# MUSIC — A Brief History (Concert Program) Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-music Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-music/raw Category: Art Slides: 14 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:04.303Z Tags: catalog, art, music ## Summary ❦ ❦ ❦ Conducted in thirteen movements — use → or click Key sections include: MUSIC / a brief history; From plainchant to playlists; Medieval — cantus planus; Renaissance — the woven voice; Baroque — affetto and ornament; Classical — clarity, balance, sonata; Romantic — sturm und drang; Modernism — the riot and the row; Jazz — an American invention; Recorded music — sound as object. ## Slide Outline 1. MUSIC / a brief history 2. From plainchant to playlists 3. Medieval — cantus planus 4. Renaissance — the woven voice 5. Baroque — affetto and ornament 6. Classical — clarity, balance, sonata 7. Romantic — sturm und drang 8. Modernism — the riot and the row 9. Jazz — an American invention 10. Recorded music — sound as object 11. Rock & Pop — the amplified century 12. Electronic — new instruments, new ears 13. The streaming era — everything, all at once 14. Encore — da capo ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: MUSIC / a brief history - Programme · Opus I · Anno MMXXVI - From plainchant to playlists - ❦ ❦ ❦ - Conducted in thirteen movements — use → or click ### Slide 2: Medieval — cantus planus - Movement I · ca. 500 – 1400 - Plainchant in stone halls; the first writing of song. - Sung the way candles burn — slowly, upward - In the high naves of monasteries, monks shaped a single sacred line called Gregorian chant — modal, unmetered, sung in unison or in long parallel fifths (organum). It was anonymous on purpose: the music was a vessel, not a voice. - Around the year 1000, Guido of Arezzo invented solfeggio (ut, re, mi…) and the four-line stave. For the first time, a melody could survive its singer. Notation made polyphony — many voices — possible. - In secular courts the troubadours of Occitania and the German Minnesinger sang of love and war in the vernacular. The split between sacred and worldly music begins here. - Chant: Dies irae, Veni Creator - Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179) - Pérotin & the Notre Dame school - Machaut: first complete polyphonic Mass ### Slide 3: Renaissance — the woven voice - Movement II · 1400 – 1600 - Polyphony perfected; sacred music as architecture in air. - Five voices, one mind — a cappella - Composers learned to weave independent vocal lines into seamless cloth. Counterpoint — note against note — became the great craft. The Catholic Church remained the patron, but printing (Petrucci, 1501) made scores portable and famous. - Josquin des Prez wrote with a rhetorical clarity that moved listeners to tears; the Council of Trent worried that polyphony obscured the sacred text. Palestrina's answer — smooth, balanced, devotional — became the template for centuries of Catholic music. - In Venice, the Gabrielis stationed brass choirs across St Mark's basilica: stereo, four hundred years early. - Josquin des Prez (c.1450 – 1521) - Palestrina — Missa Papae Marcelli (1567) - Lassus, Byrd, Tallis - The madrigal — secular polyphony in flower ### Slide 4: Baroque — affetto and ornament - Movement III · 1600 – 1750 - Opera is born; the keyboard is tamed; counterpoint reaches its summit. - Bach · Handel · Vivaldi - Around 1600 in Florence, a group of intellectuals tried to revive Greek drama and accidentally invented opera. Monteverdi gave it a soul. Music gained a steady bass line (basso continuo) and a clearer sense of harmony in the modern major–minor keys. - Vivaldi industrialised the concerto; Handel turned the oratorio into civic spectacle; J. S. Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722, 1742) — preludes and fugues in all 24 keys — proving that a single keyboard tuning could serve every key. It is the rosetta stone of Western harmony. - "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed…" — Handel, Messiah, 1741. - Monteverdi — L'Orfeo (1607) - Vivaldi — Le quattro stagioni (1725) - Handel — Messiah (1741) - J.S. Bach — fugues, cantatas, Passions - Equal temperament & the modern keyboard ### Slide 5: Classical — clarity, balance, sonata - Movement IV · 1750 – 1820 - The symphony, the string quartet, and the public concert. - Haydn · Mozart · (early) Beethoven - Reacting against the dense ornament of the late Baroque, the Classical style prized symmetry and singable melody. Phrases came in matched pairs; harmony moved with logical inevitability. - The great new form was sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation — an argument in tones. Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and effectively invented the string quartet. Mozart turned the concerto and the opera buffa into perfection. The orchestra became standardised; the piano replaced the harpsichord. - Concerts left the palace for public halls. The audience — not the patron — became the judge. - Haydn — "Father of the symphony" - Mozart — Don Giovanni, 41 symphonies - Sonata form — the great argument - The fortepiano enters the parlour ### Slide 6: Romantic — sturm und drang - Movement V · 1820 – 1900 - Beethoven cracks the form open; the orchestra swells; the composer becomes hero. - Feeling, nation, the unresolved chord - Beethoven straddles the centuries. His Third Symphony (Eroica, 1803) was twice the length of any before it; the Ninth (1824) put a chorus into a symphony and dared to set Schiller's Ode to Joy. The composer was no longer servant but prophet. - Romantics pushed harmony to the edge of tonality. Schubert's Lieder turned the song into a private confession. Brahms looked back; Liszt and Wagner rushed forward. Wagner's Tristan chord (1859) hangs unresolved — the seed of modernism. - National schools bloom: Tchaikovsky in Russia, Dvořák in Bohemia, Verdi in Italy. Orchestras grow to 100+ players. - Beethoven — the bridge (Symphonies 3, 5, 9) - Schubert — Winterreise - Chopin, Liszt — the virtuoso - Brahms, Mahler, Wagner - The leitmotif & chromatic harmony ### Slide 7: Modernism — the riot and the row - Movement VI · 1900 – 1945 - Tonality dissolves. Rhythm bites. Audiences shout back. - Stravinsky · Schoenberg · Debussy - On 29 May 1913, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps opened in Paris. The driving, irregular rhythms and grinding harmonies provoked a near-riot. The 19th-century language of music had been broken in a single evening. - In Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg gave up on tonal centres altogether and devised twelve-tone serialism (1923) — rows in which every chromatic note has equal weight. In Paris, Debussy and Ravel built music from timbre and color (impressionism): Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894). - Bartók mined folk modes; Ives stacked marching bands; recorded sound began to intrude on the concert stage. - Debussy — whole-tone & modal color - Stravinsky — Rite of Spring (1913) - Schoenberg — atonality & 12-tone rows - Bartók, Berg, Webern, Ives ### Slide 8: Jazz — an American invention - Movement VII · ca. 1900 — present - From New Orleans funeral parades to the cool calculus of Miles. - Blues → ragtime → swing → bebop → cool → fusion - Jazz is the great African-American contribution to world music. Born in New Orleans from blues, ragtime, gospel, and brass-band traditions, it carried the syncopation of West Africa into the European harmonic system — and added improvisation as the centre of the art. - Louis Armstrong proved that a soloist could be the show. Duke Ellington composed for his orchestra as a single instrument. Bebop (Parker, Gillespie, Monk) made the music a virtuoso conversation. Miles Davis kept reinventing: cool (1949), modal (Kind of Blue, 1959), fusion (Bitches Brew, 1970). - Jazz also seeded almost everything that followed in popular music: rhythm and blues, rock, hip-hop, soul, funk. - Louis Armstrong — the soloist (1920s) - Ellington, Basie — the swing era - Parker & Gillespie — bebop (1940s) - Coltrane, Mingus, Davis - The blues remains the bedrock ### Slide 9: Recorded music — sound as object - Movement VIII · 1877 — the digital era - Edison's tin foil to the lossy file: a hundred years of capture. - Cylinder · shellac · vinyl · tape · CD · MP3 · stream - In 1877, Edison spoke "Mary had a little lamb" into a tin-foil cylinder and played it back. For the first time in human history, a performance could outlive the moment of its making. Music became a thing — ownable, repeatable, mass-produced. - Each format reshaped what music sounded like. The 78 rpm shellac disc dictated the three-minute pop song. The LP (1948) made the album an art form. Magnetic tape made multi-track studio sorcery possible. The CD (1982) digitised everything. The MP3 (1993) shrank a song to a quarter of its size and slipped it through the wire. - By 2000, recording was the music; the live performance was a citation of it. - 1877 — Edison cylinder - 1948 — LP (Columbia) - 1963 — compact cassette - 1982 — Compact Disc - 1993 — MP3 standard - 1999 — Napster ### Slide 10: Rock & Pop — the amplified century - Movement IX · 1950s — present - Teenage music takes over the world. - Elvis · Beatles · Dylan · the Bronx - In the mid-1950s, electric blues, country, and gospel fused into rock and roll. Elvis Presley made it a mass phenomenon; Chuck Berry and Little Richard wrote its grammar. The Beatles (1962–70) turned the album into a unified work of art and proved a band could be its own author. - Bob Dylan dragged literary ambition into pop. Soul (Aretha, Stevie, Marvin), funk (James Brown), and disco moved Black music to the centre of the mainstream. Punk (1976) tore it down; hip-hop (DJ Kool Herc, the Bronx, ~1973) rebuilt it from samples and spoken rhyme — and went on to become the world's dominant pop language. - By the 2000s, "popular music" meant a global, multiracial, sample-based culture — and the genre boundaries that defined the 20th century began to blur away. - 1955 — Chuck Berry, "Maybellene" - 1967 — Beatles, Sgt. Pepper - 1965 — Dylan plugs in at Newport - 1973 — Kool Herc breaks the beat - 1991 — Nirvana — Nevermind ### Slide 11: Electronic — new instruments, new ears - Movement X · 1920 — present - From the theremin's wave to the warehouse rave. - Theremin · musique concrète · synth · DAW · EDM - In 1920, Léon Theremin built an instrument played by waving the hands in the air — the first electronic timbre most people heard. By 1948, in Paris, Pierre Schaeffer was splicing recorded sounds into compositions and called it musique concrète. The studio itself became an instrument. - Robert Moog's voltage-controlled synthesizer (1964) put electronic sound into the hands of musicians. Kraftwerk turned the machine into a band. Disco, house (Chicago, ~1984), techno (Detroit), and trance built whole genres from the drum machine and the sampler. The DAW (digital audio workstation) eventually let one person produce, mix, and master a record on a laptop. - By the 2010s, EDM filled stadiums; the producer was the new rock star. - 1920 — Theremin - 1948 — Schaeffer, musique concrète - 1964 — Moog synthesizer - 1980 — Roland TR-808 drum machine - 1984 — house in Chicago, techno in Detroit - 2010s — the laptop studio ### Slide 12: The streaming era — everything, all at once - Movement XI · 2010s — present - The library is infinite; the playlist is the new album. - Spotify · the long tail · the algorithm - When Spotify launched in 2008, it offered something no human had ever had: instant access to most of the recorded music ever made, for the price of a single CD per month. By the late 2010s, streaming had become the dominant way the world heard music. - The economics flipped. Where the album once defined a release, the playlist — user-curated or algorithmic — became the primary unit of listening. Songs were engineered for the first 30 seconds (the moment a stream pays out), and for placement in mood-based feeds. The long tail meant that obscure music could find its audience — but the head of the curve grew sharper, with a few global stars dominating attention. - A thousand-year arc that began with monks chanting in stone now ends with you, your phone, and an algorithm choosing the next song. - 2008 — Spotify launches - 2015 — streaming overtakes downloads - The "playlist single" replaces the album - Algorithms as A&R - Bedroom artists — global from day one ### Slide 13: Encore — da capo - Coda · encore & references - A thousand years in thirteen movements. Now go listen. - Listen further - YouTube — "History of Western Music" - YouTube — Ken Burns, "Jazz" (history) - Read further - Donald Jay Grout — A History of Western Music - Alex Ross — The Rest is Noise (20th c.) - Ted Gioia — The History of Jazz - Richard Taruskin — Oxford History of Western Music - ❦ ❦ ❦ - Programme set in italic Didot · printed on cream paper · con amore - FINE ## Related Decks - [Architecture / a brief structural history](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-architecture) - [CINEMA — 125 Years of Moving Images](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-cinema) - [Design / 130 Years of Movements](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-design-movements) - [Impressionism — A Gallery Deck](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-impressionism)