Overview of Music History for Homeschool Parents: Mastering Music 101 series

In this episode of "Music in Our Homeschool," join your host Gena Mayo as she embarks on an enlightening journey through the annals of music history. Designed to support homeschooling parents in teaching their children, this episode offers a comprehensive overview of key musical eras, from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.

Discover the pivotal events, groundbreaking innovations, and influential composers that shaped the soundscapes of each period. Gena, who brings her 30+ years of experience as a music teacher and homeschooling mom of eight, passionately discusses significant developments like the rise of Gregorian chant, the invention of the printing press, and the advent of opera.

This episode is part of Gena's Mastering Music 101 series, following an introduction to basic music note reading. Whether you are a novice or a seasoned music educator, Gena’s insights and resources, including her online courses and PDF curriculum available at Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com, will enrich your teaching toolkit. Tune in and explore free lessons, instrumental innovations, and the evolution of music styles, from polyphony to musical theater.

Additionally, Gena encourages shared learning experiences between parents and children, providing valuable tips on incorporating music history into your homeschool curriculum. Stay tuned for the next episode, which will delve into the fascinating world of musical instruments. For more resources or to connect with Gena, visit Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com.

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Find all links and resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/music-history-overview/

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Transcript

Overview of Music History (Mastering Music 101 series) E31

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. Welcome back to Mastering Music 101. This is the series I'm doing for homeschooling parents who want to help their students understand music history, but maybe you don't know much about music history yourself. Last week we talked about music note reading, just the very basics of music note reading, because music theory does get very detailed and very deep.

I do have courses on music theory over at Learn.MusicinourHomeschool.com. Today I'd like to switch our focus a little bit and talk about an overview of music history. 

Music history is another subject that I'm passionate about. It's very fun to study. I have three music history courses over at Learn.MusicinourHomeschool.com that I originally wrote for my homeschool co-op.

We were doing history of the 20th century that year. All the students from kindergarten through 12th grade were studying the same history. [00:01:00] We had them divided up by classes though, so that they were getting more appropriate level for their age. But I thought they really need to learn the 20th century music history along with the regular history, you know?

So I wrote a curriculum for 20th century music history and it has become one of my best sellers. I sell it as an online course at Learn.MusicinourHomeschool.Com and as a PDF curriculum, an ebook, over at Teachers Pay Teachers. So that is actually helps some music teachers and other types of teachers be able to teach it as well. 

Let's talk about the music history overview today. If you'd like a copy of this list, I do have a link in the show description, so you can head over there and get a copy of it. 

So let's go all the way back to the middle ages. Just a little bit of regular history in about 325 AD. That was when [00:02:00] Emperor Constantine, the Roman emperor declared Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. And that spurred the development of music in the Western tradition, beginning in Europe.

When we're talking about music history, yes, we could go all the way back to ancient times, or we could be talking about music history over the entire world. But instead, I'm going to start with just Europe and with what musicologists call the Western tradition. It was so influential that it spread from Europe to many other places around the world. 

The dates of the Middle Ages began around 450 with the fall of the Roman Empire through about 1450 and the Christian church and its music was really growing throughout this time.

Pope Gregory the Great was a pope who collected music that had already been sung in the Roman Catholic Church and that music is called [00:03:00] Gregorian chant in his honor. Gregorian chant is in Latin. It's in one part, and it's sung in unison. Everyone is singing the same notes. And it's a cappella, which means it does not have any instruments accompanying it, just voices.

Around 900 AD, polyphony began. Polyphony means singing in parts. So instead of just having one part, now you'd have two, or eventually three, and four parts, and even more. Guido d'Arezzo is who we credit with developing the solfege syllable system. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, which led to the modern music notation that we talked about last week, where there is a staff of five lines and four spaces, and each note is determined by the clef at the beginning of that staff. That started around the 1000s. 

So now we're into polyphonic music where it's [00:04:00] written in parts. And from this point on, many, many composers would write this type of music. And they started writing a lot of music for the church, the Roman Catholic church and masses. 

The Renaissance started around 1415 and went to about 1600. And if you've studied the Renaissance, you know that it was characterized by a rebirth in Europe, beginning in Italy with a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman literature, culture, and this did apply to music as well.

In 1450, the printing press was invented by Gutenberg and that made it possible now for music to be printed, leading to a more standardized form of notation and music was more widely spread with less errors. 

Josquin de Prez is considered the greatest composer of the Renaissance. He was a leader in Renaissance compositional technique and began connecting [00:05:00] words of a song to the music to help communicate the meaning.

Listen to a fun song called El Grillo. I'm going to link a Spotify playlist so that as I mentioned some of these pieces, you'll be able to go to that playlist and listen to them. Check the show description for that Spotify playlist. 

Palestrina was an Italian composer who held important positions, including musical director at St. Peter's Church in Rome. He wrote 104 masses and you'll want to listen to his most famous one called Missa Papae Marcelli. 

In 1517, the Protestant Reformation began and that led to new forms of music. being written. Martin Luther, in addition to being a theologian and author, was also a musician and composer. He wrote hymns called Lutheran Chorales, and he wanted the church congregations to sing together as a congregation. Music in the Catholic Church [00:06:00] up to that point had mostly been just the choir singing during a service, not the congregation. Luther's most famous hymn is A Mighty Fortress is Our God. 

John Calvin, another reformer, encouraged a new genre of music to be sung in his churches that was called psalmody, texts from the book of Psalms in the Old Testament. This was a movement back to monophony, which means it did not have harmony. Luther and Calvin both encouraged Christians to sing in the vernacular. The vernacular is their own language. All church music up to that point had been sung in Latin. 

And then the Anglican Church, another form of Protestantism, began in England and they began to write music called Anglican anthems. Many were written by Thomas Tallis. 

Now let's switch over to some secular music. You've probably heard of madrigals before. These were a [00:07:00] type of vocal music of the Renaissance written for several solo voices singing together as a group. The lyrics were from a short poem, usually about love. Madrigals often used word painting where the words were described in the musical setting. Sometimes there were unusual harmonies, especially when you compare it to the sacred music of that day. Madrigals began to be written in Italy around 1520. When the English defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, there was a volume of madrigals translated from Italian to English, published in London. And for the next 30 years, English madrigals were written in abundance because Queen Elizabeth loved them. This was also the time that Shakespeare was writing his plays. 

So we've talked about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 450 all the way to 1600. Now, from 1600 to 1750, we have a new era of music, [00:08:00] which we call the Baroque era.

There are four main musical eras, the Baroque, the Classical, the Romantic, and the Modern eras. And we will talk about those four now. 

The Baroque era was characterized musically by a stronger steady beat as compared to the Renaissance. Rhythmic patterns and opening melodies were often repeated throughout the piece. The dynamic level often stayed either loud or soft for a long period of time, rather than gradually changing. And this was called terraced dynamics. The changes were more abrupt than what we would hear in later musical periods. It's loud, loud, loud. And then all of a sudden it's soft, soft, soft. You especially hear this in the major keyboard instruments of the time, which were the organ, the harpsichord, and the clavichord, because those instruments could not make gradual dynamic changes [00:09:00] as with the piano that we hear today.

Basso continuo is another common feature of the Baroque era. This is an instrument group with a harpsichord and a low sounding instrument such as the cello. The Baroque period ended with the death of one of the most famous composers ever, Johann Sebastian Bach. 

The year 1600 was also the beginning of opera. Opera is a drama with a set and costumes, where the story is sung by the actors and accompanied by an orchestra. The first operas were meant to be a continuation of the ancient Greek plays because the Renaissance was still affecting people writing these operas. And Greek myths were also very popular for the first operas.

In 1616, we have the Dance Suite being established. You may have heard of the Allemande, Sarabande, and the Gigue. And these continue to be written by [00:10:00] composers even today. 

Heinrich Schutz wrote a very famous oratorio called Seven Last Words from the Cross. An oratorio is similar to an opera in that it's telling a story through singing, but the subject matter is sacred and it isn't meant to be staged with costumes and a set. It's simply sung on stage. 

Next, we have the Golden Age of Lutheran music with Diedrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel. Buxtehude was an organist and a composer, and Pachelbel's most famous piece today is Canon in D, which I'm sure you'd recognize. 

Our next is composer is Henry Purcell. He was from England and was an organist at the Westminster Abbey. Some call him the greatest of all English composers. There wasn't going to be another English composer ranked as highly as him until the 20th century. He wrote the opera Dido and Aeneas for a girls boarding school, [00:11:00] and this opera might be the finest ever written with an English text. 

Vivaldi is our next Baroque composer. He's most known for his Concerti Grossi and Solo Concertos, which is a piece played with a soloist and a small orchestra. His most famous piece heard today is Four Seasons, which I'm also sure you would recognize. 

And now let's talk about Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born in 1685 and died in 1750. He composed music that is synonymous with the high Baroque style, vocal and organ music for the church, as well as keyboard and orchestral pieces.

Our last composer we're talking about for the Baroque era is George Friedrich Handel. He was educated in Germany and Italy. but spent much of his life as a composer in England. He's most well known for his oratorios, especially the Messiah, written in 1742.

[00:12:00] Next, let's move on to the Classical era, not to be confused with the more generic term classical music, which could apply to all the music I'm speaking about today. The classical era is an actual time period from 1750 to 1820. It followed the Baroque era and preceded the Romantic era of the 1800s.

The classical era included famous composers such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and instead of the heavy textured, complicated polyphonic music of the Baroque, the classical era preferred tuneful, easy-to-remember melodies, and simple harmonies. 

Other characteristics include a variety in mood within a single piece, such as through gradual dynamic changes, because the piano had finally been invented, so they could easily do those gradual dynamic changes.

Also, there was no more basso continuo. The Baroque [00:13:00] orchestra varied from piece to piece, but the orchestra of the classical period became standard with the four main instrument sections that we use even today. The strings, the woodwinds, the brass, and the percussion. And by the way, next week's episode will focus on musical instruments, so we'll talk more about those then.

Another feature of the classical era was the rising middle class wanted music in their homes and for their children to learn to play music. The demand for music for beginners and amateurs increased as did the demand for printed music and music for children. 

Let's talk about one of those famous classical composers, Joseph Haydn. He lived a long time, from 1732 to 1809. He was a skilled servant, working for an aristocratic family who paid him to write music and he had a 25 person orchestra there plus singers. [00:14:00] He put on two concerts and two opera performances weekly. His whole life was dedicated to composing and conducting music. We call him the Father of the Symphony. 

The next famous classical era composer is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He only lived to be 35 years old, but he is still one of the most prolific and talented composers ever, writing over 600 compositions. And part of that is because he started writing when he was very young, five years old. He wrote in every genre of the classical era, string quartets, symphonies, sonatas, and operas. 

Now we're going to skip over to the last famous composer of the classical era, Ludwig von Beethoven, who lived from 1770 to 1827. He's what we call a transitional composer. He wrote music of the classical era, and then he started transitioning to his own style, partially because he [00:15:00] started going deaf and then became completely deaf and was still writing music.

His later music defined the beginning of the Romantic era of music, which covered most of the 1800s. Composers and others in the arts during this era wanted to stretch emotion, imagination, and individualism. These new artists wanted to express themselves in freedom. The classical era was really bound by rules.

The romantic era was a time when the composers felt like they could break some of those rules and do new and exciting things. Harmonies began to be more unstable and new musical forms developed. For example, Beethoven added a choir to his Ninth Symphony. 

Franz Schubert of the Romantic era wrote 144 songs in just the year 1815 alone. He is another composer like Mozart who died quite young, but still left an impressive amount of music. Nine [00:16:00] symphonies, 22 piano sonatas, many other piano pieces, chamber works, choral works, and over 100 songs. 

Franz Liszt was an innovator at the piano. He composed some beautiful music, such as the Hungarian Rhapsody.

And next let's look at Frederic Chopin, many people call him the Poet of the Piano. A lovely piece to listen of his is Nocturne No. 2. 

Rossini is one of the most famous Italian opera composers ever. He wrote the operas, The Barber of Seville and William Tell. I'm sure you'd recognize the William Tell overture. 

Wagner created a completely new type of opera and he called it music drama. It included all of the arts, music, acting, poetry, and visual arts as seen in the costumes and the scenery. 

Now we're going to talk about a very different composer compared to Wagner, and that's Stephen Foster. He's the first [00:17:00] American composer to make it onto this list today. He wrote popular songs like Oh Susanna, Old Folks at Home, And Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, as well as Beautiful Dreamer and Camp Town Races.

 Johannes Brahms is seen by many as the last great composer of the era of tradition. He wrote incredible symphonies, songs, concertos, and choral works, including the German Requiem. You'll also want to listen to his Hungarian Dance No. 5. 

Gilbert and Sullivan were Englishmen who collaborated for 20 years on 14 comic operas, which we call operettas. These were in my opinion, the transition to musical theater that came in the 20th century, but these are sung more in an operatic style. You may have heard some songs from the Pirates of Penzance. 

The last great composer of the Romantic era that we'll talk about is Peter Tchaikovsky. He was [00:18:00] Russian and the epitome of the romantic artist who let his emotions guide him and his music. Many composers did that, but he did it a lot. Tchaikovsky is known for his ballets, especially the Nutcracker and Swan Lake. 

So as the 1800s are closing, here are some things that were occurring. Thomas Edison invented sound recording and patented the phonograph. The first symphony was published in America. The Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall opened in New York City.

The modern era of music history contains much of my favorite music to listen to and to perform. I love the variety. I love the different types of styles. What else happened during the 1900s through today? Well, recording started with a phonograph and then Cassettes, then moved on to CDs and MP3s, and now we have digital downloads and streaming services.

Just think of [00:19:00] all the change that has come from simply being able to share music that's recorded. That didn't start until the late 1800s. All the centuries before that, you could only hear music, if you heard it live. This is a huge change that made such a big difference because now music was recorded and shared with other people all over the world and spread faster than it ever had before. With transportation improvements, such as the car and the airplane, musicians toured more and could take their music far and wide.

The era is also a time when composers disregarded previous constraints and compositional rules. Many radically experimented and even threw off things like major and minor keys, typical and expected rhythms, and even instrumentation of the earlier centuries.

They invented a great many new styles such as Impressionism, [00:20:00] expressionism, atonality, chance music, minimalism, folk opera, musical theater, and film scores. And that's only just a few. 

So let's start with our first composer of the modern era, John Philip Sousa. He was an American and is called the March King. He was in the Marines and started writing lots of band music, which we now associate with marching bands, especially, marches. One of his most popular marches is Stars and Stripes Forever.

Next we have Scott Joplin. He was an African American who published 50 compositions, including the first piece of sheet music ever to sell over 1 million copies, for the piano piece, The Maple Leaf Rag. He also wrote The Entertainer. 

The American W. C. Handy is called Father of the Blues, and I bet you'd be surprised to learn how early blues music came about in the early 1900s. One of the very earliest pieces was called St. Louis [00:21:00] Blues. And associated with blues is jazz. The first jazz recording ever released was in 1917. Some of the most famous American composers and performers of jazz include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Ella Fitzgerald. A great piece of Duke Ellington's is It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing.

So far, all of the composers I've talked about for the modern era have been Americans. Unlike the other centuries from the middle ages, all the way through the romantic era, which were dominated by European composers. Many of the leaders of 20th century music were Americans and many others from Europe moved to America.

But not all of them. The last great composer of the Italian opera tradition that had begun way back in 1600 was Giacomo Puccini. He wrote some of the best left operas in the [00:22:00] world like La Boheme and Madame Butterfly. 

One particular style of music that began in the late 1800s in France was called Impressionism. And just like Impressionistic paintings, the music is characterized by a sort of blurriness. Claude Debussy is one of the greatest composers of Impressionistic music. He wrote a beautiful piano piece called Clair de Lune. 

The American George Gershwin, along with his brother Ira, wrote many of the earliest musical theater shows in New York City, plus some of the great songs, and created a new genre called folk opera with his innovative opera called Porgy and Bess. He wrote some orchestral pieces that had jazz influences in them, such as Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. 

The next musical style of the modern era was called big band music. Fletcher Henderson created a standard for big band orchestration. He had a reed [00:23:00] section with saxophones and clarinets, a brass section with trumpets and trombones, and a rhythm section, which included piano, bass, and drums. Some of the most popular band leaders were Count Basie, Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. 

The composer Aaron Copland is credited with creating what we now look back on as true American music. He wrote for ballets and films. Aaron Copland lived from the year 1900 to 1990, and one of his most famous pieces is called Hoedown.

Ralph Vaughan Williams founded the English nationalist movement and spent a lot of time researching English folk melody. He traveled around England collecting over 800 folk songs. What is a folk song? Well, a folk song is a song written by just everyday regular people, not professional musicians, not people who went [00:24:00] to a music school or conservatory or academy or learned how to compose. These are just people like a mom who made up a lullaby for her baby as she was trying to sing her child to sleep, or a man who made up a love song to woo his sweetheart, or men who were working on ships or on the railroad and used music and songs to help with their work. So these are folk songs and there are lots of composers in many different countries of the 20th century who went out into the countryside to collect folk songs for their own countries.

It was a really neat thing that happened because they would take these and sometimes incorporate them into their own compositions. This style was called nationalism, and the music we hear would sound either English or Irish or Russian or Hungarian or German. 

The next composer is Russian, Rachmaninoff. He's only [00:25:00] one of two Russian composers who were well known internationally during the early part of the 20th century. The other was Igor Stravinsky, and we'll speak about him in a moment. Both men left Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Rachmaninoff came to America, but most of his major works were written while he was still living in Russia. You'll want to listen to his Piano Concerto No. 2. 

Igor Stravinsky became famous overnight with his ballet in 1910 called Firebird. The Rite of Spring, another ballet premiered in Paris in 1913, and it's one of the most famous classical compositions of the 20th century. It contains extreme dissonance and no sense of traditional tonality. People actually rioted at the first performance because many people hated it and many others were enthralled by it and wanted to be listening. 

Some who loved this [00:26:00] innovation and new types of music composition were the Austrians, Arnold Schoenberg and his students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who wrote Atonal music with no tonal center at all. It was certainly fun for them to be experimental, but this type of music didn't last. People simply don't like to listen to atonal music. It doesn't feel good to us. 

Now let's move back over to America. The Ziegfeld Follies were a musical review show in New York City. Their performances included a variety of songs and sketches without a single storyline. And they were a big hit on what we now call Broadway from 1907 to 1931. 

In 1943, the musical Oklahoma, written by a team of American composers, Rodgers and Hammerstein became the first musical where every song and dance was integral to the plot, [00:27:00] the story of the show. Musical theater was never the same after that, and thus ushered in the Golden Age of Musical Theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote many musicals such as The Sound of Music. 

 American Leonard Bernstein is known for three important roles in music. He was the first permanent conductor of a major American orchestra. He was eventually able to conduct all the major orchestras of the world. He was a composer, writing musical theater, including Candide and West Side Story and other works. And he was a music educator. He started the Young People's Concerts in the 1950s to help teach children about composers and musical concepts. 

There were some new instruments that were introduced in the 1900s that influenced music, such as the Hammond organ, the electric guitar, and the piano synthesizer.

I'll wrap up the composers of the modern era by just mentioning a few more, although [00:28:00] there are so many more that we could talk about. We just don't have enough time. Stephen Sondheim wrote musical theater and film music. He composed music and lyrics for the musicals, If Anything Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sweeney Todd, Company, and Into the Woods.

Next is John Williams, one of the most prolific film composers ever. He has written for more than 75 movies, including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Superman, E. T., Schindler's List, and Jaws. 

American Philip Glass is another prolific composer. One style he is well known for writing is called minimalism, such as you'd hear in the Truman Show film score.

And here are some other great musical composers you'll want to listen to. Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, Alan Menken, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul. Some of the musicals these men wrote were The Little Mermaid, Wicked, The Phantom of the Opera, and [00:29:00] The Greatest Showman. 

Hopefully today's workshop Mastering Music 101 Basics for Homeschool Parents, specifically talking about an overview of music history, has provided you with a comprehensive overview that will help empower you to confidently guide your children through their music education.

Remember though that you do not have to master any of these concepts. I help teach you and your kids together through all my courses and my membership at Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.Com. So head over there and be sure to download the free lessons that you can find at MusicinOurHomeschool.com/FreeMusicLessons.

And if you have any questions, there's should be a place in the show notes that says, Send Gena a message. You can click that or email me at Gena@MusicinOurHomeschool.Com. That's Gena with an E and until next time, keep the music [00:30:00] alive.

Find all links and resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/music-history-overview/