Western Music History: A Thousand Years of Choices

Play a monk's chant from the 11th century, then a few seconds of a modern video-game soundtrack. They share almost nothing in sound, and yet one grows from the other by a chain of choices, each a reply to the last: write the tune down, add a second voice, make the voices follow chords, stretch the chords until they snap, then rebuild with something else. Music history is the story of those replies.

The aim here is the graduate's version: not every name and date, but the handful of turning points that make the rest hang together, and honest notes on who is usually left out. Each card plays sound if you tap Play (generated in your browser, no files) and also shows the notes and numbers, so it works silently. Sound is not available in this reader, so the cards show notes and numbers only.

A map of a thousand years, and why the labels lie

History books divide the story into Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and so on. These are filing cabinets. Most were named after the fact, boundaries differ by author and country, and no one in 1700 knew they lived in "the Baroque". Use them as rough shelves. The card shows the conventional label for any year and who was alive then, in a sample of 25 composers chosen to include women and Latin American and Caribbean composers. It is a sample, not a ranking.

Writing it down: chant, the staff and Guido

For centuries the Western church sang plainchant: one line, sung unaccompanied. Tradition credits Pope Gregory I (c. 600) with it, hence "Gregorian chant", but scholars think the repertory took shape in Frankish lands around the 8th to 10th centuries from Roman and local traditions. At first singers learned it by ear. From about the 9th century, small signs called neumes hovered above the words to show the shape of the tune, a memory aid but not exact pitches.

The decisive step is the staff. Guido of Arezzo (c. 991/2 to after 1033), a monk and teacher in Italy, is credited as the inventor, or by some the developer, of staff notation; his Micrologus (c. 1025–26) explains how to learn a chant without a teacher. He is also credited with the syllables ut re mi fa sol la, taken from the first notes of each phrase of the hymn Ut queant laxis, whose text is attributed to Paul the Deacon. Later singers renamed ut as do (the Italian theorist Doni, 17th century), and si was added; English speakers say ti. Whether Guido himself built the full hexachord system is doubtful, but his ladder of six notes is the root of the do-re-mi you know.

The women of this period existed too. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess in the Rhineland, wrote a large body of chant and the sung play Ordo Virtutum, and is one of the first composers whose name and substantial music survive. Most chant is anonymous; for most of this era the idea of a named composer barely existed.

Many voices at once: from organum to the Renaissance

Sometime before 900 singers began adding a second line. The oldest description is a treatise called Musica enchiriadis (9th century), which describes organum: a second voice shadowing the chant, in strict parallel, a fifth or a fourth away. Notice what this is: parallel fifths, the thing the previous course teaches you to avoid, was the first harmony. By the late 12th century the Notre-Dame school in Paris (known through the names Léonin and Pérotin) wrote organum in several voices with measured rhythm. In the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) wrote songs and a polyphonic Mass setting. By Josquin (c. 1450–1521) and Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) the voices entered in turn, each imitating the last, with smooth lines and consonant harmony. Ottaviano Petrucci's printed collection of polyphony (Venice, 1501) made such music a thing you could buy.

Tonality takes shape: Baroque to Classical

Around 1600 a new idea took over: a bass line plus chords. In the Baroque (roughly 1600–1750) a keyboard and a cello played a basso continuo, a bass with figures telling the player which chords to add, and above it a singer or violin could do something expressive. Opera began in Italy at the turn of the 1600s; Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) wrote Orfeo for Mantua in 1607, and public opera houses spread from Venice. Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), a Venetian singer-composer, published eight volumes of her own music from 1644 and was in the mid-17th century one of the most prolific printed composers of secular vocal music in the city. In 1722 Rameau's Traité gave harmony a theory, and Bach completed Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

The Classical period (roughly 1750–1820) wanted balance and clarity. A tune over a light accompaniment was the norm, in short, regular phrases; the sonata form of 35/67 became the large plan; the piano, invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy, grew into the era's instrument. Music increasingly moved from the court and church to ticket buyers: Haydn's London concerts of the 1790s were public. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), born in Guadeloupe and active in Paris, wrote concertos and quartets and led a leading orchestra there, a reminder that the 18th-century tradition was not only white or only born in Europe. Mozart and Beethoven, a generation apart, carried it to Vienna's peak.

Stretching the system: Romantic chromaticism and the Tristan chord

The Romantic era (roughly 1820–1900) wanted feeling, the individual, the nation, the piano and the song. Harmony gave way to chromaticism: more notes from outside the key, longer delays before the arrival. Women composers worked inside and against the structures. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847) wrote hundreds of works, mostly songs and piano pieces; her family encouraged her music as an accomplishment but discouraged publishing, and some of her songs appeared under her brother Felix's name. Scholars now debate how far the "suppressed genius" story fits the record. Clara Schumann (1819–1896) was one of the great pianists of her century and a composer whose piano concerto was written in her teens. In Brazil Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847–1935) wrote for stage and salon.

The most-analysed chord of the century opens Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (composed 1857–59, first performed in Munich in 1865): F, B, D♯, G♯. It holds its tension; in the prelude it moves to an E dominant seventh, which is itself unresolved. The same four pitch classes make an F half-diminished seventh, and analysts have offered many readings. Wagner's technique of delaying the arrival would mark the next hundred years.

Breaking and rebuilding: the twentieth century

By 1900 the key was straining. Debussy used whole-tone and modal scales for colour (the orchestral Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, 1894). Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913; the famous uproar is told in many versions, but the rhythmic force was new. Arnold Schoenberg left the key altogether around 1908 and by about 1921–23 had devised the twelve-tone method: put all twelve pitch classes in a fixed order, a row, and use only that row and its transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion). Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) developed a comparable system independently around the same time, and credit is contested.

The tradition's reach into the Americas is a story of its own. Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) of Brazil joined Bach's manner to Brazilian material in his Bachianas Brasileiras. Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) of Mexico wrote Sensemayá, composed in 1937 and orchestrated in 1938, on a poem by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983) of Argentina fused Argentine rhythms with an avant-garde language. In the United States Florence Price (1887–1953), born in Little Rock, Arkansas, saw her Symphony No. 1 in E minor played by the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock in 1933, noted as the first by a Black woman to be played by a major US orchestra. After her death a trove of her scores was found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) combined spectral technique and electronics, and her opera L'Amour de loin dates from 2000. Other voices of the century run through Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71).

Music for pictures and play: film and game scores

Wagner's operas tied short musical ideas to characters, objects and feelings, which commentators called leitmotifs (guiding motifs), and when sound film arrived in the late 1920s, composers carried the method into cinema. Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) is a landmark of the full orchestral film score; Erich Korngold and later John Williams built whole careers on themes that return changed. A leitmotif is a plain idea, and the card shows what changes its meaning: the scale, the tempo, the register and the timbre.

Games add a new problem: nobody knows how long the player will stay. In 1985 Koji Kondo's music for Super Mario Bros. showed how a short loop can carry a whole game. In 1991 LucasArts' iMUSE system, built by composers Michael Land and Peter McConnell and first used in Monkey Island 2, let the music shift smoothly as the action changed. Today's games commonly use vertical layering: instruments are added or removed in sync as the player moves from calm to danger to a fight.

Who is in the canon? The debate

The "canon" is the repertoire a tradition treats as essential: the works that are played, taught and written about again and again. It is also the most argued-over thing in music teaching, and the arguments are worth stating in their own best terms.

The case for a canon. Time is limited, and a shared core lets people talk to each other. Works that have lasted for centuries have been tested against many audiences; later composers actually learned from them, so knowing them explains the music that followed. A core is not closed: each generation can add.

The critique. Who got into the canon depended on who could train, publish and be performed, and who wrote the histories. Women, composers of colour and composers outside Europe and North America were limited by access, not by talent, and later left out of the telling. Critics such as Marcia Citron (Gender and the Musical Canon, 1993) argue that "greatness" is partly a story told about works. Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (1985) asked musicology to look at its own habits, and Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music (2005) tried to tell the story with more of its context. Many programmes now call this "decolonising the curriculum".

The middle ground. Most working teachers do both: keep the core and widen it, ask what the works did in their world, and teach the stories of Hildegard, Strozzi, Hensel, Price, Saariaho and others as part of the main line, not a sidebar. Where they disagree is how much to widen, and whether "quality" can be measured apart from the structures that shaped it. The field has not settled that, and this piece does not pretend to.

What a graduate just sees

• Period names are filing cabinets: later labels on a continuous story.
• Writing music down on a staff is what made a tradition of composers, not just performers, possible.
• The first harmony was parallel fifths; the rules a student learns are what came after.
• Around 1600 the bass-plus-chords idea took over, and by 1722 it had a theory.
• The Classical period balances phrases; the Romantic period delays arrival; the Tristan chord is the poster child.
• The twelve-tone row is a way to treat all twelve notes as equals, and its matrix proves the rows work.
• Film and game scores carry the leitmotif forward; games add the question of music that responds.
• The canon is a contested list, and women and Latin American composers have always been part of the story.

Where it shows up next

• Music Traditions of the World (35/69) sets this tradition beside raga, maqam, gamelan and West African ensembles, each in its own terms.
• Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71) takes the harmony and the forms into the 20th-century studio.
• Composition, Arranging & Orchestration (35/72) uses these textures as a palette.
• In the world: a conductor choosing a programme, a film composer building a theme, a teacher deciding what to include, a game audio designer using layers.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (W. W. Norton). The most widely assigned survey, with an anthology and recordings.
• 📘 Reference. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press, 2005). Opinionated and deeply contextual.
• 📘 Gentler. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007). A story-driven tour of the century.
• 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, MUSI 112 Listening to Music (Craig Wright), a free lecture series.
• 🌐 IMSLP, the free library of public-domain scores: browse Bach, Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann side by side.