became a middle-class household instrument, so short character pieces and songs multiplied alongside symphonies that kept getting longer. This century is still the bulk of what concert halls play.

78 coming up · 63 composers · 290 works

The period in which a shared tonal language came apart. Some composers went to twelve-tone rows and serial method, some went back to older forms to write new things inside them, some took scales and rhythms out of the folk music of their own countries, and some admitted noise and electronic sound as material. It is not one line of development but several running at once, none of which conceded that another was the mainstream. Audiences had their ears retrained over the same hundred years.

49 coming up · 48 composers · 117 works

Composers still writing. There is no mainstream: minimalism's repetition, the spectralists' analysis of overtones, works that count the room and the projection as part of the piece, and a straightforward return to tonal writing all proceed at once. Shanghai hears premieres by Chinese composers every season, which is the part of this period most easily heard here and the part most worth going to, because a first performance is not always followed by a second.

27 coming up · 46 composers · 58 works