Styles and periods

Romantic

A movement in Western classical music that flourished during the 19th century. It emphasized individual expression, expanded harmonic and orchestral resources, and often drew on literature, nature, folklore, and national traditions.

Classical

The Classical period in European art music, conventionally dated from about 1750 to 1820, emphasized clarity, balance, formal proportion, and predominantly homophonic textures, while consolidating forms such as the symphony, sonata, and string quartet.

Modern

A broad movement in Western art music from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, marked by a break with inherited conventions and experimentation with harmony, tonality, rhythm, timbre, and form.

Baroque

A period of European art music, conventionally dated c. 1600–1750, characterized by basso continuo, increasingly tonal harmony, elaborate ornamentation, and strong contrasts; it saw the development of opera, the concerto, and the sonata.

Late Romantic

Late Romanticism was a current in European classical music from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It extended Romantic forms and expression through richer chromatic harmony, expanded orchestration, and heightened emotional intensity.

Nationalism

A 19th- and early 20th-century movement in classical music that expressed national identity through folk melodies and rhythms, local history, literature, landscapes, and distinctive linguistic traditions.

Contemporary

Contemporary classical music is a broad field of art music from the mid-20th century to the present, encompassing modernist, postmodern, experimental, tonal, and electronic practices.

Socialist Realism

The official aesthetic doctrine of Soviet music from the 1930s, socialist realism called for accessible, ideologically committed works, often using tonal and folk-derived language and heroic or optimistic themes.

Renaissance

A period of European music spanning roughly the 15th and 16th centuries. It is characterized by modal harmony, increasingly balanced polyphony, and the development of both sacred and secular vocal and instrumental genres.

Avant-garde

A broad current in 20th- and 21st-century art music defined by radical experimentation and a break with established conventions through new compositional systems, techniques, sonorities, and forms.

Jazz

A musical tradition that emerged in African American communities of New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is characterized by improvisation, syncopation, swing, and roots in blues and ragtime.

Impressionism

A musical movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, centered chiefly in France. It emphasized atmosphere and suggestion through nuanced timbre, fluid forms, and harmonic color.

Neoclassicism

An early- to mid-20th-century movement in Western art music that revived forms, genres, and ideals of clarity and balance associated with the 17th and 18th centuries, combining them with modern harmony, rhythm, and orchestration.

Electronic Music

Music created or substantially shaped by electronic instruments and sound-processing technologies. Emerging in the early 20th century, it developed after the Second World War through tape, studio techniques, and sound synthesis.

Serialism

A compositional method developed in the early 20th century that organizes pitches, and sometimes rhythm, dynamics, or timbre, into ordered series used to structure a work.

Neofolklore

A 20th-century current in art music that reinterprets folk traditions through modern compositional techniques, often drawing on archaic songs, ritual genres, modal structures, and distinctive folk rhythms.

Post-Romanticism

A current in Western classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that extended Romantic aesthetics through heightened expression, expanded harmony, large-scale forms, and often rich orchestral writing.

Symbolism

A late 19th- and early 20th-century tendency in European music, linked to literary and artistic Symbolism. It favored suggestion over direct depiction, often using ambiguous harmony, distinctive timbre, mystical themes, and synesthetic ideas.

Neobaroque

A 20th-century current in classical music that revived Baroque forms, genres, and contrapuntal techniques, recasting them through modern harmony, rhythm, and orchestration.

Neoromanticism

A trend in late 20th-century classical music that renewed Romantic ideals of emotional expression, lyrical melody, tonal harmony, and expansive forms after decades of modernist experimentation.

Galant Style

An 18th-century European style that marked the transition from the late Baroque to Classicism. It favored clear, balanced melodies, homophonic textures, light accompaniment, and regular phrasing.

Minimalism

A movement in Western art music that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, characterized by repeated patterns, steady pulse, gradual transformation, and often a clear tonal or modal basis.

New Simplicity

A late 20th-century academic music style that reacted against avant-garde complexity through clearer melody, tonality, and emotionally direct expression.

Polystylism

A compositional approach that combines or juxtaposes elements of different historical and contemporary musical styles within a single work. It became especially prominent in the late 20th century.

Rock music

A broad genre of popular music that emerged from rock and roll in the 1950s and developed internationally from the 1960s, especially in the United States and Britain. It typically features amplified guitars, a strong beat, and song-based forms.

Sacral Romanticism

A composer-defined direction combining sacred subject matter with a romantic musical idiom.

Aleatorism

A 20th-century compositional approach in which elements of a work’s creation or performance are determined by chance or left to the performer’s choice, while other aspects may remain fixed by the composer.

Bel Canto

An Italian vocal tradition that developed from the 17th to the early 19th century, emphasizing even tone, sustained legato, controlled breath, flexibility, and refined ornamentation, especially in opera.

Expressionism

An early 20th-century movement centered in German-speaking Europe, Expressionism sought intense psychological expression through heightened dissonance, fragmented textures, extreme contrasts, and often atonality.

Futurism

An early 20th-century avant-garde movement, originating in Italy and also influential in Russia, that rejected inherited conventions and embraced urban dynamism, machines, noise, sharp rhythms, and experimental sonorities.

Musique Concrète

An electroacoustic practice developed in France in the late 1940s, based on recording, editing, and transforming sounds from real-world sources rather than composing solely with notated instrumental tones.

Neoconservatism

New Consonant Music

Post-Minimalism

A late 20th-century direction in contemporary classical music that developed from minimalism, retaining repetition and a steady pulse while introducing greater harmonic, formal, and expressive variety.

Rococo

An 18th-century European style associated with the transition from the late Baroque to the Classical period. It favored elegance, light textures, graceful ornamentation, and clear melody over dense contrapuntal writing.

Verismo

A movement in Italian opera that emerged in the 1890s and remained influential into the early 20th century. It favored contemporary or everyday settings, ordinary characters, intense conflicts, and a direct, emotionally charged dramatic style.