19 Facts About Classical music

Classical music generally refers to the formal musical tradition of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions.

The subsequent Romantic Classical music focused instead on programmatic Classical music, for which the art song, symphonic poem and various piano genres were important vessels.

The performance of such Classical music was specialized by the Academy of Ancient Music and later at the Concerts of Antient Music series, where the work of select 16th and 17th composers was featured, especially George Frideric Handel.

The general attitude towards Classical music was adopted from the Ancient Greek and Roman Classical music theorists and commentators.

Just as in Greco-Roman society, Classical music was considered central to education; along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, Classical music was included in the quadrivium, the four subjects of the upper division of a standard liberal arts education in the Middle Ages.

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Medieval Classical music includes Western European Classical music from after the fall of the Western Roman Empire by 476 to about 1400.

Polyphonic Classical music developed from monophonic chant throughout the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, including the more complex voicings of motets.

The 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 Classical music began to adopt secular forms for their own designs.

Classical music composed Euridice, the first opera to have survived to the present day.

Baroque Classical music is characterized by the use of complex tonal counterpoint and the use of a basso continuo, a continuous bass line.

Classical music era established many of the norms of composition, presentation, and style, and was when the piano became the predominant keyboard instrument.

Chamber Classical music grew to include ensembles with as many as 8 to 10 performers for serenades.

The Classical music became more chromatic, dissonant, and tonally colorful, with tensions about key signatures increasing.

Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss are commonly regarded as transitional composers whose Classical music combines both late romantic and early modernist elements.

Postmodern Classical music is a period of Classical music that began as early as 1930 according to some authorities.

The written quality of the Classical music has enabled a high level of complexity within them: fugues, for instance, achieve a remarkable marriage of boldly distinctive melodic lines weaving in counterpoint yet creating a coherent harmonic logic.

Classical music's argues that in the 1800s, women composers typically wrote art songs for performance in small recitals rather than symphonies intended for performance with an orchestra in a large hall, with the latter works being seen as the most important genre for composers; since women composers did not write many symphonies, they were deemed not to be notable as composers.

Classical music has often incorporated elements or material from popular music of the composer's time.

Similarly, movies and television often revert to standard, cliched excerpts of classical music to convey refinement or opulence: some of the most-often heard pieces in this category include Bach´s Cello Suite No 1, Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, and Rossini's "William Tell Overture".