A journey through Time!

Musical history can be divided into several periods. The periods that we need to know about for orchestral landmarks are:

The Baroque (1600 1750) The Classical (1750 1810) The Romantic(1810 1910) The Twentieth century
The dates given above are all approximate. Nobody woke up on January 1st 1600 and decided that it would be the baroque period! We just round the dates off to make them more clear cut.

You have been chosen to sift through all the composers in time and put forward suggestions for a composer in residence who will create new music to perform on the new world Europa - a moon of Jupiter. Each group must gather evidence for the composer;.. What type of music he writes, how
successful, what type of orchestra, how quick he can write, What events he wrote for?

Your team then puts forward its case The whole council debates and then votes on the composer to bring back from history. The human race will be a fresh set of clones so this will be the first music they will hear when they awake.

Just as civilations are built upon past inventions, so is music this is called a musical canon (someone invents an idea and it gets carried on a developed in different eras.)

Music was of great importance and both secular and sacred musicians were supported well. Composers of note.
King Henry VIII (pastime with good company) Tylman Susato (Fanfare)

John Taverner (mass, sacred choral works)

Robert Fayrfax

Much music of the era was lost ( many people died of sickness) The earliest music was plainchant and this was in unison with no harmony or rhythm, they were called plain chant because they were so simple. Later on other notes and especially polyphonic music came into being and this marked the beginning of harmony.

 Music was not usually written down, Bards would

memorize huge collections of songs and chants and carry these around in their head they would pass them on aurally. Pope Gregory I was the first to introduce rules for writing down music and so the first music was sacred He declared music was to be standadized and so notation was the same for everyone. The earliest written music was gregorian chant (from Pope Gregory).