Classical Music: The Classical Period

The classical era was 1750-1820. It was a time period that was plagued by war and violence. The wars consisted of the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. Also during the classical period the power shifted from the nobility and the church to the middle class. The classical music period contained contrasting moods with rhythmic variety. The classical period was homophonic in texture. The three main forms in the classical period are sonata form, theme and variations, and rondo. Sonata form is single movements that consist of three parts; the exposition, the development, the recapitulation, and the ending concluding section called the coda. In the exposition the themes are present, then in the development the themes are presented in a new way and the themes reappear in the recapitulation. This is all concluded by the coda. An example of this is Symphony No. 40 in G Minor K. 550, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In this piece, he displays sonata-form by displaying an initial theme, treating the theme in a new way, and the theme returns again. The next major form is Theme and Variations, which is an idea, or theme that is repeated throughout a piece, but it is changed each time that it is repeated. The theme can be outline by AA 'A ' 'A ' ' ', each of the primes represents the …show more content…
They often wrote about love, thus the reason for calling it the romantic period. They also let the politics of the time period influence their work. The composers would create songs that contained a national identity, or they would compose songs that represented a foreign land. Another thing that became very popular in the romantic period is program music, which is instrumental music associated with a story, poem, idea, or scene. A great example of program music is Romeo and Juliet, by Tchaikovsky. He modeled the music after Shakespeare 's