History of music timeline

Famous composers of medieval period
The history of music in the world
Facts about the history of music

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Written sheet music, and hence any accurate record of music, dates to around 1000 AD, so it is almost impossible to say much about what music actually sounded like prior to that. Obviously, this does not preclude the likelihood of intelligent thought about music before this point, and it certainly doesn’t imply that music wasn’t being made. Today I’ll give a brief overview of some key developments in musical thought which preceded written representations of music and I hope to illustrate something of the mystery of music to point towards its importance as an art form.

Prehistoric man

Music is very old. Stone age flutes have been found in disparate parts of the world dating as far back as 43,000 years ago. This implies that the impulse to make music could be even older, that singing and clapping predated even the earliest instruments. It seems that we humans have had music since we have had culture. It’s also a universal truth that humans enjoy music, that it is part of our nature. I don’t mean enjoy like you enjoy an ice cream on the beach ̵

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A brief history of classical music

Johann Sebastian Bach

Fixing a date for ‘the beginning of classical music’ is as elusive as pin-pointing the millennium in which dinosaurs became extinct. 1000 AD merely provides a convenient starting point for the birth of modern Western music. It was around that date when the idea first occurred of combining several voices to sing a melody; it was the time, too, when the Church, for so long the most important influence and inspiration on the development of music, recognised a need to standardise the single-line unaccompanied chants that had been used for centuries in sacred ceremonies.

Gregorian chant

This early Christian music, derived from Greek songs and from the chanting used in synagogues, had evolved into what we now call plainsong, plainchant or Gregorian chant, the traditional music of the Western Church – a single melodic line, usually sung without accompaniment. (The Gregorian chant melodies sung today date from after the death of Pope Gregory in 604 AD.) Without any accepted written system to denote the pitch or length of a

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List of medieval composers

Composers in the middle ages

Medieval music generally refers the music of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, from approximately the 6th to 15th centuries. The first and longest major era of Western classical music, medieval music includes composers of a variety of styles, often centered around a particular nationality or composition school. The lives of most medieval composers are generally little known, and some are so obscure that the only information available is what can be inferred from the contents and circumstances of their surviving music.^{[n 1]}

Composers of the Early Middle Ages (500–1000) almost exclusively concerned themselves with sacred music, writing in forms such as antiphons, hymns, masses, offices, sequences and tropes. Most composers were anonymous and the few whose names are known were monks or clergy. Of the known composers, the most significant are those from the Abbey of Saint Gall school, particularly Notker the Stammerer (Notker Balbulus); the Saint Martial school and its most prominent member, Adémar de Chabanne