This guide is divided into three parts:
For more information about Stanley Library, Ferrum College, or the History Major/Minors Programs here at Ferrum, please click the logo below.
Julio Salazar
Julio Salazar was a Music Major with an emphasis in Performance and a History Minor. He was involved in all the ensembles at Ferrum College where he played tuba with the Ferrum College Band and Jazz Combo, sung with the Panther Singers, and played the mandolin with Orchestra Appalachia. This project focused on a collection of scores and musical text that were found on campus, Julio's focus was to scan the whole collection and determine specific pieces the could highlight specific genres of music for a potential music repository for students to utilize.
Music History is broken up into six different eras of music.
The first recorded era of Music History is the Medieval period (c. 1150- c.1400) which consisted mostly of religious music. Most notably Gregorian Chants one of the most popular forms of music during that time. Instruments at that time mostly consisted of stringed instruments like the lute, flutes, and drums.
Next is the Renaissance period (c.1400- c.1600) which in French means rebirth. The Renaissance is known for it's jump in the the arts, especially in painting with Medieval painting looking very flat and detailed to the Renaissance paintings looking very detailed and proportionate.
Then it was the Baroque period (c.1600- c.1750). The Baroque period musically featured lots of ornamentation, contrasting sections with polyphonic or contrapuntal texture and use of the harpsichord continuo. This time period had some notable composers like Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and George Frideric Handal.
After that came the Classical era (c. 1750- c.1820). the Classical period had a focus on simplicity, tonal harmony, single-line melodies, and it also enlarged the size of ensembles to incorporate more instruments. This period's most notable composers were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig Van Beethoven.
Beethoven brings us to our next era known as the Romantic era (c.1820- c.1900). though Beethoven was a Classical composer he is the one who expanded on and broke free of the strict rules of the Classical music. Beethoven is credited as one of the founding fathers of the Romantic era. Some notable composers, other than Beethoven, during the Romantic period are Franz Liszt, hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin, Richard Wagoner, Robert Schumann, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Johannes Brahms.
The current era is the Modern era (c.1900- Present). In the Modern era the confines of music were tested and music took on many forms such as Jazz, Blues, Ragtime, and Rhythm and Blues to name a few. Some musicians and composers really pushed the boundaries of music like Ornette Coleman who created a new form of Jazz called Free Jazz which had no rules musically. Some important composer and musicians of the Modern era are Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Prokofiev, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Cage, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.
Music is a form of art that can come in many different forms through singing, playing an instrument, or some might say just making a sound is making music.
The selections I picked are broken up into three different sections Books About Music, Religious Scores, and Secular Scores which I think gives a good layout of the text about music or musical compositions you may find. The Books About Music section has a collection of different method books and books covering specific topics of music. Method books are made to help improve the skill of musicians by covering different musical topics and through exercises. Music is like any other study in that people wright books about topics that they might be interested in or that they have a lot of knowledge in, whether it be a specific time period, composer, or a genre. The other two sections are Religious Scores and Secular Scores, which is a good way of differentiating music in broad way. The reason this is a good way to separate music is because the church was a big patron for the arts throughout most of music history. With that being said there was a lot of religious music made, but of course not of the all of it was religious. There was also secular music which can be about anything and everything as long as it's not religious.
Music is very important to a lot of people. Music can be a form of culture or identity for groups of people in a national, communal, or individual setting. In a more personal setting music can be a form of expression or relaxation for a person whether writing/composing, playing, or listening to music.
Works Cited