This program adds the achievements of Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Modest Mussorgsky and the rest of The Mighty Handful, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg, Georges Bizet, Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Straus...
This program describes the development of music in Europe between the 2nd and 16th centuries, from the plainchant of the early Christians to the polyphony of the late Renaissance. The motet, chanson, madrigal, chorale, mass, canzone, and songs of th...
This program studies the birth of Classical music, which occurred during the final decades of the Baroque Era, and its maturation up to about 1800. Differences between Baroque and Classical music—particularly in matters of tonality and form—are ...
While Classical composers relied on form and structure, Romantic composers gave priority to emotional expression. This program surveys the 19th century as it notes the contributions of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Franz Lisz...
The early 20th century saw the virtual elimination of tonality as an organizing musical principle and dissonance used as sheer sound rather than a transitional state of musical tension that had to be resolved. This program examines how Claude Debuss...
Over the past half-century, concert music has felt the influence of jazz and the Modernist innovations of serialism, “chance music,” microtonality, abstractly expressionistic electronic music, and minimalism. At the same time, there has been a r...
When and where did music begin? What functions does music serve in different cultures? What major similarities and differences define the world’s musical traditions? And how did early European music get its start? This program sheds light on those...
For centuries, the Church dominated Western thought and expression—but no hierarchy lasts forever. This program focuses on the Italian Renaissance and the flowering of humanist and secular art forms in Europe. Highlighting the intellectual and cre...
What directions did art take after the triumph of the high Renaissance? This program studies the pictorial and musical idioms of the Baroque period, from the ongoing importance of Italian painters and sculptors to the creation of opera, the oratorio...