Embarrassed by the crow's feet at the corners of your eyes? Contemplating plastic surgery to remove those unsightly little creases? Think again. Your crow's feet could be your ticket to social acceptance.

Australian researchers have found that we look for the twitch of the crow's feet on the faces of others as a sign of friendliness.

The 19th century French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne found that the subtle muscle contractions at the sides of the eyes were associated only with authentic smiles. He found that people cannot voluntarily produce the crow's feet creases when they are faking a smile. Thus the authentic smile has been dubbed the ``Duchenne smile".

The University of Sydney's BRAINnet was interested in the question of how important the Duchenne smile was to social communication. It asked 60 people to study the expressions of happy, sad and neutral faces on a computer monitor.

Using an infra-red eye gaze monitoring system, the researchers were able to log where the gaze of the volunteers fell on the pictures. They found the volunteers lingered on the crow's feet just long enough to value the creases as significant to determining whether the subject was genuinely happy.

The head of the university's cognitive neuroscience unit, Dr Lea Williams, said the crow's feet contraction was produced only when people experienced a genuine sense of enjoyment or happiness, suggesting it was evoked only when the brain networks associated with these experiences were activated.

``I would hope that this type of research helps us to put greater value on our facial wrinkles rather than necessarily and only viewing them as the negative signs of age," she said.

Brain imaging evidence suggested we had evolved specialised and hard-wired brain networks to deal with each basic emotion - happy, sad, surprise, fear, disgust and anger - and that there may therefore be an evolutionary basis for these emotions, she said.

Imagine building up a collection of the great singers and groups of the "Swingin' Sixties", cheaply and economically - savings money in the process!

This process is simply about selecting the best collections in the market, and choosing the best sources - in the high street or on-line, so that you get the best possible product, at the best possible price!

Tips to ensure you get the best there is for the least outlay:

1. Don't get sucked in to the latest marketing programme. With Christmas coming up, this is doubly important, because this is the time when ridiculous sums of money are asked for, for compilations that have been on the market for years - at much lower sums. Ignore ALL such promotions, and use the tips in this article!
2. Consider buying second hand. I know there is a delight in unwrapping the cellophane of a new purchase. Actually, that is the one thing I DETEST about buying new, as I can never get the wretched wrapping off, without the aid of a sharp knife or scissors, when I often scratch the CD case in frustration. As soon as you play your DC or DVD, it is officially second hand, so what have you gained. I have only once found a second hand product to be even slightly faulty, and on e-bay you will almost certainly be able to get a refund.
3. Take care to look at the small print on the cover of a CD. IGNORE all CDs with the words "tracks by original artistes, although some may have been re-recorded featuring some or all of the original artistes. You may get some tracks as originals, or even a version that is superior in many ways to the original. But don't bank on it. If you can get it for $1.00 or a couple of dollars, you may want to take the chance. But better not!
4. Use ebay to search for the best compilation of tracks of your chosen artiste. For sixties artistes, it is relatively common to acquire a "best of" CD featuring 20, 30, 40, even 50 original tracks on a single CD or CD box set.
5. Even better, choose a CD compilation with a clear theme. This could be all the EP tracks, or all the "A" and "B" singles over a given period. This ensures that there is no fillers of dubious quality tracks to pad out the CD.
6. Compare prices on ebay with Amazon. It can be amazing how much prices can vary for the same product - either new or second hand, between the two sites. Sometimes Amazon is best option - especially as there is no bidding involved, and sometimes ebay wins hands down.
7. Use Amazon to check out the quality of the compilation. Reviewers will give hard hitting honest appraisal of the CD or DVD, identifying those dodgy re-recorded tracks mentioned above, or where the tracks are not representative of an artiste's best work.
8. If bidding on ebay, bid low and late. You can get an idea of the average price by going to "completed listings", but I prefer to wade right in. Once I have identified a great product, I assess my top total price (including postage and packing!), then make my bid about 24 hours before the end date at about half my target. I log in again about half an hour before the end of auction, and get ready to make a late (and final) bid. Don't exceed you top bid. There will be another one along tomorrow!
9. And for special individual tracks, why not use the Internet to download songs as MP3 tracks!

The term ‘baroque’ was first coined to describe the architectural style of 17th and 18th century religious buildings in many parts of Europe. It wasn’t until the 1900s that the word ‘baroque’ was applied to musical composition. Today, the term refers to a specific musical genre which originated in the 1600s and reached its peak in the early to mid 1700s.

So what exactly is baroque music? It is a style intended primarily to invoke a particular emotional mood in the listener. The intended mood can vary from piece to piece but is generally consistent within the piece – for example, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, perhaps the most well-known example of baroque music, was written to create a mood of joy and celebration in the listener. The ideal Baroque style can be summed up in the words of composer Johann Joseph Fux.

“A composition meets the demands of good taste if it is well constructed, avoids trivialities as well as willful eccentricities, aims at the sublime, but moves in a natural ordered way, combining brilliant ideas with perfect workmanship.”

Baroque music often contains a feeling of continuity, achieved by repeating a musical “theme” throughout the piece. These compositions tend to be extremely intricate and are frequently not easy to play or sing. The dynamics of baroque music tend to shift abruptly within a piece, rarely using gradual changes such as crescendos. This is probably due to the limitations of the musical instruments at the time – keyboard instruments such as harpsichords were unable to create subtle changes in volume, so the composer had the choice of piano (soft) or forte (loud) but not gradual transitions between the two. The development of the orchestra also influenced this characteristic, since the composer could now induce abrupt changes in tone and volume by adding and removing instruments.

Baroque had a tremendous influence on musical evolution. Some of the world’s most cherished composers wrote during this era – Bach, Vivaldi, Gluck, Hendel and dozens more. Opera was invented during the Baroque era and still bears the fingerprints of the style, with its elaborate harmonies and emotional appeal. The baroque era also represents the beginning of a shift in emphasis from religious to secular music. Perhaps for this reason, during the Classical Era (from roughly 1730-1820) most religious music was written in the Baroque style, while secular music was developed using the new techniques. For example, Mozart’s oratorios and masses are distinctly Baroque in their harmonic style, while his secular compositions generally are not.

Baroque music was also the distant ancestor of jazz. Not only were most Baroque pieces written for small ensembles similar to a jazz quartet, they also required a level of improvisation by the performers. Many compositions employed a method known as ‘Figured Bass,’ which is a way for pianists to improvise a bass line to support the pre-written chords – and as a result, performances of the same piece of Baroque music could vary greatly from day to day. 

In many ways, the Baroque era was the “Great Enlightment” of music – the time of discovery and exploration when the musical world exploded with ideas and insights. An understanding of this time is critical to understanding music as a whole.

In the broadest sense, contemporary music is any music being written in the present day. In the context of classical music the term has been applied to music written in the last quarter century or so, particularly works post-1975. There is debate over whether the term should be used to apply to music in any style, or only to composers writing avant-garde music, or only to "modernist" music. There is some use of "Contemporary" as a synonym for "Modern", particularly in academic settings. A more restrictive use applies the term only to living composers and their works (perhaps only their recent works). Since "contemporary" is a word that describes a time frame, rather thana style or a unifying idea, there are no universally agreed criteria for making these distinctions.

History

In the early part of the 20th century contemporary music included modernism, the twelve tone technique, atonality, futurism, primitivism, constructivism, New Objectivity, unresolved and greater amounts of dissonance, rhythmic complexity, nationalism, social and socialist realism, and neoclassicism. In the fifties, contemporary music generally meant serialism, in the sixties serialism, post-serialism, indeterminacy, electronic music including computer music, mixed media, performance art, and fluxus, and since then minimal music, post-minimalism, New Simplicity, New Complexity, and all of the above.

Since the 1970s there has been increasing stylistic variety, with far too many schools to name or label. However, in general, there are three broad trends. The first is the continuation of modern avant-garde traditions, including musical experimentalism. The second are schools which sought to revitalize a tonal style based on previous common practice. The third focuses on non-functional triadic harmony, exemplified by composers working in the minimalist and related traditions.

Contemporary music composition has been altered with growing force by computers in composition, which allow for composers to listen to renderings of their scores before performance, compose by layering performed parts over each other and to disseminate scores over the internet. It is far too soon to tell what the final result of this wave of computerization will have as an effect on music.

All history is provisional, and contemporary history even more so, because of the well known problems of dissemination and social power. Who is "in" and who is "out" is often more important to who is known than the music itself. In an era with perhaps as many as 40,000 composers of concert music in the United States alone, first performances are difficult, and second performances even more so. The lesson of obscure composers in the past becoming important later applies doubly so to contemporary music, where it is likely that there are "firsts" before the officially listed first, and works which will be later admired as exemplars of style, which are as yet, unheralded in their own time.

Movements in contemporary music

Modernism

Many of the key figures of the high modern movement are alive, or only recently deceased and there is also still an extremely active core of composers, performers and listeners who continue to advance the ideas and forms of Modernism. Elliott Carter is still active, for example, as is Lukas Foss. While high modernist schools of composing, such as serialism are no longer as rhetorically central, the contemporary period is beginning the process of sorting through the modern corpus, looking for works which will have repertory value.

Modernism is also present as surface or trope in works of a large range of composers, as atonality has lost much of its ability to terrorize listeners, and even film scores use sections of music clearly rooted in modernist musical language. Active modernist composers include Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Judith Weir, Thomas Adès, Magnus Lindberg and Gunther Schuller.

Serialism

More specifically named "integral" or "compound" serialism, one of the most important post-war movements, led by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe, and by Milton Babbitt, Donald Martino, and Charles Wuorinen in America.

Compositions use an ordered set or several such sets, which may be the basis for the whole composition. The term is also often used for dodecaphony, or twelve-tone technique, which is alternatively regarded as the model for integral serialism.

Post-modernism

Post-modernism is held to by many critics to be a strong influence in contemporary classical music. While explanations of what post-modernism is, and why it is influential vary widely, and responses to whether post-modernism is "good" for music, or even a good in and of itself - there is a wide agreement that instrumental concert music, and "art music" has absorbed ideas and influences from the wider culture, and that the results of these influences, for better and for worse, can be detected in musical results. Examples include polystylism, bricolage and collage, pop music references, the use of fragments, found sounds and incorporated voices, the shift from increasingly chromatic surfaces to more triadic ones, juxtaposition of genres, the use of new instrumental combinations which take instruments from several different cultures, and the combining of composition with video and other media images. Key composers include the Scottish composer, James MacMillan (who draws on sources as diverse as plainchant, South American Liberation Theology and Polish avant-garde techniques of the 1960s), the American Michael Torke (drawing on classical tradition, minimalism and popular music) and Mark-Anthony Turnage from the UK (drawing from jazz, English pastoralism and the avant-garde).

Polystylism

Polystylism is the use of multiple styles or techniques of music, and is seen as a postmodern characteristic. Polystylist composers include William Bolcom, Sofia Gubaidulina, George Rochberg, Frederic Rzewski, Alfred Schnittke, Ezequiel Viñao and John Zorn.

Conceptualism

When Duchamp displayed a urinal in an art museum, he struck the most visible blow for artistic conceptualism. Music conceptualism found a champion in John Cage and, a bit later, in the composers associated with the Fluxus movement. A conceptualist work is an act whose musical importance draws from the frame, rather than the content of the work. An example would be Alvin Singleton's 56 Blows, a work that has the distinction of being mentioned in debate on the floor of the Senate.

Minimalism and post-minimalism

The minimalist generation still has a prominent role in new composition. Philip Glass has been expanding his symphony cycle, while John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a choral work commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks won a Pulitzer Prize. Steve Reich has explored electronic opera (most notably in Three Tales) and Terry Riley has been active in composing instrumental music and music theatre. But beyond the minimalists themselves, the tropes of non-functional triadic harmony are now commonplace, even among composers who are not regarded as minimalists per se.

Many composers are expanding the resources of minimalist music to include rock and world instrumentation and rhythms, serialism, and many other techniques. Kyle Gann considers William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes as the first "post-minimalism" piece, and labels John Adams as a "post-minimalist" composer, rather than as a minimalist. Gann defines "post-minimalism" as the search for greater harmonic and rhythmic complexity by composers such as Mikel Rouse and Glenn Branca. Another notable characteristic is storytelling and emotional expression taking precedence over technique. Post-minimalism is also [1] a movement in painting and sculpture which began in the late 1960s. (See lumpers/splitters)

Other composers sometimes referred to as "post-minimalist" include Erkki-Sven Tüür, Peteris Vasks, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars, Lepo Sumera, Valentin Silvestrov, Veljo Tormis, Ingram Marshall, Kevin Volans, Daniel Lentz, Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski, and many composers associated with the Bang on a Can collective.

Post-classic tonality

Other aspects of post-modernity can be seen in a "post-classic" tonality that has advocates such as Michael Daugherty, Elena Kats-Chernin and Tan Dun.

"World music" influence

An increasing number of composers mix western and non-western instruments, including gamelan from Indonesia, Chinese traditional instruments, ragas from Indian Classical music. There is also an exploration of eastern-European and non-Western tonalities, even in relatively traditionally structured works. This can be in the context of post-minimalist works, such as Janice Giteck's and Evan Ziporyn's Balinese-influenced works, bandura works by Julian Kytasty, or in the context of post-classic tonality, such as in the music of Bright Sheng, or in the context of thoroughly modernist styled works.

Rock influence

Similarly, many composers have emerged since the 1980s who are heavily influenced by rock. Many, such as Scott Johnson and Steven Mackey started out as rock musicians and only later moved into the realm of scored music. Other notable composers who draw on rock include Annie Gosfield, Evan Ziporyn, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang, John Zorn, Steve Martland, Ben Johnston, Anne LeBaron, Kitty Brazelton, Glenn Branca, and Nick Didkovsky. Many of these composers (Gordon, Lang, Wolfe, Ziporyn, Martland, Branca) are post-minimalist in orientation, but some (Didkovsky, Brazelton) are very much not.

Historicism

There are composers that have adopted historicist approach to composition, employing a variety of styles of previous eras. Some composers had occasional forays into this approach previously (Alfred Schnittke), while others embraced it to varying degrees of exclusion of other styles.

Some post-minimalist works, such as Gavin Bryars' "Oi me lasso" cycle employ medievalism. Other composers embrace renaissance, baroque and classical styles with varying degrees of purism (Fritz Kreisler, Robert Casadesus, Jordi Savall, Rene Clemencic, Thomas Binkley, Benjamin Bagby, Joseph Dillon Ford, Ladislav Kupkovič, Winfried Michel, the several composers of the Delian Society, and the Vox Saeculorum group). This movement is related to Early Music Revival and a number of historicist composers are influenced by their intimate familiarity with the instrumental practice of earlier eras (Alexandre Danilevsky, Paulo Galvão, Roman Turovsky-Savchuk).

Historicism may also be combined with minimalism, post-minimalism, and world-music.

Experimentalism

One important movement in contemporary music involves expanding the range of gestures available to instrumentalists, for example the work of George Crumb. The Kronos Quartet has been among the most active ensembles in promoting contemporary American works for string quartet, and they take delight in music which stretches the manner in which sound can be drawn out of instruments.

European composers who make heavy use of extended techniques include Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and Heinz Holliger.

Electronic music

Electronics are now part of mainstream music creation. Performances of regular works often use midi synthesizers to back or replace regular musicians. Looping, sampling, and (rarely) drum machines may also be used. However the older idea of electronic music (musique concrète, electroacoustics...) - as a search for pure sound and an interaction with the hardware itself - continues to find a place in composition, from commercially successful pieces to works targeted at very narrow audiences. See, for example, the work of Michel Chion.

Neo-Romanticism

The resurgence of the vocabulary of extended tonality which flourished in the first years of the 20th century continues in the contemporary period, though it is no longer considered shocking or controversial as such. Composers working in the neoromantic vein include John Corigliano, George Rochberg (in some of his works after 1971), David Del Tredici and Krzysztof Penderecki (after about 1975).

New Simplicity

A movement in Germany in the late seventies and early eighties, reacting with a variety of strategies to restore the subjective to composing. New Simplicity's best-known composer is Wolfgang Rihm, who strives for the emotional volatility of late 19th-century Romanticism and early 20th-century Expressionism. Called Die neue Einfachheit in German, it has also been termed "New Romanticism," "New Subjectivity," "New Inwardness," "New Sensuality," "New Expressivity," and "New Tonality."

Styles found in other countries sometimes associated with the German New Simplicity movement include the so-called "Holy Minimalism" of the Pole Henryk Górecki and the Estonian Arvo Pärt (in their works after 1970), as well as Englishman John Tavener, who unlike the New Simplicity composers have turned back to Medieval and Renaissance models, however, rather than to 19th-century romanticism for inspiration. Important representative works include Symphony No. 3 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" (1976) by Górecki, Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977) by Pärt, and The Veil of the Temple (2002) by Tavener.

New Complexity

"New Complexity" is a current within today's European contemporary avant-garde music scene, named in reaction to the New Simplicity. Among this diverse group are Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon and Michael Finnissy.

Spectral Music

Epitomized by the works of Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and Horatiu Radulescu. Much of Kaija Saariaho's and the last few pieces of Claude Vivier's music are influenced by the spectralists.

Contemporary choral music

At the turn of the century, Eric Whitacre has achieved considerable attention by combining tonal music with tone clusters and similar experimental techniques. Although it is too soon to discern trends in the 21st century, the spirit of more practical music which dominated the last decades of the 20th century seems to be continuing via the works of Karl Jenkins, John Rutter, Kentaro Sato and Morten Lauridsen amongst others.

20th century classical music, the classical music of the 20th century, was extremely diverse, beginning with the late Romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Impressionism of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, the Neoclassicism of middle-period Igor Stravinsky, and ranging to such distant sound-worlds as the complete serialism of Pierre Boulez, the simple triadic harmonies of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, the microtonal music adopted by Harry Partch, Alois Hába and others, the aleatoric music of John Cage, the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the polystylism of Alfred Schnittke.

Perhaps the most salient common thread during this time period of classical music was the wider use of dissonance in composing music. Because of this, the 20th century is sometimes called the "Dissonant Period" of classical music, which followed the common practice period, which emphasized consonance until about 1900.

Among the most prominent composers of the 20th century were Béla Bartók, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland, Carl Nielsen, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux and Witold Lutoslawski. Classical music also had an intense cross fertilization with jazz, with several composers being able to work in both genres, including George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. An important feature of 20th century concert music is the existence of the splitting of the audience into traditional and avant-garde, with many figures prominent in one world considered minor or unacceptable in the other. Composers such as Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Edgard Varèse, Milton Babbitt, and Luciano Berio have devoted followings within the avant-garde, but are often attacked outside of it. As time has passed, however, it is increasingly accepted, though by no means universally so, that the boundaries are more porous than the many polemics would lead one to believe: many of the techniques pioneered by the above composers show up in popular music by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Nirvana, Enigma, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and in film scores that draw mass audiences.

It should be kept in mind that this article presents an overview of 20th century classical music and many of the composers listed under the following trends and movements may not identify exclusively as such and may be considered as participating in different movements. For instance, at different times during his career, Igor Stravinsky may be considered a romantic, modernist, neoclassicist, and a serialist.

The 20th century was also an age where recording and broadcast changed the economics and social relationships inherent in music. An individual in the 19th century made most music themselves, or attended performances. An individual in the industrialized world had access to radio, television, phonograph and later digital music such as the CD.

Romantic style

Particularly in the early part of the century, many composers wrote music which was an extension of 19th century Romantic music. Harmony, though sometimes complex, was tonal, and traditional instrumental groupings such as the orchestra and string quartet remained the most usual. Traditional forms such as the symphony and concerto remained in use. (See Romantic Music)

Many prominent composers — among them Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel, and Benjamin Britten — made significant advances in style and technique while still employinga melodic, harmonic, structural and textural language which was related to that of the 19th century and quite accessible to the average listener.

Music along these lines was written throughout the 20th century, and continues to be written today. Some other twentieth-century composers of works in a more-or-less-traditional idiom include:

• Samuel Barber
• Leonard Bernstein
• Aaron Copland
• John Corigliano
• George Gershwin
• Henryk Górecki
• Percy Grainger
• Howard Hanson
• Roy Harris
• Alan Hovhaness
• Gustav Holst
• Aram Khachaturian
• Colin McPhee
• Carl Nielsen
• Giacomo Puccini
• Sergei Rachmaninoff
• Ned Rorem
• Jean Sibelius
• Ralph Vaughan Williams

Minimalist composers such as Philip Glass can also be said to evoke some sense of nineteenth-century melodic and harmonic language, but depart radically in structure and texture, harmony, ideas, development, counterpoint and rhythm.

Many other 20th century composers took more experimental routes.

Modernism

Modernism is the name given to a series of movements (See Modernism) arising out of the idea that the 20th century presented a new basis for society and activity, and therefore art should adopt this new basis, however construed, as the fundamental of aesthetics. Modernism took the progressive spirit of the late 19th century, its love of rigor and of technical advancement, and unhinged it from the norms and forms of late 19th century art. To take one example, architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his drafting work with tools, not because he could not draw freehand, but because "the machine was the coming thing, therefore I wanted to make beauty with the machine". Various movements in 20th century music, including neo-classicism, serialism, experimentalism, conceptualism can be traced to this idea.

The Second Viennese School, atonality and serialism

Arnold Schoenberg is one of the most significant figures in 20th century music. His early works are in a late Romantic style, influenced by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, but he later abandoned a tonal framework altogether, instead writing freely atonal music — he is often reckoned to have been the first composer to have done so. In time, he developed the twelve-tone technique of composition, intended to be a replacement for traditional tonal pitch organisation. His pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg also developed and furthered the use of the twelve-tone system and were notable for their use of the technique in their own right. They together are known, colloquially, as the Schoenberg "trinity" or the Second Viennese School. This name was created to imply that this "New Music" would have the same effect as the "First Viennese School" of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Schoenberg's music and that of his followers was very controversial in its day, and remains so to some degree now. Many listeners found, and still find, his music hard to follow, lacking a sense of definite melody. Nonetheless, works such as Pierrot Lunaire continue to be performed, studied and listened to, while many of the contemporary works which were considered more acceptable have been forgotten. A larger measure of the reason for this is that the style he pioneered was very influential, even among composers who continued to compose tonal music. Many composers have since written music which does not rely on traditional tonality.

The twelve-tone technique itself was later adapted by other composers to control aspects of music other than the pitch of the notes, such as dynamics and methods of attack, creating completely serialised music. Milton Babbitt created his time point system, where the distance in time between attack points for the notes is serialized also, while some composers serialized aspects such as register or dynamics. The "pointillistic" style of Webern — in which individual sounds are carefully placed within the piece such that each has importance — was very influential in the years following World War II among composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. After years of unpopularity, the twelve tone technique became the norm in Europe during the 50's and 60's, but then experienced a backlash as generations of younger and older composers returned to writing tonal music, either in a neoclassical, romantic, or minimalist vein. Stravinsky, who studied as a young man with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, became a modernist, then a neoclassicist, and ultimately became a serialist upon Schoenberg's death.

Free dissonance and experimentalism

In the early part of the 20th century modernist composers such as George Antheil and others produced music that was shocking to audiences of the time for its disregard or flaunting of musical conventions. Charles Ives quoted popular music, often had multiple or bitonal layers of music, extreme dissonance, and seemingly unplayable rhythmic complexity. Henry Cowell performed his solo piano pieces by strumming or plucking the inside of the piano, knocking on the outside, or depressing tone clusters with his arms or boards. Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific sounding names; he also dreamed of producing music electronically. Charles Seeger enunciated the concept of dissonant counterpoint, a technique used by Carl Ruggles, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, and others. Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev fled the riot that greeted The Rite of Spring and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography. Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith explored bitonality. Amadeo Roldán brought music written specifically for percussion ensemble into the classical tradition; he was soon followed by Varèse and then others. Kurt Weill wrote the popular Threepenny Opera entirely in the popular idiom of German cabarets. Modernist composers being the avant-garde, they often wrote atonally, sometimes explored twelve tone technique, used liberal amounts of dissonance, quoted or imitated popular music, or somehow provoked their audience.

Neoclassicism

Neo-classicism, in music, means the movement in the 20th century to return to a revived "common practice" harmony, mixed with greater dissonance and rhythm, as the basic point of departure for music. Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev, Vangelis Papathanasiou and Béla Bartók are usually listed as the most important composers in this mode, but also the prolific Darius Milhaud and his contemporary Francis Poulenc.

Neo-classicism was born at the same time as the general return to rational models in the arts in response to World War I. Smaller, more spare, more orderly was conceived of as the response to the overwrought emotionalism which many felt had herded people into the trenches. Since economics also favored smaller ensembles, the search for doing "more with less" took on a practical imperative as well. Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is thought of as a seminal "neo-classical piece", as are his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and his "Symphonies of Wind Instruments", as well as his Symphony in C. Stravinsky's neo-classicism culminated with his opera Rake's Progress, with the book done by the well known modernist poet, W. H. Auden.

Stravinsky's rival for a time in neo-classicism was the German Paul Hindemith, who mixed spiky dissonance, polyphony and free ranging chromaticism into a style which was "useful". He produced both chamber works and orchestral works in this style, perhaps most famously "Mathis der Maler". His chamber output includes his Sonata for French Horn, an expressionistic work filled with dark detail and internal connections.

Neo-classicism found a welcome audience in America, the school of Nadia Boulanger promulgated ideas about music based on their understanding of Stravinsky's music. Students of theirs include neo-classicists Elliott Carter (in his early years), Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, Ástor Piazzolla and Virgil Thomson.

Neo-classicism's most audible traits are melodies which use the tritone as a stable interval, and coloristically add dissonant notes to ostinato and block harmonies, along with the free mixture of polyrhythms. Neo-classicism won greater audience acceptance more quickly, and was taken to heart by those opposed to atonality as the true "modern" music. Neo-classicism also embraced the use of folk musics to give greater rhythmic and harmonic variety. Modernists such as the Hungarians Béla Bartók and Romantically inclined Zoltán Kodály and the Czech Leoš JanáÄÂek collected and studied their native folk musics which then influenced their compositions.

In 1990s the world was introduced to a new wonder of neo-classicism - Vangelis Papathanasiou. A former New Age composer wrote over 30 compositions, cilminating with such wonderful pieces as Foros Timis Ston Greco , 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Mythodea ( 2001 ). The symphonic opera of Mythodea was written in 1993. The 2001 version of Mythodea was recorded and played on-stage by: Vangelis on synthesizers and keyboards, the London Metropolitan Orchestra, sopranos Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, two harpists, the chorus of the Greek National Opera, and the Seistron and Typana percussion ensembles (concert only). The concert was held in Athens, Greece on June 28, 2001, and the record was officially released on October 23, 2001, to coincide with the NASA 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft entering the orbit of planet Mars.

Post-modernist music

Post-modernism's birth

Post-modernism can be said to be a response to modernism which asserts that the products of human activity — particularly manufactured or created by artifice — are the central subject for art itself, and that the purpose of art is to focus people's attention on objects for contemplation, as composer-critic Steve Hicken explained it. This strain of modernism looks backward to the dada school of art exemplified by Duchamp, and to the collage of "concrete" music, as well as experiments with electronic music by Edgard Varèse and others. However, post-modernism asserted that this was the primary mode of human existence, an individual aswim in a sea of the products of people.

John Cage is a prominent figure in 20th century music whose influence steadily grew during his lifetime, and who is regarded by many as the founder of post-modernist music. Cage questioned the very definition of music in his pieces, and stressed a philosophy that all sounds are essentially music. Cage in the "silent" 4'33" presents the listener with his idea that the unintentional sounds are just as musically valid as the sounds originating from an instrument. Cage also notably used aleatoric music, and "found sounds" in order to create an interesting and different type of music. His music not only rested on his argument that there was no "music" or "noise" only "sound", and that combinations of found sound were musical events as well - but on the importance of focusing of attention and "framing" as essential to art. (See Post-Modernism)

Cage, though, has been seen by some to be too avant-garde in his approach; for this reason, many find his music unappealing. Interestingly, the seeming opposite of Cage's indeterminism is the overdetermined music of the serialists, which both schools have noted produce similar sounding pieces, yet many serialists, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen have used aleatoric processes. Michael Nyman argues in Experimental Music that minimalism was a reaction to and made possible by both serialism and indeterminism. (See also experimental music)

Post-modernism reached music and painting at very similar moments, on one hand, the spareness, purity, love of mechanism, abstraction and the grid which are very modernist traits were preserved, as was the emphasis on personalizing style and experimentalism. However, post-modernism rejected the hermeneutic stance - the need to be "in" on the joke as it were - of modernism. Instead post-modernism took the popular and pared down as its aesthetic guide. One of the first movements to overtly break with the modernist took inspiration from Cage's work, and its emphasis on layering sounds: Minimalism.

Minimalism

Many composers in the later 20th century began to explore what is now called minimalism. The most specific definition of minimalism refers to the dominance of process in music — where fragments are layered on top of each other, often looped, to produce the entirety of the sonic canvas. Early examples include Terry Riley's In C and Steve Reich's Drumming. Riley is seen by some as the "father" of minimalist music with In C, a work comprised of melodic cells that each performer in an ensemble plays through at their own rate. The minimalist wave of composers — Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young to name the most prominent — wanted music to be "accessible" to ordinary listeners, and wanted to express concrete specific questions of dramatic and music form, not hidden in layers of technique, but very overtly. One key difference between minimalism and previous music is the use of different cells being "out of phase" or determined by the performers; contrast this with the opening of Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner which, despite its use of triadic cells, has each part controlled by the same impulse and moving at the same speed.

Minimalist music is often contentious amongst traditional listeners. Its critics find it to be overly repetitive and empty while proponents argue that the static elements that are often prevalent draw more interest to small changes. Minimalism has, however, inspired and influenced many composers not usually labeled "minimalist" such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. Composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki, whose Symphony No. 3 was the highest selling classical album of the 1990s, have found great success with what has been called "Holy Minimalism" in their deeply felt religious works.

The next wave of composers working in this tradition are not called "Minimalist" by some, but are by others. These include opera composer John Adams and his student Aaron Jay Kernis. The expansion of minimalism from process music, to music which relies on texture to hold together the movement of the music has created a wider diversity of compositions and composers.

Electronic music

Technological advances in the 20th century enabled composers to use electronic means of producing sound. The first electronic instrument was invented in Russia in 1919 by Leon Theremin, and was called the theremin. Some composers simply incorporated electronic instruments into relatively conventional pieces. Olivier Messiaen, for example, used the ondes martenot in a number of works.

Other composers abandoned conventional instruments and used magnetic tape to create music, recording sounds and then manipulating them in some way. Pierre Schaeffer was the pioneer of such music, termed Musique concrète. Some figures, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, used purely electronic means to create their work. In the United States of America, Milton Babbitt used the RCA Mark II Synthesizer to create music. Sometimes such electronic music was combined with more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard Varèse's Déserts, and Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms offer a few examples (although Déserts is sometimes performed today without the tape part).

Oskar Sala, created the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, using the trautonium electronic instrument he helped develop. Morton Subotnick provided the electronic music for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Some well known electronic works generally regarded as in the classical tradition include "Film Music" by Vladimir Ussachevsky, A Rainbow in Curved Air and Shri Camel by Terry Riley, "Silver Apples", "The Wild Bull", and "Return" by Morton Subotnick, Sonic Seasonings and Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, "Light Over Water" by John Adams, Aqua by Edgar Froese, and Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse.

Iannis Xenakis is another modern composer who used computers and electronic instruments, including one he invented, in many compositions. Some of his electronic works are gentle ambient pieces and some are savage sonic violence. Composers such as Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor created and performed live electronic music, often designing their own electronics or using tape. A number of institutions sprung up in the 20th century specialising in electronic music, with IRCAM in Paris perhaps the best known.

The influences of minimalists such as Steve Reich (in particular 'Drumming') are clear in much of the work of DJ Spooky showing a perfect example of the crossover between 20th century classical, and electronic music such as trip-hop and even trance and drum n bass.

The era of Romantic music is defined as the period of European classical music that runs roughly from the early 1800s to the first decade of the 20th century, as well as music written according to the norms and styles of that period. The Romantic period was preceded by the classical period, and was followed by the modern period.

Romantic music is related to Romantic movements in literature, art, and philosophy, though the conventional periods used in musicology are now very different from their counterparts in the other arts, which define "romantic" as running from the 1780s to the 1840s. The Romanticism movement held that not all truth could be deduced from axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition. Romantic music struggled to increase emotional expression and power to describe these deeper truths, while preserving or even extending the formal structures from the classical period.

The vernacular use of the term romantic music applies to music which is thought to evoke a soft or dreamy atmosphere. This usage is rooted in the connotations of the word "romantic" that were established during the period, but not all "Romantic" pieces fit this description. Conversely, music that is "romantic" in the modern everyday usage of the word (that is, relating to the emotion of love) is not necessarily linked to the Romantic period.

Trends of the Romantic period

Musical language

Music theorists of the Romantic era established the concept of tonality to describe the harmonic vocabulary inherited from the Baroque and Classical periods. Romantic composers sought to fuse the large structural harmonic planning demonstrated by earlier masters such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with further chromatic innovations, in order to achieve greater fluidity and contrast, and to meet the needs of longer works. Chromaticism grew more varied, as did dissonances and their resolution. Composers modulated to increasingly remote keys, and their music often prepared the listener less for these modulations than the music of the classical era. Sometimes, instead ofa pivot chord, a pivot note was used. The properties of the diminished seventh and related chords, which facilitate modulation to many keys, were also extensively exploited. Composers such as Beethoven and, later, Richard Wagner expanded the harmonic language with previously-unused chords, or innovative chord progressions. Much has been written, for example, about Wagner's Tristan chord, found near the opening of Tristan und Isolde, and its precise harmonic function.

Some Romantic composers analogized music to poetry and its rhapsodic and narrative structures, while creating a more systematic basis for the composing and performing of concert music. Music theorists of the Romantic era codified previous practices, such as the sonata form, while composers extended them. There was an increasing focus on melodies and themes, as well as an explosion in the composition of songs. The emphasis on melody found expression in the increasingly extensive use of cyclic form, which was an important unifying device for some of the longer pieces that became common during the period.

The greater harmonic elusiveness and fluidity, the longer melodies, poesis as the basis of expression, and the use of literary inspirations were all present prior to the Romantic period. However, some composers of the Romantic period adopted them as the central pursuit of music itself. Romantic composers were also influenced by technological advances, including an increase in the range and power of the piano and the improved chromatic abilities and greater projection of the instruments of the symphony orchestra.

Non-musical influences

One of the controversies that raged through the Romantic period was the relationship of music to external texts or sources. While program music was common before the 19th century, the conflict between formal and external inspiration became an important aesthetic issue for some composers during the Romantic era.

During the 1830s Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, which was presented with an extensive program text, caused many critics and academics to pick up their pens. Prominent among the detractors was François-Joseph Fétis, the head of the newly-founded Brussels Conservatory, who declared that the work was "not music". Robert Schumann defended the work, but not the program, saying that bad titles would not hurt good music, but good titles could not save a bad work. Franz Liszt was one of the prominent defenders of extra-musical inspiration.

This rift grew, with polemics delivered from both sides. For the supporters of "absolute" music, formal perfection rested on musical expression that obeys the schematics laid down in previous works, most notably the sonata form then being codified. To the adherents of program music, the rhapsodic expression of poetry or some other external text was, itself, a form. They argued that for the artist to bring his life into a work, the form must follow the narrative. Both sides used Beethoven as inspiration and justification. The rift was exemplified by the conflict between followers of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner: Brahms' disciples took him to be a pinnacle of absolute music, while Wagnerites put their faith in the poetic "substance" shaping the harmonic and melodic flow of his music.

Examples of music inspired by literary and artistic sources include Liszt's Faust Symphony, Dante Symphony, his symphonic poems and his Annees de Pelerinage, Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony, Mahler's First Symphony (based on the novel Titan), and the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Schubert included material from his Lieder in some of his extended works, and others, such as Liszt, transcribed opera arias and songs for solo instrumental performance.

Romantic opera

In opera, the forms for individual numbers that had been established in classical and baroque opera were more loosely used. By the time Wagner's operas were performed, arias, choruses, recitatives and ensemble pieces often cannot easily be distinguished from each other in the continuous, through-composed music.

The decline of castrati led to the heroic leading role in many operas being ascribed to the tenor voice. The chorus was often given a more important role.

Towards the end of the Romantic period, verismo opera became popular, particularly in Italy. It depicted realistic, rather than historical or mythological, subjects. France followed with operas such as Bizet's Carmen.

Nationalism

A number of Romantic composers wrote nationalist music. Mikhail Glinka's operas, for example, are on specifically Russian subjects, while Bed���ich Smetana and Antonín Dvo���ák both used rhythms and themes from Czech folk dances and songs. Late in the 19th century, Jean Sibelius wrote music based on the Finnish epic, the Kalevala and his piece 'Finlandia' became a symbol of Finnish nationalism.

Instrumentation and scale

Instrumentation continued to undergo technological advances during the romantic era. Composers such as Hector Berlioz used the new capabilities of instruments in hitherto unimagined orchestrations. Some composers' works called for a much larger symphony orchestra, and instruments that were previously rarities began to be used more frequently. Mahler's Symphony No. 8 is known as the Symphony of a Thousand because of the massive choral and orchestral forces required to perform it.

Also much longer works became acceptable. A typical Haydn or Mozart symphony lasts between twenty and twenty-five minutes. Beethoven's Third Symphony lasts over forty-five minutes, and the longest symphonies of, among others, Anton Bruckner and Mahler last more than an hour.

The Romantic period also saw the continuing rise of the instrumental virtuoso. The violinist Niccolò Paganini was one of the musical stars of the early 19th century. Liszt, in addition to his skills as a composer, was also a very popular and influential virtuoso pianist. A leading virtuoso was an outstanding attraction for audiences. Chopin wrote in forms like the polonaise and mazurka, that were derived from Polish folk music. Many Russian composers like Balkirev, Cui, Borodin, Rimski-Korsakov, and Balkirev shared the commone dream to write music that was inspired by Russian folk music.

Chronology

Classical roots (1780-1815)

In literature, the Romantic period is often taken to start in 1770s or 1780s Germany with the movement known as Sturm und Drang ("storm and struggle") attended by a greater regard for Shakespeare and Homer, and for folk sagas, whether genuine or Ossian. It affected writers including Goethe and Schiller, while in Scotland Robert Burns began setting down folk music.[citation needed] This literary movement is reflected in the music of contemporary composers, including Mozart's German operas, Haydn's so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies, the lyrics that composers (particularly Schubert) chose for their Lieder, and a gradual increase in the violence of emotion that music expressed. As long as most composers relied on royal or court patronage, their opportunity to engage in "romanticism and revolt" was limited. Mozart's troubles in the banning of his The Marriage of Figaro as revolutionary are a case in point.

Romanticism drew its fundamental formal substance from the structures of classical practice. Performing standards improved during the classical era with the establishment of performing groups of professional musicians. The author E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn the "three Romantic composers".

The role of chromaticism and harmonic ambiguity developed during the classical era. All of the major classical composers used harmonic ambiguity, and the technique of moving rapidly between different keys. One of the most famous examples is the "harmonic chaos" at the opening of Haydn's The Creation, in which the composer avoids establishing a "home" key at all.

By the 1810s, the use of chromaticism and the minor key, and the desire to move into remote keys to give music a deeper range, were combined with a greater operatic reach. While Beethoven would later be regarded as the central figure in this movement, it was composers such as Clementi and Spohr who represented the contemporary taste in incorporating more chromatic notes into their thematic material. There was a tension between the desire for more expressive "color" and the desire for classical structure. One response was in the field of opera, where texts could provide structure in the absence of formal models. ETA Hoffman is principally known as a critic nowadays, but his opera Undine of 1814 was a radical musical innovation. Another response to the tension between structure and emotional expression was in shorter musical forms, including novel ones such as the nocturne.

Early Romantic (1815-1850)

By the second decade of the 19th century, the shift towards new sources of musical inspiration, along with an increasing chromaticism in melody and more expressive harmony, became a palpable stylistic shift. The forces underlying this shift were not only musical, but economic, political and social.[citation needed] A new generation of composers emerged in post-Napoleonic Europe, among whom were Beethoven, Ludwig Spohr, ETA Hoffman, Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert.

These composers grew up amidst the dramatic expansion of public concert life during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which partly shaped their subsequent styles and expectations. Beethoven was extremely influential as among the first composers to work freelance rather than being employed full-time by a royal or ecclesiastic patron. The chromatic melodies of Muzio Clementi and the stirring operatic works of Rossini, Cherubini and Méhul, also had an influence. The setting of folk poetry and songs for voice and piano, to serve a growing market of middle-class homes where private music-making was becoming an essential part of domestic life, was also becoming an important source of income for composers.

Works of this group of early Romantics include the song cycles and symphonies of Franz Schubert, and the operas of Weber, particularly Oberon, Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. Schubert's work found limited contemporary audiences, and only gradually had a wider impact. In contrast, the compositions of John Field quickly became well-known, partly because he had a gift for creating small "characteristic" piano forms and dances.

Early-Romantic composers of a slightly later generation included Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, and Hector Berlioz. All were born in the 19th century, and produced works of lasting value early in their careers. Mendelssohn was particularly precocious, and wrote two string quartets, a string octet and orchestral music before even leaving his teens. Chopin focussed on compositions for the piano. Berlioz broke new ground in his orchestration, and with his programatic symphonies Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy, the latter based on Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

What is now labelled "Romantic Opera" became established at around this time, with a strong connection between Paris and northern Italy. The combination of French orchestral virtuosity, Italianate vocal lines and dramatic flare, along with texts drawn from increasingly popular literature, established a norm of emotional expression which continues to dominate the operatic stage. The work of Bellini and Donizetti was immensely popular at this time.

Virtuoso concerts (or "recitals", as they were called by Franz Liszt) became immensely popular. This phenomenon was pioneered by Niccolò Paganini, the famous violin virtuoso. The virtuoso piano recital became particularly popular, and often included improvisations on popular themes, and the performance of shorter compositions as well as longer works such as the sonatas of Beethoven and Mozart. One of the most prominent exponents of Beethoven was Clara Wieck, who later married Robert Schumann. The increase in travel, facilitated by rail and later by steamship, created international audiences for touring piano virtuosi such as Liszt, Chopin and Thalberg. Concerts and recitals were promoted as significant events.

During the late 1830s and 1840s, music of Romantic expression became generally accepted, even expected. The music of Robert Schumann, Giacomo Meyerbeer and the young Giuseppe Verdi continued the trends. "Romanticism" was not, however, the only, or even the dominant, style of music making at the time. A post-classical style exemplified by the Paris Conservatoire, as well as court music, still dominated concert programs. This began to change with the rise of performing institutions, along the lines of the Philharmonic Society of London founded in 1813. Such institutions often promoted regular concert seasons, a trend promoted by Felix Mendelssohn among others. Listening to music came to be accepted as a life-enhancing, almost religious, experience. The public's engagement in the music of the time contrasted with the less formal manners of concerts in the classical period, where music had often been promoted as a background diversion.

Also the 1830s and 1840s Richard Wagner produced his first successful operas. He argued for a radically expanded conception of "musical drama". A man who described himself as a revolutionary, and who was in constant trouble with creditors and the authorities, he began gathering around him a body of like-minded musicians, including Franz Liszt, who dedicated themselves to making the "Music of the Future".

Literary Romanticism ended in 1848, with the revolutions of that year marking a turning point in the mood of Europe. With the rise of realism, as well as the deaths of Paganini, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and Liszt's retirement from public performance, perceptions altered of where the cutting edge in music and art lay.

Late Romantic Era (1850-1910)

As the 19th century moved into its second half, many social, political and economic changes set in motion in the post-Napoleonic period became entrenched. Railways and the electric telegraph bound the European world ever closer together. The nationalism that had been an important strain of early 19th century Romantic music became formalized by political and linguistic means. Literature for the middle classes became the publishing norm, including the rise of the novel as the primary literary form.

In the previous 50 years numerous innovations in instrumentation, including the double escarpment piano action, the valved wind instrument, and the chin rest for violins and violas, were no longer novelties but requirements. The dramatic increase in musical education brought a still wider sophisticated audience, and many composers took advantage of the greater regularity of concert life, and the greater financial and technical resources available. These changes brought an expansion in the sheer number of symphonies, concerti and "tone poems" which were composed, and the number of performances in the opera seasons in Paris, London and Italy. The establishment of conservatories and universities also created centers where musicians could forge stable teaching careers, rather than relying on their own entrepreneurship.

During this late Romantic period, some composers created styles and forms associated with their national folk cultures. The notion that there were "German" and "Italian" styles had long been established in writing on music, but the late 19th century saw the rise of a nationalist Russian style (Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Borodin), and also Czech, Finnish and French nationalist styles of composition. Some composers were expressly nationalistic in their objectives, seeking to rediscover their country's national identity in the face of occupation or oppression, as did for example the Bohemian Bed���ich Smetana and the Finnish Jean Sibelius.

Romanticism in the 20th century

Many composers born in the nineteenth century continued to compose in a Romantic style well into the 20th century, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss. In addition, many composers who would later be identified as musical modernists composed works in Romantic styles early in their career, including Igor Stravinsky with his Firebird ballet, Arnold Schoenberg with Gurrelieder, and Béla Bartók with Bluebeard's Castle.

The vocabulary and structure of the music of the late 19th century was no mere relics; composers including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Erich Korngold, Berthold Goldschmidt and Sergei Prokofiev continued to compose works in recognizably Romantic styles after 1950. While new tendencies such as neo-classicism and atonal music challenged the preeminence of the Romantic style, the desire to use a tonally-centered chromatic vocabulary remained present in major works. Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, Dmitri Shostakovich, Malcolm Arnold and Arnold Bax drew frequently from musical Romanticism in their works, and did not consider themselves old-fashioned.

Musical romanticism reached a rhetorical and artistic nadir around 1960: it seemed as if the future lay with avant garde styles of composition, or with neo-classicism of some kind. While Hindemith moved back to a style more recognizably rooted in romanticism, most composers moved in the other direction. Only in the conservative academic hierarchy of the USSR and China did it seem that musical romanticism had a place. However, by the late 1960s a revival of music using the surface of musical romanticism began. Composers such as George Rochberg switched from serialism to models drawn from Gustav Mahler, a project which found him the company of Nicholas Maw and David Del Tredici. This movement is described as Neo-Romanticism, and includes works such as John Corigliano's First Symphony.

Another area where the Romantic style has survived, and even flourished, is in film scoring. Many of the early émigres escaping from Nazi Germany were Jewish composers who had studied, or even studied under, Gustav Mahler's disciples in Vienna. Max Steiner's lush score for Gone with the Wind provides an example of the use of Wagnerian leitmotifs and Mahlerian orchestration. The "Golden Age of Hollywood" film music rested heavily on the work of composers such as Korngold and Steiner as well as Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman. The next generation of film composers, Alexander North, John Williams, and Elmer Bernstein drew on this tradition to write some of the most familiar orchestral music of the late 20th century.

Baroque Period, a time during the 17th century that portrayed exemplified drama and grandeur. During this era architectural structures consisted of irregular shapes and elaborate design. The musical genre of this time falls between the Renaissance and the Classical era. The music forms a major portion of the classical music canon. Baroque period is recognized as the time when more ornamental and elaborate music appeared and was associated with composers such as J.S. Bach, Antonio Vilvaldi and Claudio Monteverdi.

Overview

When we speak of music associated to the Baroque era we are generally speaking of music from a wide range of styles and geographical region. This music was composed during a period of 150 years. The term Baroque as applied to music is a more recent development, only acquiring currency in English in the 1940's. In the 1960's it was commonly disputed as to the result of lumping together such diverse music.

Baroque vs. Renaissance

To distinguish between these two eras we begin by taking a close look at what stylistic differences the music had. While both shared a heavy use of polyphony and counterpoint they differed in the use of these techniques. Renaissance achieved harmony through the consonances incidental to the smooth flow of polyphony where the Baroque used these consonances as chords in a hierarchical, functional tonal scheme. The chord root motion is also distinctly different in terms of how these two eras achieved harmony. Baroque music uses longer lines and stronger rhythms than does Renaissance. These differences show a definite transition from the fantasias of the Renaissance to the more defining Baroque form.

Baroque vs. Classical

The classical era followed Baroque diminishing the role of counterpoint all together. It was replaced with a homophonic texture. Classical works begin to reduce the need for ornamentation and became more articulated. Classical era used the use of modulation to portray a dramatic journey through a sequence of musical keys. In comparison the Baroque modulation has less structural importance than that of the classical era. Baroque is known to portray a single emotion where classical gave birth to the widely varying emotions in music ending in a more dramatic climax.

Brief history

Baroque music began to surface in Italy between 1567-1643. The first composer to begin this new era was Claudio Monteverdi. He created a recitative style and the rise of musical drama called opera. The adoption of this change demonstrated a change in musical thinking all together placing a higher emphasis on harmony rather than polyphony. While harmonic thinking occurred among particular composers it was not until after the Renaissance that it became part of the common vocabulary.

In Italy, the Roman Catholic Church sought a method to increase faith in their religion. They decided that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The demands of religion were also to make the test of sacred works clearer. This increased the pressure to move away from the Renaissance era which offered more densely layered polyphony. It demanded lines that put the words front and center or had a more limited range of imitation.

Middle Baroque music

The middle Baroque is separated by the coming of systematic thinking to a new style. This time brought a gradual institutionalization of the forms and norms particularly in opera. The printing press and trade created an expanded international audience of works for music much in the same fashion they had done for literature.

This time period is often identified by increasingly harmonic focus and the creation of formal systems of teaching. The teaching of music demanded to be taught in an orderly fashion to uphold the demands of this art.

There are many influential composers that stand out from the middle Baroque period including Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) who explored contrast between stately and fully orchestrated sections and simple recitatives and airs, Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) who is remembered for his achievements on the other side of musical technique as a violinist who organized violin technique and pedagouy, Henry Purcell (1659-1695) who is referred to as a commentary genius because he produced a profusion of music widely recognized in his lifetime, and Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) who, in contrast to the previous composers, was an organist and entrepreneurial presenter of music.

Late Baroque music

Between 1680 and 1720 the dividing between middle and late Baroque occurred. The exact date is widely debated due a lack in synchronized transition. The important dividing line seems to lay in the full absorption of tonality as a structuring principle of music. The theoretical work of Rameau made this particularly evident. The sense of two styles of composition was created from the combination of modal counterpoint with tonal logic of cadences. These two styles were referred to as the homophonic dominated by vertical considerations and the polyphonic dominated by imitation and contrapuntal considerations.

Some of the famous composers closely associated with this time period include Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and probably the most famous composer George Frederic Handel (1685-1759). Other leading figures include J.S. Bach (1685-1750), George Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764).

The Baroque influence on later music

Baroque music was the basis for pedagogy and as a result retained a stylistic influence. It became an influence in the 19th century as a paragon of academic and formal purity. Many composers set a standard to aspire to from Bach's fugue style in music. In contemporary music there are many pieces being published as “rediscovered” Baroque such as a viola concerto written by Henri Casadesus but attributed to Handel. In addition many pieces have been termed as neo-Baroque for a focus on imitative polyphony.

There are many similarities between the Baroque style and that of jazz as well. Baroque is similar to a jazz quartet in that pieces used a variety of improvisation on the performers part with the most similar aspect being improvisation of the lead instrument.

Renaissance music is European classical music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 to 1600. Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, given the lack of abrupt shifts in musical thinking during the 15th century. Additionally, the process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, but 1400 is used here.

Overview

Style and trends

The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music (in the Middle Ages, thirds had been considered dissonances: see interval). Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century: the beginning of the 15th century showed simplification, with the voices often striving for smoothness. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music—in the Middle Ages, the narrow range made necessary frequent crossing of parts, thus requiring a greater contrast between them.

The modal (as opposed to tonal) characteristics of Renaissance music began to break down towards the end of the period with the increased use of root motions of fifths. This has since developed into one of the defining characteristics of tonality.

Genres

Principal liturgical forms which endured throughout the entire Renaissance period were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular forms (such as the madrigal) for their own designs.

Common sacred genres were the mass, the motet, the madrigale spirituale, and the laude.

During the period, secular music had an increasingly wide distribution, with a wide variety of forms, but one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost. Secular music included songs for one or many voices, forms such as the frottola, chanson and madrigal.

Secular vocal genres included the madrigal, the frottola, the caccia, the chanson in several forms (rondeau, virelai, bergerette, ballade, musique mesurée), the canzonetta, the villancico, the villanella, the villotta, and the lute song.

Purely instrumental music included consort music for recorder or viol and other instruments, and dances for various ensembles. Common genres were the toccata, the prelude, the ricercar, the canzona, and intabulation (intavolatura, intabulierung). Instrumental ensembles for dances might play a basse danse (or bassedanza), a pavane, a galliard, an allemande, or a courante.

Towards the end of the period, the early dramatic precursors of opera such as monody, the madrigal comedy, and the intermedio are seen.

Theory and notation

According to Margaret Bent (1998), "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness."

Renaissance compositions were notated only in individual parts; scores were extremely rare, and barlines were not used. Note values were generally larger than are in use today; the primary unit of beat was the semibreve, or whole note. As had been the case since the Ars Nova (see Medieval music), there could be either two or three of these for each breve (a double-whole note), which may be looked on as equivalent to the modern "measure," though it was itself a note-value and a measure is not. The situation can be considered this way: it is the same as the rule by which in modern music a quarter-note may equal either two eighth-notes or three, which would be written as a "triplet." By the same reckoning, there could be two or three of the next-smallest note, the "minim," (equivalent to the modern "half note") to each semi-breve. These different permutations were called "perfect/imperfect tempus" at the level of the breve-semibreve relationship, "perfect/imperfect prolation" at the level of the semibreve-minim, and existed in all possible combinations with each other. Three-to-one was called "perfect," and two-to-one "imperfect." Rules existed also whereby single notes could be halved or doubled in value ("imperfected" or "altered," respectively} when preceded or followed by other certain notes. Notes with black noteheads (such as quarter notes) occurred less often. This development of white mensural notation may be a result of the increased use of paper (rather than vellum), as the weaker paper was less able to withstand the scratching required to fill in solid noteheads; notation of previous times, written on vellum, had been black. Other colors, and later, filled-in notes, were used routinely as well, mainly to enfore the aforementioned imperfections or alterations and to call for other temporary rhythmical changes.

Accidentals were not always specified, somewhat as in certain fingering notations (tablatures) today. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint." See musica ficta. A singer would interpret his or her part by figuring cadential formulas with other parts in mind, and when singing together musicians would avoid parallel octaves and fifths or alter their cadential parts in light of decisions by other musicians (Bent, 1998).

Interestingly, it is through contemporary tablatures for various plucked instruments that we have gained much information about what accidentals were performed by the original practitioners.

Early Renaissance music (1400 - 1467)

The Burgundian School of composers, led by Guillaume Dufay, demonstrated characteristics of both the late Medieval era and the early Renaissance (see Medieval music). This group gradually dropped the late Medieval period's complex devices of isorhythm and extreme syncopation, resulting in a more limpid and flowing style. What their music "lost" in rhythmic complexity, however, it gained in rhythmic vitality, as a "drive to the cadence" became a prominent feature around mid-century.

Middle Renaissance music (1467 - 1534)

Towards the end of the 15th century, polyphonic sacred music (as exemplified in the masses of Johannes Ockeghem and Jacob Obrecht) had once again become more complex, in a manner that can perhaps be seen as correlating to the stunning detail in the painting at the time. Ockeghem, particularly, was fond of canon, both contrapuntal and mensural. He even composed a mass in which all the parts are derived canonically from one musical line.

It was in the opening decades of the next century that music felt in a tactus (think of the modern time signature) of two semibreves-to-a-breve began to be as common as that with three semibreves-to-a-breve, as had prevailed prior to that time.

In the early 16th century, there is another trend towards simplification, as can be seen to some degree in the work of Josquin des Prez and his comtemporaries in the Franco-Flemish School, then later in that of G. P. Palestrina, who was partially reacting to the strictures of the Council of Trent, which discouraged excessively complex polyphony as inhibiting understanding the text. Early 16th-century Franco-Flemmings moved away from the complex systems of canonic and other mensural play of Ockeghem's generation, tending toward points of imitation and duet or trio sections within an overall texture that grew to five and six voices. They also began, even before the Tridentine reforms, to insert ever-lengthening passages of homophony, to underline important text or points of articulation. Palestrina, on the other hand, came to cultivate a freely flowing style of counterpoint in a thick, rich texture within which consonance followed dissonance on a nearly beat-by-beat basis, and suspensions ruled the day (see counterpoint). By now, tactus was generally two semibreves per breve with three per breve used for special effects and climactic sections; this was a nearly exact reversal of the prevailing technique a century before.

Late Renaissance music (1534 - 1600)

In Venice, from about 1534 until around 1600, an impressive polychoral style developed, which gave Europe some of the grandest, most sonorous music composed up until that time, with multiple choirs of singers, brass and strings in different spatial locations in the Basilica San Marco di Venezia (see Venetian School). These multiple revolutions spread over Europe in the next several decades, beginning in Germany and then moving to Spain, France and England somewhat later, demarcating the beginning of what we now know as the Baroque musical era.

The Roman School was a group of composers of predominantly church music, in Rome, spanning the late Renaissance into early Baroque eras. Many of the composers had a direct connection to the Vatican and the papal chapel, though they worked at several churches; stylistically they are often contrasted with the Venetian School of composers, a concurrent movement which was much more progressive. By far the most famous composer of the Roman School is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose name has been associated for four hundred years with smooth, clear, polyphonic perfection.

The brief but intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them, is known as the English Madrigal School. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models. Most were for three to six voices.

Musica reservata is a term referring to either a style or a performance practice in a cappella vocal music of the latter, mainly in Italy and southern Germany, involving refinement, exclusivity, and intense emotional expression of sung text.

In addition, many composers observed a division in their own works between a prima pratica (music in the Renaissance polyphonic style) anda seconda pratica (music in the new style) during the first part of the 17th century.

Mannerism

In the late 16th century, as the Renaissance era closes, an extremely manneristic style develops. In secular music, especially in the madrigal, there was a trend towards complexity and even extreme chromaticism (as exemplified in madrigals of Luzzaschi, Marenzio, and Gesualdo). The term "mannerism" derives from art history.

Transition to the Baroque

Beginning in Florence, there was an attempt to revive the dramatic and musical forms of Ancient Greece, through the means of monody, a form of declaimed music over a simple accompaniment; a more extreme contrast with the preceding polyphonic style would be hard to find; this was also, at least at the outset, a secular trend. These musicians were known as the Florentine Camerata.

We have already noted some of the musical developments that helped to usher in the Baroque, but for further explanation of this transition, see polychoral, concertato, monody, madrigal, and opera, as well as the works given under "Sources and further reading."

The term medieval music encompasses European music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD) and ends in approximately the middle of the fifteenth century. Establishing the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance is admittedly arbitrary; 1400 is used here.

Overview

Style and trends

The only medieval music which can be studied is that which was written down and survived. Since creating musical manuscripts was very expensive, due to the expense of parchment, and the huge amount of time necessary for a scribe to copy it all down, only very rich institutions were able to create manuscripts which survived to the current time. These institutions generally included the church and church institutions, such as monasteries, although some secular music was also preserved in these institutions. These manuscript traditions do not reflect much of the popular music of the time. At the start of the era, the notated music is presumed to be monophonic and homorhythmic with what appears to be a unison sung text and no notated instrumental support. In earlier medieval notation, rhythm cannot be specified, although neumatic notations can give clear phrasing ideas, and somewhat later notations indicate rhythmic modes.

The simplicity of chant, with unison voice and natural declamation, is most common. The notation of polyphony develops, and the assumption is that formalised polyphonic practices first arose in this period. Harmony, in consonant intervals of perfect fifths, unisons, octaves, (and later, perfect fourths) begins to be notated. Rhythmic notation allows for complex interactions between multiple vocal lines in a repeatable fashion. The use of multiple texts and the notation of instrumental accompaniment has developed by the end of the era.

Instruments

The instruments used to perform medieval music largely still exist, though in different forms. The medieval cornett differed immensely from its modern counterpart, the trumpet, not least in traditionally being made of ivory or wood rather than metal. Cornetts in medieval times were quite short. They were either straight or somewhat curved, and construction became standardised on a curved version by approximately the middle 15th century. In one side, there would be several holes. The flute was once made of wood rather than silver or other metal, and could be made as a side-blown or end-blown instrument. The recorder, on the other hand, has more or less retained its past form. The gemshorn is similar to the recorder in having finger holes on its front, though it is really a member of the ocarina family. One of the flute's predecessors, the pan flute, was popular in medieval times, and is possibly of Hellenic origin. This instrument's pipes were made of wood, and were graduated in length to produce different pitches.

Many medieval plucked string instruments were similar to the modern guitar, such as the lute and mandolin. The hammered dulcimer, similar in structure to the psaltery and zither, was not plucked but struck. The hurdy-gurdy was (and still is) a mechanical violin using a rosined wooden wheel attached to a crank to "bow" its strings. Instruments without sound boxes such as the Jew's harp were also popular. Early versions of the organ, fiddle (or vielle), and trombone (called the sackbut) existed as well.

Genres

In this era, music was both sacred and secular, although almost no early secular music has survived, and since notation was a relatively late development, reconstruction of this music, especially before the 12th century, is currently subject to conjecture (see authentic performance).

Theory and notation

In music theory the period saw several advances over previous practice, mostly in the conception and notation of rhythm. Previously music was organised rhythmically into "longs" and "breves" (in other words, "shorts"), though often without any clear regular differentiation between which should be used. The most famous music theorist of the first half of the 13th century, Johannes de Garlandia, was the author of the De mensurabili musica (about 1240), the treatise which defined and most completely elucidated the rhythmic modes,a notational system for rhythm in which one of six possible patterns was denoted by a particular succession of note-shapes (organized in what is called "ligatures"). The melodic line, once it had its mode, would generally remain in it, although rhythmic adjustments could be indicated by changes in the expected pattern of ligatures, even to the extent of changing to another rhythmic mode. A German theorist of a slightly later period, Franco of Cologne, was the first to describe a system of notation in which differently shaped notes have entirely different rhythmic values (in the Ars Cantus Mensurabilis of approximately 1260), an innovation which had a massive impact on the subsequent history of European music. Most of the surviving notated music of the 13th century uses the rhythmic modes as defined by Garlandia.

Philippe de Vitry is most famous in music history for writing the Ars Nova (1322), a treatise on music which gave its name to the music of the entire era. His contributions to notation, in particular notation of rhythm, were particularly important, and made possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years. In some ways the modern system of rhythmic notation began with Vitry, who broke free from the older idea of the rhythmic modes, short rhythmic patterns that were repeated without being individually differentiated. The notational predecessors of modern time meters also originate in the Ars Nova; for Franco, a breve (for a brief explanation of the mensural notation in general, see the article Renaissance music) had equalled three semibreves (that is, half breves) (on occasion, two, locally and with certain context; almost always, however, these two semibreves were one of normal length and one of double length, thereby taking the same space of time), and the same ternary division held for all larger and smaller note values. By the time of Ars Nova, the breve could be pre-divided, for an entire composition or section of one, into groups of two or three smaller semibreves by use of a "mensuration sign," equivalent to our modern "time signature." This way, the "tempus" (denoting the division of the breve, which ultimately achieved the same primacy over rhythmic structure as our modern "measure") could be either "perfect," with ternary subdivision, or "imperfect," with binary subdivision. Tempus perfectus was indicated by a circle, while tempus imperfectus was denoted by a half-circle (our current "C" as a stand-in for the 4/4 time signature is actually a holdover from this practice, not an abbreviation for "common time", as popularly believed). In a similar fashion, the semibreve could in turn be divided into three "minima" or "minims" (prolatio perfectus or major prolation) or two (prolatio imperfectus or minor prolation) and, at the higher level, the longs into three or two breves (modus perfectus or perfect mode, or modus imperfectus or imperfect mode respectively).

For the duration of the medieval period, most music would be composed primarily in perfect tempus, with special effects created by sections of imperfect tempus; there is a great current controversy among musicologists as to whether such sections were performed with a breve of equal length or whether it changed, and if so, at what proportion. In the highly syncopated works of the Ars subtilior, different voices of the same composition would sometimes be written in different tempus signatures simultaneously.

Many scholars, citing a lack of positive attributory evidence, now consider "Vitry's" treatise to be anonymous, but this does not diminish its importance for the history of rhythmic notation. The first definitely identifiable scholar to accept and explain the mensural system was Johannes de Muris (Jehan des Mars), who can be said to have done for it what Garlandia did for the rhythmic modes.

Early medieval music ( -1150)

Early chant traditions

Chant (or plainsong) is a monophonic sacred form which represents the earliest known music of the Christian church. The Jewish Synagogue tradition of singing psalms was a strong influence on Christian chanting.

Chant developed separately in several European centres. The most important were Rome, Spain, Gaul, Milan, and Ireland. These chants were all developed to support the regional liturgies used when celebrating the Mass there. Each area developed its own chants and rules for celebration. In Spain, Mozarabic chant was used and shows the influence of North African music. The Mozarabic liturgy even survived through Muslim rule, though this was an isolated strand and this music was later suppressed in an attempt to enforce conformity on the entire liturgy. In Milan, Ambrosian chant, named after St. Ambrose, was the standard, while Beneventan chant developed around Benevento, another Italian liturgical center. Gallican chant was used in Gaul, and Celtic chant in Ireland and Great Britain.

Around 1011 AD, the Roman Catholic Church wanted to standardize the Mass and chant. At this time, Rome was the religious centre of western Europe, and Paris was the political centre. The standardization effort consisted mainly of combining these two (Roman and Gallican) regional liturgies. This body of chant became known as Gregorian Chant. By the 12th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had superseded all the other Western chant traditions, with the exception of the Ambrosian chant in Milan, and the Mozarabic chant in a few specially designated Spanish chapels.

Gregorian chant

A doctrinally unified version which came together from under the supervision of Rome in approximately the ninth century was called Gregorian chant, a type of plainsong that was central to the musical tradition of Europe in the Medieval era. The actual melodies that make up the repertory probably come from several sources, some as far back as the pontificate of Gregory the Great himself (c. 590–604). Many of them were probably written in the politically stable, relatively literate setting of western monasteries during the reign of Charlemagne.

The earliest surviving sources of chant showing musical notation are from the early ninth century, though the consistency of the music across a wide area implies that some form of chant notation, now lost, may have existed earlier than this. It should be noted that music notation existed in the ancient world–for example Greece–but the ability to read and write this notation was lost around the fifth century, as was all of the music that went with it.

To what extent the music of the Gregorian chant represents a survival of the music of the ancient world is much debated by scholars, but certainly there must have been some influence, if only from the music of the synagogue. Only the smallest of scraps of ancient music have survived (for instance, the Seikilos epitaph), but those that have show an unsurprising similarity of mode, shape and phrase conception to later Western music.

Chant survived and prospered in monasteries and religious centres throughout the chaotic years of the early middle ages, for these were the places of greatest stability and literacy. Most developments in western classical music are either related to, or directly descended from, procedures first seen in chant and its earliest elaborations.

Early polyphony: organum

Around the end of the ninth century, singers in monasteries such as St. Gall in Switzerland began experimenting with adding another part to the chant, generally a voice in parallel motion, singing in mostly perfect fourths or fifths with the original tune (see interval). This development is called organum, and represents the beginnings of harmony and, ultimately, counterpoint. Over the next several centuries organum developed in several ways.

The most significant was the creation of "florid organum" around 1100, sometimes known as the school of St. Martial (named after a monastery in south-central France, which contains the best-preserved manuscript of this repertory). In "florid organum" the original tune would be sung in long notes while an accompanying voice would sing many notes to each one of the original, often in a highly elaborate fashion, all the while emphasizing the perfect consonances (fourths, fifths and octaves) as in the earlier organa. Later developments of organum occurred in England, where the interval of the third was particularly favoured, and where organa were likely improvised against an existing chant melody, and at Notre Dame in Paris, which was to be the centre of musical creative activity throughout the thirteenth century.

Much of the music from the early medieval period is anonymous. Some of the names may have been poets and lyric writers, and the tunes for which they wrote words may have been composed by others. Attribution of monophonic music of the medieval period is not always reliable. Surviving manuscripts from this period include the Musica Enchiriadis, Codex Calixtinus of Santiago de Compostela, and the Winchester Troper.

Liturgical drama

Another musical tradition of Europe originated during the early Middle Ages was the liturgical drama. In its original form, it may represent a survival of Roman drama with Christian stories - mainly the Gospel, the Passion, and the lives of the saints - grafted on. Every part of Europe had some sort of tradition of musical or semi-musical drama in the middle ages, involving acting, speaking, singing and instrumental accompaniment in some combination. Probably these dramas were performed by travelling actors and musicians. Many have been preserved sufficiently to allow modern reconstruction and performance (for example the Play of Daniel, which has been recently recorded).

Goliards

The Goliards were itinerant poet-musicians of Europe from the tenth to the middle of the thirteenth century. Most were scholars or ecclesiastics, and they wrote and sang in Latin. Although many of the poems have survived, very little of the music has. They were possibly influential — even decisively so — on the troubadour-trouvère tradition which was to follow. Most of their poetry is secular and, while some of the songs celebrate religious ideals, others are frankly profane, dealing with drunkenness, debauchery and lechery.

High medieval music (1150-1300)

Ars antiqua

The flowering of the Notre Dame school of polyphony from around 1150 to 1250 corresponded to the equally impressive achievements in Gothic architecture: indeed the centre of activity was at the cathedral of Notre Dame itself. Sometimes the music of this period is called the Parisian school, or Parisian organum, and represents the beginning of what is conventionally known as Ars antiqua. This was the period in which rhythmic notation first appeared in western music, mainly a context-based method of rhythmic notation known as the rhythmic modes.

This was also the period in which concepts of formal structure developed which were attentive to proportion, texture, and architectural effect. Composers of the period alternated florid and discant organum (more note-against-note, as opposed to the succession of many-note melismas against long-held notes found in the florid type), and created several new musical forms: clausulae, which were melismatic sections of organa extracted and fitted with new words and further musical elaboration; conductus, which was a song for one or more voices to be sung rhythmically, most likely in a procession of some sort; and tropes, which were rearrangements of older chants with new words and sometimes new music. All of these genres save one were based upon chant; that is, one of the voices, (usually three, though sometimes four) nearly always the lowest (the tenor at this point) sung a chant melody, though with freely composed note-lengths, over which the other voices sang organum. The exception to this method was the conductus, a two-voice composition that was freely composed in its entirety.

The motet, one of the most important musical forms of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, developed initially during the Notre Dame period out of the clausula, especially the form using multiple voices as elaborated by Pérotin, who paved the way for this particularly by replacing many of his predecessor (as canon of the cathedral) Léonin's lengthy florid clausulae with substitutes in a discant style. Gradually, there came to be entire books of these substitutes, available to be fitted in and out of the various chants. Since, in fact, there were more than can possibly have been used in context, it is probable that the clausulae came to be performed independently, either in other parts of the mass, or in private devotions. The clausulae, thus practised, became the motet when troped with non-liturgical words, and was further developed into a form of great elaboration, sophistication and subtlety in the fourteenth century, the period of Ars nova.

Surviving manuscripts from this era include the Codex Montpellier, Codex Bamberg, and El Codex musical de Las Huelgas.

Composers of this time include Léonin, Pérotin, W. de Wycombe, Adam de St. Victor, and Petrus de Cruce (Pierre de la Croix). Petrus is credited with the innovation of writing more than three semibreves to fit the length of a breve. Coming before the innovation of imperfect tempus, this practice innagurated the era of what are now called "Petronian" motets. These late 13th-century works are in three, sometimes four, parts and have multiple texts sung simultaneously. These texts can be either sacred or secular in subject, and with Latin and French mixed. The Petronian motet is a highly complex genre, given its mixture of several semibreve breves with rhythmic modes and sometimes (with increasing frequency) substitution of secular songs for chant in the tenor. Indeed, ever-increasing rhythmic complexity would be a fundamental characteristic of the 14th century, though music in France, Italy, and England would take quite different paths during that time.

Troubadours and trouvères

The music of the troubadours and trouvères was a vernacular tradition of monophonic secular song, probably accompanied by instruments, sung by professional, occasionally itinerant, musicians who were as skilled as poets as they were singers and instrumentalists. The language of the troubadours was Occitan (also known as the langue d'oc, or Provençal); the language of the trouvères was Old French (also known as langue d'oil). The period of the troubadours corresponded to the flowering of cultural life in Provence which lasted through the twelfth century and into the first decade of the thirteenth. Typical subjects of troubadour song were war, chivalry and courtly love. The period of the troubadours ended abruptly with the Albigensian Crusade, the fierce campaign by Pope Innocent III to eliminate the Cathar heresy (and northern barons' desire to appropriate the wealth of the south). Surviving troubadours went either to Spain, northern Italy or northern France (where the trouvère tradition lived on), where their skills and techniques contributed to the later developments of secular musical culture in those places.

The music of the trouvères was similar to that of the troubadours, but was able to survive into the thirteenth century unaffected by the Albigensian Crusade. Most of the more than two thousand surviving trouvère songs include music, and show a sophistication as great as that of the poetry it accompanies.

The Minnesinger tradition was the Germanic counterpart to the activity of the troubadours and trouvères to the west. Unfortunately, few sources survive from the time; the sources of Minnesang are mostly from two or three centuries after the peak of the movement, leading to some controversy over their accuracy.

Late medieval music (1300-1400)

France: Ars nova

The beginning of the Ars nova is one of the few clean chronological divisions in medieval music, since it corresponds to the publication of the Roman de Fauvel, a huge compilation of poetry and music, in 1310 and 1314. The Roman de Fauvel is a satire on abuses in the medieval church, and is filled with medieval motets, lais, rondeaux and other new secular forms. While most of the music is anonymous, it contains several pieces by Philippe de Vitry, one of the first composers of the isorhythmic motet, a development which distinguishes the fourteenth century. The isorhythmic motet was perfected by Guillaume de Machaut, the finest composer of the time.

During the Ars nova era, secular music acquired a polyphonic sophistication formerly found only in sacred music, a development not surprising considering the secular character of the early Renaissance (and it should be noted that while this music is typically considered to be "medieval", the social forces that produced it were responsible for the beginning of the literary and artistic Renaissance in Italy—the distinction between Middle Ages and Renaissance is a blurry one, especially considering arts as different as music and painting). The term "Ars nova" (new art, or new technique) was coined by Philippe de Vitry in his treatise of that name (probably written in 1322), in order to distinguish the practice from the music of the immediately preceding age.

The dominant secular genre of the Ars Nova was the chanson, as it would continue to be in France for another two centuries. These chansons were composed in musical forms corresponding to the poetry they set, which were in the so-called formes fixes of rondeau, ballade, and virelai. These forms significantly affected the development of musical structure in ways that are felt even today; for example, the ouvert-clos rhyme-scheme shared by all three demanded a musical realization which contributed directly to the modern notion of antecedent and consequent phrases. It was in this period, too, in which began the long tradition of setting the mass ordinary. This tradition started around mid-century with isolated or paired settings of Kyries, Glorias, etc., but Machaut composed what is thought to be the first complete mass conceived as one composition. The sound world of Ars Nova music is very much one of linear primacy and rhythmic complexity. "Resting" intervals are the fifth and octave, with thirds and sixths considered dissonances. Leaps of more than a sixth in individual voices are not uncommon, leading to speculation of instrumental participation at least in secular performance.

Italy: Trecento

Most of the music of Ars nova was French in origin; however, the term is often loosely applied to all of the music of the fourteenth century, especially to include the secular music in Italy. There this period was often referred to as Trecento.

Italian music has always, it seems, been known for its lyrical or melodic character, and this goes back to the 14th century in many respects. Italian secular music of this time (what little surviving liturgical music there is, is similar to the French except for somewhat different notation) featured what has been called the cantalina style, with a florid top voice supported by two (or even one; a fair amount of Italian Trecento music is for only two voices) that are more regular and slower moving. This type of texture remained a feature of Italian music in the popular 15th and 16th century secular genres as well, and was an important influence on the eventual development of the trio texture that revolutionized music in the 17th.

There were three main forms for secular works in the Trecento. One was the madrigal, not the same as that of 150-250 years later, but with a verse/refrain-like form. Three-line stanzas, each with different words, alternated with a two-line ritornello, with the same text at each appearance. Perhaps we can see the seeds of the subsequent late-Renaissance and Baroque ritornello in this device; it too returns again and again, recognizable each time, in contrast with its surrounding disparate sections. Another form, the caccia ("chase,") was written for two voices in a canon at the unison. Sometimes, this form also featured a ritornello, which was occasionally also in a canonic style. Usually, the name of this genre provided a double meaning, since the texts of caccia were primarily about hunts and related outdoor activities, or at least action-filled scenes. The third main form was the ballata, which was roughly equivalent to the French ballade.

Surviving Italian manuscripts include the Squarcialupi Codex and the Rossi Codex. In all, however, significantly less Italian music survives from the 14th century than French.

Germany: Geisslerlieder

The Geisslerlieder were the songs of wandering bands of flagellants, who sought to appease the wrath of an angry God by penitential music accompanied by mortification of their bodies. There were two separate periods of activity of Geisslerlied: one around the middle of the thirteenth century, from which, unfortunately, no music survives (although numerous lyrics do); and another from 1349, for which both words and music survive intact due to the attention of a single priest who wrote about the movement and recorded its music. This second period corresponds to the spread of the Black Death in Europe, and documents one of the most terrible events in European history. Both periods of Geisslerlied activity were mainly in Germany.

There was also French-influenced polyphony written in German areas at this time, but it was somewhat less sophisticated than its models. In fairness to the mostly anonymous composers of this repertoire, however, most of the surviving manuscripts seem to have been copied with extreme incompetence, and are filled with errors that make a truly thorough evaluation of the music's quality impossible.

Mannerism and Ars subtilior

As often seen at the end of any musical era, the end of the medieval era is marked by a highly manneristic style known as Ars subtilior. In some ways, this was an attempt to meld the French and Italian styles. This music was highly stylized, with a rhythmic complexity that was not matched until the 20th century. In fact, not only was the rhythmic complexity of this repertoire largely unmatched for five and a half centuries, with extreme syncopations, mensural trickery, and even examples of augenmusik (such as a chanson by Baude Cordier written out in manuscript in the shape of a heart), but also its melodic material was quite complex as well, particularly in its interaction with the rhythmic structures. Already discussed under Ars Nova has been the practice of isorhythm, which continued to develop through late-century and in fact did not achieve its highest degree of sophistication until early in the 15th century. Instead of using isorhythmic techniques in one or two voices, or trading them among voices, some works came to feature a pervading isorhythmic texture which rivals the integral serialism of the 20th century in its systematic ordering of rhythmic and tonal elements. The term "mannerism" was applied by later scholars, as it often is, in response to an impression of sophistication being practised for its own sake, a malady which some authors have felt infected the Ars subtilior.

Transitioning to the Renaissance

Demarcating the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance, with regards to the composition of music, is problematic. While the music of the fourteenth century is fairly obviously medieval in conception, the music of the early fifteenth century is often conceived as belonging to a transitional period, not only retaining some of the ideals of the end of the Middle Ages (such as a type of polyphonic writing in which the parts differ widely from each other in character, as each has its specific textural function), but also showing some of the characteristic traits of the Renaissance (such as the international style developing through the diffusion of Franco-Flemish musicians throughout Europe, and in terms of texture an increasing equality of parts). The Renaissance began early in Italy, but musical innovation there lagged far behind that of France and England; the Renaissance came late to England, but musical innovation there was ahead of continental Europe.

Music historians do not agree on when the Renaissance era began, but most historians agree that England was still a medieval society in the early fifteenth century (see a discussion of periodization issues of the Middle Ages). While there is no consensus, 1400 is a useful marker, because it was around that time that the Renaissance came into full swing in Italy.

The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of transition into the Renaissance. Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century. With John Dunstaple and other English composers, partly through the local technique of faburden (an improvisatory process in which a chant melody and a written part predominantly in parallel sixths above it are ornamented by one sung in perfect fourths below the latter, and which later took hold on the continent as "fauxbordon"), the interval of the third emerges as an important musical development; because of this Contenance Angloise ("English countenance"), English composers' music is often regarded as the first to sound less truly bizarre to modern, unschooled audiences. English stylistic tendencies in this regard had come to fruition and began to influence continental composers as early as the 1420s, as can be seen in works of the young Dufay, among others. While the Hundred Years' War continued, English nobles, armies, their chapels and retinues, and therefore some of their composers, travelled in France and performed their music there; it must also of course be remembered that the English controlled portions of northern France at this time.

The Classical period in Western music occurred from about 1730 to 1820, despite considerable overlap at both ends with preceding and following periods, as is true for all musical eras. Although the term classical music is used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music in this tradition, it can also occasionally mean this particular era within that tradition.

The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. Probably the best known composers from this period are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven, though other notable names include Muzio Clementi, Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Beethoven is also regarded either as a Romantic composer or a composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic; Franz Schubert is also something of a transitional figure. The period is sometimes referred to as Viennese Classic, since Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert all worked at some time in Vienna.

Main characteristics of music in the Classical period

• Lighter, clearer texture than Baroque music, and less complicated; mainly homophonic – melody above chordal accompaniment (but counterpoint is by no means forgotten, especially later in the period).
• An emphasis on grace and beauty of melody and form; proportion and balance, moderation and control; polished and elegant in character with expressiveness and formal structure held in perfect balance.
• More variety and contrast within a piece: of keys, melodies, rhythms and dynamics (now using crescendo and sforzando); frequent changes of mood and timbre.
• Melodies tend to be shorter than those of Baroque, with clear-cut phrases and clearly marked cadences.
• Orchestra increases in size and range; harpsichord continuo falls out of use; woodwind becomes a self-contained section.
• The harpsichord is replaced by the piano (or fortepiano): early piano music is thinnish in texture, often with Alberti bass accompaniment (Haydn and Mozart), but later becomes richer, more sonorous and powerful (Beethoven).
• Importance given to instrumental music – main kinds: sonata, trio, string quartet, symphony, concerto, serenade and divertimento.
• Sonata form develops, and becomes the most important design – used to build up the first movement of most large-scale works, but also other movements, and single pieces (such as overtures).

History of the Classical period

The Classical style as part of a larger artistic change

In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move to a new style in architecture, literature, and the arts generally, known as Classicism. While still tightly linked to the court culture and absolutism, with its formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy, the new style was also a cleaner style, one that favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and colors, and simplicity rather than complexity. The remarkable development of ideas in "natural philosophy" had established itself in the public consciousness, with Newton's physics taken as a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms, and articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity worked its way into the world of music as well, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period, and towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony – a combination called homophony – was preferred. This meant that playing of chords, even if they interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part, became a much more prevalent feature of music, and this in turn made the tonal structure of works more audible. (See also counterpoint and harmony.)

The new style was also pushed forward by changes in the economic order and in social structure. As the 18th century progressed, the nobility more and more became the primary patrons of instrumental music, and there was a rise in the public taste for comic opera. This led to changes in the way music was performed, the most crucial of which was the move to standard instrumental groups, and the reduction in the importance of the "continuo", the harmonic fill beneath the music, often played by several instruments. One way to trace this decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the decline of the term "obbligato", meaning a mandatory instrumental part in a work of chamber music. In the Baroque world, additional instruments could be optionally added to the continuo; in the Classical world, all parts were noted specifically, though not always notated, as a matter of course, so the word "obbligato" became redundant. By 1800, the term was virtually extinct, as was the practice of conducting a work from the keyboard.

The changes in economic situation just noted also had the effect of altering the balance of availability and quality of musicians. While in the late Baroque a major composer would have the entire musical resources of a town to draw on, the forces available at a hunting lodge were smaller, and more fixed in their level of ability. This was a spur to having primarily simple parts to play, and in the case of a resident virtuoso group, a spur to writing spectacular, idiomatic parts for certain instruments, as in the case of the Mannheim orchestra. In addition, the appetite for a continual supply of new music, carried over from the Baroque, meant that works had to be performable with, at best, one rehearsal. Indeed, even after 1790 Mozart writes about "the rehearsal", to imply that his concerts would have only one.

Since polyphonic texture was no longer the focus of music, but rather a single melodic line with accompaniment, there was greater emphasis on notating that line for dynamics and phrasing. The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more important, and also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre, more important in establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.

This led to the Classical style's gradual breaking with the Baroque habit of making each movement of music devoted to a single "affect" or emotion. Instead, it became the style to establish contrasts between sections within movements, giving each its own emotional coloring, using a range of techniques: opposition of major and minor; strident rhythmic themes in opposition to longer, more song-like themes; and especially, making movement between different harmonic areas the principal means of creating dramatic contrast and unity. Transitional episodes became more and more important, as occasions of surprise and delight. Consequently composers and musicians began to pay more attention to these, highlighting their arrival, and making the signs that pointed to them, on one hand, more audible, and on the other hand, more the subject of "play" and subversion – that is, composers more and more created false expectations, only to have the music skitter off in a different direction.

Beginnings of the Classical style (1730-1760)

At first the new style took over Baroque forms – the ternary "da capo aria" and the "sinfonia" and "concerto" – and composed with simpler parts, more notated ornamentation and more emphatic division into sections. However, over time, the new aesthetic caused radical changes in how pieces were put together, and the basic layouts changed. (See History of sonata form.) Composers from this period sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and clearer textures. The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti was an important figure in the transition from Baroque to Classical. His unique composition style is strongly related to that of the early Classical period. He is best known for composing more than five hundred one-movement keyboard sonatas. Another important break with the past was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and improvisational ornament, and focused on the points of modulation and transition. By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he enabled powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. To highlight these episodes he used changes in instrumentation, melody, and mode. Among the most successful composers of his time, Gluck spawned many emulators, one of whom was Antonio Salieri. Their emphasis on accessibility was hugely successful in opera, and in vocal music more widely: songs, oratorios, and choruses. These were considered the most important kinds of music for performance, and hence enjoyed greatest success in the public estimation.

The phase between the Baroque and the rise of the Classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to unify the different demands of taste, economics and "worldview", goes by many names. It is sometimes called "Galant", "Rococo", or "pre-Classical", or at other times, "early Classical". It is a period where composers still working in the Baroque style are still successful, if sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present – Bach, Handel and Telemann all compose well beyond the point at which the homophonic style is clearly in the ascendant. Musical culture was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older style had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C.P.E. Bach was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well, and knew how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form; he went far in overhauling the older forms from the Baroque.

The early Classical style (1760-1775)

By the late 1750s there are flourishing centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of symphonies are composed, and there are "bands" of players associated with theatres. Opera or other vocal music is the feature of most musical events, with concerti and "symphonies", which would over the course of the Classical develop and become independent instrumental works (see symphony), serving as instrumental interludes and introductions, for operas, and for even church services. The norms of a body of strings supplemented by winds, and of movements of particular rhythmic character, are established by the late 1750s in Vienna. But the length and weight of pieces is still set with some Baroque characteristics: individual movements still focus on one affect or have only one sharply contrasting middle section, and their length is not significantly greater than Baroque movements. It should also be noted that at this time there is not yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new style. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough.

Many consider this breakthrough to have been made by C.P.E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C.P.E. Bach and Gluck are often considered to be founders of the Classical style itself.

The first great master of the style was the composer Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych ("Morning", "Noon", and "Evening") solidly in the "contemporary" mode. As a "vice-Kapellmeister" and later "Kapellmeister", his output expanded: he would compose over forty symphonies in the 1760s alone. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was only one among many.

While some suggest that he was overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate Haydn's centrality to the new style, and therefore to the future of Western art music as a whole. At the time, before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music that set him above all other composers except perhaps George Friedrich Handel. Some have pointed out that he occupieda place equivalent to the Beatles, for example, in the history of Rock and Roll. It was he who, more than any other single individual, realized that the evolving new style needed to be directed by new ideas and principles. He took existing ideas, and radically altered how they functioned – earning him the titles "father of the symphony," and "father of the string quartet." One might truly say that he was the father of the sonata form – which, in its Classical flowering, relied on dramatic contrast, tension of melody against harmony and rhythm, and required the audience to follow a dramatic curve over a larger span of time than was previously necessary.

Strangely enough, one of the forces that worked as an impetus for his pressing forward was the first stirring of what would later be called "Romanticism" – the "Sturm und Drang", or "storm and stress" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious emotionalism was a stylistic preference: the fad of the 1770s. Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic contrast and more emotionally appealing melodies, with sharpened character and individuality. This period faded away in music and literature: however, it would color what came afterward, and eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in coming decades.

The "Farewell" Symphony, No. 45 in F# Minor, exemplifies Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new style, with surprising sharp turns, and a long adagio to end the work. In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deploys the polyphonic techniques he gathered from the previous era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas. For some this marks the beginning of the "mature" Classical style, where the period of reaction against the complexity of the late Baroque begins to be replaced with a period of integration of elements of both Baroque and Classical styles.

The middle Classical style (1775-1790)

Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director for a prince, had far more resources and scope for composing than most, and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his music. This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his career, restlessly sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music (see development). His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets (1781), where the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among the instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody and what is harmony. This changes the way the ensemble works its way between dramatic moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious interruption. He then took this integrated style and began applying it to orchestral and vocal music.

Haydn's gift to music was a way of composing, a way of structuring works, which was at the same time in accord with the governing aesthetic of the new style. It would, however, be a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who would bring his genius to Haydn's ideas, and apply them to two of the major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. Whereas Haydn spent much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a virtuoso. Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of a large audience. Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more chromatic chords (and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally), a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. He found, in Haydn's music, and later in his study of the polyphony of Bach, the means to discipline and enrich his gifts.

Mozart rapidly came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music. Their letters to each other are filled with the kind of asides that only two people working at a higher plane than their contemporaries can share. In Mozart, Haydn found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource – the learning relationship moved in two directions.

Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1780 brought an acceleration in the development of the Classical style. There Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness which had been brewing for the previous 20 years. His own taste for brilliances, rhythmically complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and virtuoso flourishes was merged with an appreciation for formal coherence and internal connectedness. Strangely enough, it is at this point that war and inflation halted a trend to larger and larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theatre orchestras. This pressed the Classical style inwards: towards seeking greater ensemble and technical challenge – for example, scattering the melody across woodwinds, or using thirds to highlight the melody taken by them. This process placed a premium on chamber music for more public performance, giving a further boost to the string quartet and other small ensemble groupings.

It was during this decade that public taste began, increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached a higher standard of composition. By the time Mozart arrived at age 25, in 1781, the dominant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence in the 1750s of the early Classical style. By the end of the 1780s, changes in performance practice, the relative standing of instrumental and vocal music, technical demands on musicians, and stylistic unity had become established in the composers who imitated Mozart and Haydn. During this decade Mozart would compose his most famous operas, his six late symphonies which would help redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti which still stand at the pinnacle of these forms.

One composer who was influential in spreading the more serious style that Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who dueled Mozart to a draw before the Emperor, when they exhibited their compositions in performance. His own sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he became the most successful composer in London during the 1780s. The stage was set for a generation of composers who, having absorbed the lessons of the new style earlier, and having clear examples to aim at, would take the Classical style in new directions. Also in London at this time was Johann Ladislaus Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened possibilities. The importance of London in the Classical period is often overlooked – but it served as the home to the Broadwood's factory for piano manufacturing, and as the base for composers who, while less famous than the "Vienna School", would have a decisive influence on what came later. They were composers of a number of fine works, notable in their own right. London's taste for virtuosity may well have encouraged the complex passage work and extended statements on tonic and dominant.

The late Classical style (1790-1825)

When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were played as single movements before, between, or as interludes within other works, and many of them lasted only ten or twelve minutes; instrumental groups had varying standards of playing and the "continuo" was a central part of music-making. In the intervening years, the social world of music had seen dramatic changes: international publication and touring had grown explosively, concert societies were beginning to be formed, notation had been made more specific, more descriptive, and schematics for works had been simplified (yet became more varied in their exact working out). In 1790, just before Mozart's death, with his reputation spreading rapidly, Haydn was poised for a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and "London" symphonies. Composers in Paris, Rome and all over Germany turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.

The moment was again ripe for a dramatic shift. The decade of the 1790s saw the emergence of a new generation of composers, born around 1770, who, while they had grown up with the earlier styles, found in the recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for greater expression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris, and in 1791 composed "Lodoiska", an opera that shot him to fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight that had not yet been felt in the grand opera. His contemporary Étienne Méhul extended instrumental effects with his 1790 opera "Euphrosine et Coradin", from which followed a series of successes.

Of course, the most fateful of the new generation would be Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a set of three piano trios, which remain in the repertoire. Somewhat younger than these, though equally accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and his native virtuosity, was Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Hummel studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven and Schubert, and a teacher to Franz Liszt. He concentrated more on the piano than any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and 1792 saw the composition, and publication in 1793, of three piano sonatas, opus 2, which idiomatically used Mozart's techniques of avoiding the expected cadence, and Clementi's sometimes modally uncertain virtuoso figuration. Taken together, these composers can be seen now as the vanguard of a broad change in style and the center of gravity in music. They would study one another's works, copy one another's gestures in music, and on occasion behave like quarrelsome rivals.

The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen in the downward shift in melodies, increasing durations of movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the greater and greater use of keyboard resources, the shift from "vocal" writing to "pianistic" writing, the growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to bring "texture" forward as an element in music. In short, the late Classical was seeking a music that was internally more complex. The growth of concert societies and amateur orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of middle-class life, contributed to a booming market for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve as examplars. Hummel, Beethoven, Clementi were all renowned for their improvising.

One explanation for the shift in style has been advanced by Schoenberg and others: the increasing centrality of the idea of theme and variations in compositional thinking. Schoenberg argues that the Classical style was one of "continuing variation", where a development was, in effect, a theme and variations with greater continuity. In any event, theme and variations replaced the fugue as the standard vehicle for improvising, and was often included, directly or indirectly, as a movement in longer instrumental works.

Direct influence of the Baroque continued to fade: the figured bass grew less prominent as a means of holding performance together, the performance practices of the mid 18th century continued to die out. However, at the same time, complete editions of Baroque masters began to become available, and the influence of Baroque style, as the Classical period understood it, continued to grow, particularly in the ever more expansive use of brass. Another feature of the period is the growing number of performances where the composer was not present. This led to increased detail and specificity in notation; for example, there were fewer and fewer "optional" parts that stood separately from the main score.

The force of these shifts would be abundantly apparent with Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, given the name "Eroica", which is Italian for "heroic", by the composer. As with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its innovations, but its aggressive use of every part of the Classical style set it apart from its contemporary works: in length, ambition, and harmonic resources.

Classical influence on later composers

Musical eras seldom disappear at once; instead, features are replaced over time, until the old is simply felt as "old-fashioned". The Classical style did not "die" so much as transform under the weight of changes.

One crucial change was the shift towards harmonies centering around "flatward" or subdominant keys. In the Classical style, major key was far more common than minor, chromaticism being moderated through the use of "sharpward" modulation, and sections in the minor mode were often merely for contrast. Beginning with Mozart and Clementi, there began a creeping colonization of the subdominant region. With Schubert, subdominant moves flourished after being introduced in contexts in which earlier composers would have confined themselves to dominant shifts (For a fuller discussion of these terms see Tonality.). This introduced darker colors to music, strengthened the minor mode, and made structure harder to maintain. Beethoven would contribute to this, by his increasing use of the fourth as a consonance, and modal ambiguity – for example, the opening of the D Minor Symphony.

Among this generation of "Classical Romantics" Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, and John Field are among the most prominent, along with the young Felix Mendelssohn. Their sense of form was strongly influenced by the Classical style, and they were not yet "learned" (imitating rules which were codified by others), but directly responding to works by Beethoven, Mozart, Clementi, and others, as they encountered them. The instrumental forces at their disposal were also quite "Classical" in number and variety, permitting similarity with avowedly Classical works.

However, the forces destined to end the hold of the Classical style gather strength in the works of each of these composers. The most commonly cited one is, of course, harmonic innovation. However, also important is the increasing focus on having a continuous and rhythmically uniform accompanying figuration. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata would be the model for hundreds of later pieces – where the shifting movement of a rhythmic figure provides much of the drama and interest of the work, while a melody drifts above it. As years wore on, greater knowledge of works, greater instrumental expertise, increasing variety of instruments, the growth of concert societies, and the unstoppable domination of the piano – which created a huge audience for sophisticated music – all contributed to the shift to the "Romantic" style.

Drawing the line exactly is impossible: there are sections of Mozart's works which, taken alone, are indistinguishable in harmony and orchestration from music written 80 years later, and composers continue to write in normative Classical styles all the way into the 20th century. Even before Beethoven's death, composers such as Louis Spohr were self-described Romantics, incorporating, for example, more and more extravagant chromaticism in their works. However, generally the fall of Vienna as the most important musical center for orchestral composition is felt to be the occasion of the Classical style's final eclipse, along with its continuous organic development of one composer learning in close proximity to others. Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin visited Vienna when young, but they then moved on to other vistas. Composers such as Carl Czerny, while deeply influenced by Beethoven, also searched for new ideas and new forms to contain the larger world of musical expression and performance in which they lived.

Renewed interest in the formal balance and restraint of 18th century classical music led in the early 20th century to the development of so-called Neoclassical style, which numbered Stravinsky and Prokofiev among its proponents.

Is a cluttered desk a sign of genius or just hopeless disorganization?

I had plenty of opportunity to ponder this question during a recent office move that involved packing multiple (I dare not say how many for fear the storage police will come after me) boxes of back files.

Now a certain Jay Brand has unwittingly come to my rescue and allowed me to save face among my colleagues who were able to fit all their office belongings into two allotted "hot files" for the move.

Brand, a former psychology professor, is now a "cognitive engineer" at office furniture giant Haworth Inc. in Holland, Mich.

He says, and I quote: "A clean desk isn't always the sign of a productive employee."

Phew.

"In fact, a clean desk can hinder worker efficiency."

I love this guy.

The premise is that people use their desk space as an extension of their minds.

"The human mind, specifically short-term memory, has a limited capacity," Brand said. "It has seven, plus or minus two, 'chunks' available for storing things.

"Since most people are doing seven things at once, they tax the capacity of their working memory almost immediately."

They need a place to "offload" some information from working memory into the environment.

Information placed into the environment this way is known as a "cognitive artifact."

"It expands a person's capacity to think," Brand said. "You're using the environment to think as well."

Companies that promote, or require, clean desk policies are in essence giving their workers "environmental lobotomies," he said.

"Essentially, you're required to destroy the context of your work every night and recreate it the next morning. It's wasted time."

Each time people clean their desks, they lose the embedded cues that their cognitive artifacts provide, Brand said. "Workers in such environments can sometimes feel like they spend more time getting organized each day than working on actual projects."

Brand himself confesses his work group -- the industrial design division at Haworth -- has a reputation for being difficult to clean up around.

Everyone has a different working style, he said. As long as people's piles mean something, they're useful.

People think differently. Some people lay out their projects left to right. Others use a top down method.

Piles may be organized by topic, chronologically, or some highly idiosyncratic system. Different strategies work for different people, Brand said. Using space to think, however, is not an excuse for being a pack rat, he said.

Rats.

"I don't advocate people be messy as an end in itself," he said. "You have to have some method to your madness."

Most people never use 80 percent of the stuff they file away, and 60 percent of the stuff on their desks.

Current projects tend to attract all kinds of paper. But once a project is finished, cull through the file, then put the rest in storage, Brand said.

Other tips include using multiple surfaces to layer information. Shelves can help separate information so ideas don't get lost.

Moving things around in the piles also helps refresh their significance, he said. "Post-it notes, pictures, magazine articles, lists and charts lose their meaning and become virtually invisible if left alone."

Also, keep your most important projects and priority items within your personal "strike zone."

Retailers have long known that people's attention is most often focused on items placed in view between their shoulders and their hips. Anything higher or lower is less likely to get noticed. You can apply the same strategy to the papers in your work environment.

The concept that my desk with its drifts of paper, and stacks of things I can't bear to toss may be an extension of my inner brain is a scary thought.

Then again, a clean desk is a blank slate.

And that's an even scarier one.

Although single people are engaged in the flirting game, there is a fierce debate regarding whether married people should participate. Some experts say that flirting with other people is a necessary component of a healthy relationship. But others consider flirting while married synonymous with cheating.

Flirting with other people when you're married is okay," says Dr. Gardere, the author and radio host. "Flirting is a healthy thing because instead of keeping your sexuality caged up inside where it may be expressed in dangerous ways or extramarital affairs, it allows you to make someone else feel good and it makes you feel good. I encourage married people to flirt as long as they keep it at the flirtation stage."

But Dixon, a single executive, and many others strongly disagree. "If you're married, flirtation is an affair. Lust is an emotion, not an action. It's right up there with adultery. Being unfaithful includes anything that you wouldn't do in front of your spouse," she says. "So instead of flirting with someone else, you should flirt with your spouse. They'll love it."

Dr. Jeff Gardere, host of the New York radio show Conversations with Dr. Jeff, says that almost any place is a good place to flirt. From grocery stores to laundromats to the post office, there is a range of options. "Church is an excellent place for flirting, absolutely the best place," he says. "You're there to celebrate life and the praising of the Lord, so what better place to open yourself to someone else. I recommend it to all my clients. I tell them 'Go to church if you want to find a good woman.'"

But the radio show host warns against office flirtation. "Flirting in the office can be dangerous, and therefore it must be very innocent, more complimentary than anything else," he says. "But anything else and anywhere else is fair game .

Everyday situations offer freedom from the pressures of formal dating. "I think if you're at the park, at the cleaners or at the mall" Toya Dixon says, "those are the best times to meet and flirt. It's casual and it's a great time to be friendly with no preconceived motives or hidden agendas."

Other venues that are conducive to flirting are social conferences, cultural events, concerts, after-work affairs, picnics, museums, libraries and business and professional conferences. Places such as airports, casinos, train stations, fitness centers, jogging paths, and parks are perfect spots for flirtation. And according to some Sisters, home improvement stores and car washes are prime locations for flirting with men.

Flirting can serve many purposes in every day life, such as showing romantic and sexual interest or engaging an acquaintance in a light form of communication. Children learn early on how to flirt subtly and acquire positive feedback from those around them.

A smile, a look and some light touching is often all it takes to catch someone's interest, so there is no reason to overdo it. Women in particular are often approached in a less than flattering way and if you really want to get someone's attention you should avoid the more extreme methods.

The Holler

Shouting “Hey baby!” at someone while driving past them in a car is not as becoming as you may think. While your friends might laugh and you have been noticed, the man or woman being screamed at will in most cases feel offended. Try to hold it in, you don't know if you might meet the person walking down the street again and in a more appropriate setting. Any attention is not better than no attention.

The Grope

There are probably many attractive people with sexy parts you wouldn't mind touching moving around the world. There is nothing wrong with feeling this way and even fantasizing about doing so, but keep your hands to yourself! Chances are that the person who owns the butt you wish to grab does not actually want to be touched by you. There is a time and place for everything and if you start off with an unwelcome grope, you will probably never get any further. Showing respect for people's physical and emotional boundaries is very important if you wish to flirt successfully.

The Pick-Up Line

We have all heard the urban myth about the time a pick-up line actually worked. Don't chance it, though. In most cases and by most people pick-up lines are considered lame. It can be a little intimidating to express your interest in someone with words and a rehearsed comment is less scary. If they turn you down, it was just a joke, right? However, saying “Pardon me, but are you a screamer or a moaner?” to a potential partner will most likely make sure you never find out. Why not go for a simple “Hello”?

The Overblown Romantic Gesture

Romance is great, but it is generally best suited from the first date and onwards. Overblown gestures might make your potential someone feel uncomfortable and out of place. Keep romance personal and on a small scale, and your chances of charming instead of scaring away will enhance greatly.

The Jitters

Successful flirting is all about keeping your cool. If the thought of approaching someone romantically brings out your childhood stutter and makes you sweat excessively, you may want to reconsider your attitude towards it. Remember that flirting is meant to be a casual form of communication, it can be everything from a little smile to a well-thought out compliment. Find your comfort zone instead of coming off as nervous and jittery.

Some people seem to flirt effortlessly, almost without knowing they are doing it. Others are more reserved and have to give a lot of thought to expressing interest in the one they want. The key to flirting successfully lies in managing to stay within the norms of social interaction and at the same time suggesting interest or intimacy. Sound complicated? It doesn't have to be.

Initiating contact

Before you can begin flirting you will need to initiate contact with the person you wish to express your interest in. If they are a total strangers you may want to use a subtle approach by asking for the time or directions to somewhere. In bars or pubs a polite greeting and the offer of a drink might get the job done.

In either scenario it is good to start with catching their gaze and a smile, either from a distance or when you are close enough to speak.

Extended contact

Flirting can be as simple as pushing the normal social boundaries in your society without crossing any lines. Keeping eye contact for a few seconds longer than what is normal, smiling to a stranger or briefly touching someone during a conversation can give them the subconscious messages they need to know you are attracted to them.

Sometimes being intimate through words can help as well. If you share a little bit more about yourself than you normally would when you're with someone you've just met, you may create a bond that makes flirting and showing interest easier.

Compliments

Most people love compliments and giving one is always rewarding. If you make someone feel good about themselves the chances are they will feel good about you too. Sincere and somewhat original compliments will have the highest chance of success.

Noticing someone's beautiful eyes is an old classic for many reasons. Eyes are an important part of how we look. Eyes can express a vast variety of emotions and commenting on them suggests that you have spent time noticing little details.

You can also compliment on a change in their appearance and in that way tell them you pay attention to them. Better yet, get even more intimate and mention a personality trait you like. “You are always so kind” or “I love your sense of humour” will do the trick.

Body Language

You may not know it, but your body tells more than you might want it to. When we are attracted to someone we display several subtle signs with our body to let the other person know where we stand.

If we see someone we like, our faces tend to “open” and make us appear more approachable. Our nostrils flare slightly, we lift our eyebrows and our lips part. We often start preening ourselves without being aware of it. Things like straightening our tie or adjusting our pants come naturally as we wish to look our best. Another sure give away is mirroring. You have a sip of your drink, they have a sip of their drink. They run a hand through their hair, you do the same.

However, there is no reason why we can't help nature along a bit and use some conscious body language as well. Leaning in during a conversation tells them you are interested in what they have to say and maybe them as well. Avoid crossing your arms over your chest or even crossing your legs. Both of these gestures can indicate that you're defensive, anxious or bored.

Keep your focus on the target of your attraction instead of yourself, and your interest will shine through.

Among the tricks used to exhibit sexual attraction, flirting remains a well-tested strategy. It is used by both sexes. Many men makea habit of flirting with women. The following article examines what motivates such flirtatious behavior, and it studies the current effectiveness of this age-old method for catching the attention of a member of the opposite sex.

While a young adult male may believe that flirting with women can help him to somehow expand the pool of women whom he might chose to date, the facts argue against such an illusory idea. In fact, Edward Laumann, Ph.D., the coauthor of Sex in America, has said, "...most of us end up with partners much like ourselves...You've got to get close for sexual chemistry to occur. Sparks can fly when you see someone across a room, but you only see a selected group of people."

In other words, when a man starts flirting with women he is normally trying to initiate a sexual relationship with a small, select group of women. More likely than not all of the women targeted by the man's flirting share with him some characteristic such as age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class or education. By flirting before only a select group of women, a man automatically limits the pool of women whom he might have the chance to date.

Still, the act of flirting with women can satisfy an important need. Flirting with women, especially a select group of women helps to alleviate some of the uncertainty inherent in the start of a relationship. Flirting with women provides a man with a way to respond to the fact that a woman's attractiveness has sparked his interest.

The question men must ask, however, comes down to this: How can the act of flirting with women convince a member of the opposite sex that their search for a suitable partner has come to an end? In order to answer this question, a man must examine what it is that women want.

In the past women sought man with power, wealth and status. These constituted the items that might assure a woman that a man had the ability to provide her children with security. Flirting with women frequently has the ability to convey to some degree a measure of a man's wealth, power and status. Present-day women, however, do not always look for evidence of those three character traits.

In the 1990s Psychology Today did a survey of young adult females, those who might be targeted by men flirting with women. The respondents said that thy looked for men who could empathize with their feelings, think on an intellectual level and have a sense of humor.

The survey results showed that younger more immature girls may remain attracted to men with a pleasant facial appearance or a striking physique. These young ladies could provide a young man with a good reason to flirt with girls. As both sexes mature, however, the rewards that once went to the boy who used to flirt with girls do not always translate into similar rewards for the men who insist on flirting with women.

So if the more practiced methods for flirting with women no longer have the same ability to catch a woman's attention, then men need to concentrate on other skills. They need to develop the ability to empathize with women, to see more of life through the eyes of a woman.

Most importantly they need to develop an unquestionable sense of humor. This seems to give the modern man his strongest guarantee yet of sparking the interest of an attractive lady.

This is a survey taken from 500 women ages 25 through 45 years old, single and married. When a woman knows the pleasure of dancing in the arms of a man, it is next to impossible to settle for anything less, unless he has some incredibly exciting career in which they can experience unlimited financial freedom together or he is unbelievable in bed or both! Yes, it is true in the order of importance according to our survey. Dance, Financial Success then Sex. Of all the women surveyed not one said she did not enjoy dancing in the arms of a man. To top it off, if he knew how to dance really well then sex was the best she had ever experienced! All women agreed sex is best when both man and woman are in love! In fact 90% of the women said they could tell what kind of a lover a man would be by the way he danced with her and they could tell his level of sincerity towards her by observing the way he danced with other women. Either he is a player, shy, inhibited or uninhibited, aggressive or passive.

Women love a man who has a certain level of refinement. A man who is masculine but who also enjoys the arts as well. A man who is interested in becoming more than just his job. Seeking more out of life than just eat, sleep and work.

Music and dancing touches women in a very profound and unique way. It "Stirs the Soul" and can enable her to let the every day problems of life seem less significant and help unlock the playful and sensuous side of one's personality. What could be better than sharing that with a special man!

Women said that the old dinner and a movie routine for a date has become so boring. First of all standing in line on a Friday night with hundreds of strangers is not real fun after a long day at work or after driving the kids to and from school and soccer practice. Eating high calorie junk food and sitting for 1 1/2 hours in a dark theater without conversation is of course not helping the figure any and not what most women want to do on a date unless they are under 20 years old and have nothing to talk about. Women do like to get dressed up and looking their best when out on a date. Women love to be complimented by their date and on their appearance. After all, there is always something nice a man can say that is complimentary about a woman at any age.

The ultimate experience is dancing with a man and being romanced in a sincere way, getting to know that man on and off the dance floor and being courted where the sexual pressure is off! Eventually revealing deeper feelings for one another and it is mutual and then becoming intimate! This is the ultimate dance dream come true!

A smart man learns how to dance because he knows that is where all the women are, out dancing! A lucky man meets a fabulous woman while out dancing who loves him and admires him. A smart and lucky man recognizes a good woman when he finds her and continues to nourish the relationship with dance and romance!

10 qualities women look for in men (On and off the dance floor)

1. Good Leader on the dance floor who stays on the music.
2. Neat, clean appearance and well groomed.
3. Confident, self assured. Direct eye contact .
4. Stable career, financial security.
5. Sense of humor, quick witted, intelligent.
6. Well mannered i.e.; opens the door, introduces you to his friends, good table manners etc.
7. Physically fit, keeping weight under control.
8. Interested in what you have to say, a good listener.
9. Good in bed.
10. Nice looking.
    

Of all the women surveyed, all enjoyed compliments on their appearance, dancing ability, intelligence and cooking abilities. Of course only if they do know how to cook. Women also said they knew if a man was giving insincere flattery, it is like a sixth sense women have. So men beware, only sincere flattery please!

10 qualities women do not like in men

1. Men who can't lead and blame it on the woman.
2. Bad breath or body odor.
3. Cheap cologne.
4. Cocky attitude, think they are "God's gift" to women.
5. Lewd conduct on and off the dance floor.
6. Men who wear clothing that went out of style 10-20 years ago.
7. Cheap toupees. Invest in an expensive one or just go au' natural.
8. Smokers and heavy drinkers.
9. Unemployed loser types. They can dance but don't have a job, house, or money.
10. Dumb Guys.

95 % of the women said they would put up with all the negative qualities (with exception to numbers 2, 5, and 8) if the man was a very good dancer.

If men only knew what a powerful aphrodisiac dancing is for women, every man in the world would learn how. Up until now it has been the best kept secret on the dating scene. Try it and see for yourself.

Where do I start? How do I learn how to Dance?

1. Look in your local Yellow Pages under Dance Instruction. Swing, Ballroom, Country or Latin.
2. Subscribe to a Dance Magazine ie; Swing, Latin, Country, Ballroom.
3. Ask around, word of mouth is the best! You would be surprised how many people you know take Partner Dance Lessons.
4. Choose a program that is Fun and Supportive with a qualified instructor who has an excellent reputation, experience and will allow you to observe a group lesson!

We all fear rejection and this is why some find it difficult to request a woman's phone number. Asking for it simply means: “I want to meet you again”. Should she say no, there will be other chances with other women. If she says yes, you have a lot to gain.

However, considering how and when you do it will improve your chance of success.

Wait for the right moment

Blurting out “Can I have your number?” at the start of a conversation will usually make you seem desperate. Make sure that before popping the question you have given her your full attention over a period of time, made her laugh and perhaps initiated some light-hearted flirting. After this, wait until one of two things happen:

• One of you have to leave.

• The topic of meeting again has been brought up by you or, better yet, her.

Appear confident

You are already past the worst part; you got her to talk to you. Chances are that by this point she will actually want to meet you again and all you have to do is utter the words. How can you appear more confident than you feel?

• Push your shoulders back and hold your head high.

• Keep eye contact.

• Smile!

Choose your wording

 

All women love to feel special and wanted, so how you word your question might be of great importance. You can also opt for not asking at all, but simply telling her to give it to you. Here's some ideas that you may wish to steal:

• “I have had such a great time talking to you. Will you give me your number?”

• “I really want to see you again. Please write down your number for me.”

• “You're really cool, we gotta do this again. Let's swap numbers.”

 

Leave something to be desired

 

Meeting a woman by chance and catching her interest can be compared to a first date. You want to leave her in anticipation and eager for more and keeping some things to yourself will be helpful. Maybe you have planned out the perfect date already and know that you will call her about it on Wednesday, but don't tell her. Uncertainty about what is going to happen will get her thinking about you.

 

Be honest!

 

Keep in mind that when a woman gives you her number she will feel just as vulnerable as you did when you asked for it. She is basically saying: “I really like you and hope that you will call me.” Don't collect phone numbers, only ask if you really wish to see her again and intend on calling within a reasonable amount of time.

 

Your sincerity will shine through and further increase your chances of success.

Never stay where you are not appreciated. This applies to all phases in life. Work, sports, your social life; but it especially applies when courting single women.

Bad Vibes

If a girl is not interested in you, then there is absolutely nothing you can
do is going to change it. Review the previous chapter and if none of the signs are present don't waste time with people who are not interested in you. Even if she looks like the girl of your dreams, it will lead nowhere and will leave you both physically and emotionally drained. 

By hanging around this girl, you will gain nothing. And worse, she will lose respect for you. At least if you leave with your head high and pride intact, it will leave her with the impression that maybe, just maybe, she missed out on a good thing.

Moving On

There are a few reliable indicators which can alert you if the relationship is going nowhere. Although by no means foolproof, taking note of these behavior patterns should enable you to bail out of the relationship before she dumps you. Think about it. Would you rather she dump you instead of you bravely accepting reality and moving on?

Signs Of Dislike

Firstly, She won't make herself available. Even though her excuses may sound valid, if she were interested, she would make time to see you. If arranging a date to get together becomes a struggle and you are the only one working on the initiating the dates, it might be time to leave. At this point, conversations will be awkward and forced, often ending with her making something up to get you off the line. After all, you are the only one trying to keep it going.

Conversations and the tone in her voice will be neutral. She might occasionally look away and seem bored, as if she would rather be someplace else. Not necessarily negative, but they will be absent of that up-beat positive mood that an interested girl gives.

The most important thing to consider is that most women don't want to hurt you in any way. So, if they are not interested, they will expect you to infer the fact that there is an absence of a "come on" in their manner. Many men will assume that since a girl hasn't come out and said "drop dead," then maybe she is interested. Do realize that this only applies to you if you have been out on at least five or more dates! If you have only just met her, there is absolutely no way you would know if she thinks you are a jerk and a waste of her time.

The main reason she does not call you back is probably because you are doing something that doesn't agree with her. You may be coming at the whole relationship from the traditional or 'courtship' behavior, and this may be leading her to just drop you as soon a she can.

She has other men on hand who are ready to do many things for her and all she has to do is ask them. They will drive her around, fill her stomach, even buy her things and all they get in return is a kiss on the cheek or a hug in the hopes of something more.

And all of that is if she wants to keep you around as one of her boy girlfriends. You will be categorized just like all of her other friends like this if you are even so lucky. All of this is stemming from the wrong frame of relationship in the first place.

When you start courting her, she knows that she has the power especially because of the actions you do to buy her attention almost 'paying' to around her. If you are more of the wussy friend, then you may talk to her a lot and she'll tell you about all of the problems she's having with her 'jerk' boyfriends.

It is true you can have REAL friendships with these women with no ulterior motive other than friendship. This is healthy. These women are my equals and I have several of these relationships. I highly recommend..be a socially adept man.

'Courting her' is really boring to her and she will often just not return your calls even if you are a nice guy with a lot to offer; purely because of the relationship approach that you took.

Dating dynamics have changed in our modern society. Being really traditional and expecting a woman to be interested in you when you take this approach which used to work ( but remember times have changed), is full of all kinds of expectations and is often too much pressure for her to handle even if you are a great catch. This is really why millions of American women are dumping great guys every week.

On the other hand, if you are starting the frame of the relationship on a different level which may be more closer towards an accelerated mating process of attraction, there will be a lot less pressure when done correctly because the entire dynamics are naturally based and without heavy consequence.

When you take a woman out on a date she all of a sudden now senses she is obligated to do something in return because you have paid for her attention. Usually this is just letting you kiss her on the hand or a hug, and because she does not want to deal with all of the pressure of you following her around after she might decide to let you sleep with her. Her anxiety will build up as well as yours, but she isn't thinking about 'you'.

As in the movie Swingers, when Mikey gets a girl's number at the bar and then calls her immediately when he gets home, he is just oozing interest and a high level of expectation. This is a lot of pressure especially for a beautiful woman because she does not know if or when she will be able to get rid of you if she takes things further with you. This is the explanation of why most women will not call you back.

There are also other reasons why she finally just isn't interested in you any more due to her social persona or whatever. If you are in a 50-50 relationship she may resent that you have given her most of the power; this is how two of my American x-girlfriends have broken up with me; I let them just go ahead and have the power in the relationship with me just kind of going along with things (knowing I wasn't being myself and just keeping everything inside).

And this led to the relationship's demise. Usually sooner or later she will lose interest in you if she can not be naturally attracted to you or if the power shifts too much in her favor.

One of the main reason traditional relationships stay together is because a man is being a man and a woman is being a traditional woman. Because of the essential role reversal that is now pervasive in our society everything and everyone has gotten confused.

There is going to be drama in any type of long-term relationship with an independent and especially beautiful woman - guaranteed. The chance that she will give up a lot of her freedom and newfound rights to be more like her traditional and simpler counterpart throughout the rest of the world, is very slim despite her birthright desire still to raise children.

The inability for her to give up a lot of her freedoms and play her more biological role of just being a mother leads to nagging, the gene, griping that many American married men will tell you about (especially if they are divorced).

I do not want to give relationship advice for men in 50-50 relationships with women, because I do not deal with that kind of drama in my life. You will find that if you can just be a man and living your reality, you will attract women to you who will want to stay around you and will not have to question why she is not calling you because she will be calling you more often than you will be calling her.

This is really the way it is supposed to be. She is the one who is supposed to be hanging by you and that's what she wants to do despite what feminists say. Just look at women who are around men; they will often choose men who are not nice guys now and they will be calling them because 'there's something about them'. Women don't have to understand this but you do. You can give them those feelings by truly being yourself (on the universal understanding level).

If you can just be a natural or a man that creates attraction and desire within women, you will have them calling you a lot more often and you will not be wondering why no one ever calls. Hey I've gone through it in the past as well with American women.

It is his energy of essentially giving her the power and choice in the relationship which she ultimately resents it will not call you back for; in that sense some things have never changed. Women are still women beneath their hard edged socially developed exterior.

If you want to learn how to have women calling you, then make sure you check out my ultimate resource 'Mens Guide to Women'. If she can just be around a man who is 100% comfortable around her without letting her perceived socially acceptable appearance get in the way, she will be magnetically attracted to you.

There is a lot of leverage that is giving her this power that is already natural anyways. It is up to you to take advantage of this to give both you and her what you are looking for. This is the opposite of how Mikey reacted after he got back from the club.

In fact in a movie you will notice that his ex-girlfriend finally called him back when he officially let her go by taking the other call from his new girlfriend. This is not too far from the truth of reality.

Somehow women just know (as in the opening sequence of the movie). He was emotionally hanging on to her for too long, giving her the power in the relationship; this is not the biological order, he was being a wussy. When you really get things 'in order' women will be calling you and other women will start calling you all of a sudden (interesting..).

Coffee improves short-term memory and speeds up reaction times by acting on the brain’s prefrontal cortex, according to a new study.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine how coffee activates different areas of the brain in 15 volunteers.

“Caffeine modulates a higher brain function through its effects on distinct areas of the brain,” explains Florian Koppelstätter, who carried out the research with colleagues at the Medical University at Innsbruck, Austria.

Prior to testing, the group fasted for 4 to 6 hours, and abstained from caffeine and nicotine for at least 24 hours. Then they were then given either a cup of strong coffee – containing 100 milligrams of caffeine – or a caffeine-free placebo drink. After 20 minutes all participants underwent fMRI scans while carrying out a memory and concentration test. A few days afterwards the experiment was repeated under the same conditions but each received the other drink.

Executive memory

During the memory tests, participants were shown a fast sequence of capital letters, then flashed a single letter on a screen and told to decide quickly whether this letter was the same as the one which appeared second-to-last in the earlier sequence. They had to respond by pressing a “Y” for yes or “N” for no.

“The group all showed activation of the working memory part of the brain," Koppelstätter explains. "But those who received caffeine had significantly greater activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe, known as the anterior cingulate and the anterior cingulate gyrus. These areas are involved in 'executive memory', attention, concentration, planning and monitoring."

“This type of memory is used when, for example, you look up a telephone number in a book and then mentally store it before dialling,” he adds.

Pick-me-up

Koppelstätter stresses that the study is preliminary and that he has yet to discover how long the memory effects last or what other effects coffee has on brain function. He adds that the long-term impact of caffeine use is also an important consideration.

But he says the study shows that coffee has an effect on specific brain regions involved in memory and concentration that tallies with anecdotal evidence of the drink's “pick-me-up” effect.

Caffeine is known to influence adenosine receptors which are found throughout the brain on nerve cells and blood vessels. It is thought that the drug inhibits these receptors and that this excites the nerve cells in the brain. “This may be the mechanism involved,” suggests Koppelstätter.

The research was presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.