Music History: Composers, Eras and More
People sometimes hear the word "history" and then run away. But history can be far from boring! Music history is filled with colorful characters, interesting scenarios and great music.
I consider music history a fundamental component of music education. Without the context of knowing who composers were or where the music you're learning fits into the grand scheme of things, you'll never fully appreciate your pieces.
The first section in our music history discussion is on composers. This page will lead you to discussions on important composers, as well as videos of the music they composed. You'll also find tutorials written by them that are available on this website.
Say you're learning a sonata - what's a sonata? Where did it originate? Who wrote them? What's its form? These are all vital questions to understanding the mechanics of your pieces. In this section, we detail a variety of common musical dances and song forms.
Listening to music is an art in and of itself. It's easy to appreciate simple modern music - it's so familiar to us. It can be more of a challenge to appreciate Classical music simply because it's different, and we don't have a natural understanding of it.
This section is full of listen-throughs and analysis videos to help you understand and appreciate compositions across a broad spectrum of eras.
There are four main eras in music we consider as pianists (there are more beyond that, but that's a discussion for another day). They are the baroque (1600-1750), classical (1750-1820), romantic (1820-1910) and modern (1900-) period.
In each of these sections, you'll find a breakdown of the main composers, info about the era, and tutorials from those time periods.