Mythology
This body of musical works, presented as a lineage of "classics" said to represent the pinnacle of European artistic achievement, was invented in the nineteenth century.
Western Art Canon/Western Classical Canon
Many nineteenth-century songs for voice and piano were marketed toward this demographic--for whom skill as a singer signaled suitability for marriage.
Young women of the middle/upper classes
This musical and artistic style, exemplified in Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, uses pulsing rhythms, static repetition, unprepared and unresolved dissonance, and dry timbres, to represent a “crude” and “uncultured” society of the past, in opposition to “sophisticated” modern life and “trained” artistry.
Primitivism
Robert Schumann's Ich grolle nicht and Gustav Mahler's Der Tamboursg'sell both take their lyrics from this source.
German poetry
These TWO composers were the figureheads leading the "radical" and "traditional" factions of German music in the mid-late nineteenth century.
Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms
The "heroic" theme in this Beethoven symphony has been mythologized as representing either Napoleon Bonaparte, or Beethoven himself.
Symphony No. 3, "Eroica"
The narrator in Pierrot Lunaire delivers the vocal lines using this kind of notated, pitch-controlled speech.
Sprechstimme
Claude Debussy's technique of writing block chords moving in parallel motion (sometimes called planing) is a reference to this older French genre.
Church organum
Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F Minor and Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique both come with one of these.
Program
He was the leading "conservative" composer of symphonies in Russia in the nineteenth century.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
This series of four operas is based on the Nibelungenlied--the first heroic epic written in the German vernacular.
Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle
This nineteenth-century style of operatic singing encompasses seemingly effortless technique, an equally beautiful tone throughout a singer's entire range, agility, flexibility, control, long, lyrical lines, and florid embellishment.
Bel canto
This twentieth-century composition for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano features repeating rhythmic and melodic patterns, in a technique taken from the medieval isorhythmic motet.
Olivier Messiaen, Quatour pour la fin du temps, I. Crystal Liturgy
The first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Pathétique, and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture both follow this Classical form.
Sonata form
He sought to develop an entirely novel approach to melodic and harmonic writing that was free from the conventions of consonance and dissonance--while still placing himself in the lineage of "great" German composers.
Arnold Schoenberg
This tone poem, depicting the sexual fantasies of a creature from Greek myth, is based on a Symbolist poem by Stéphane Mallarmé
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy
Music critic Charles Shaar Murray wrote that this blues song features unusual vocal/guitar timbres and microtonality that evoke "moan[ing] like wind through dead trees."
"Hellhound On My Trail" by Robert Johnson
Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring incorporates the tune to this older Shaker song
"Simple Gifts" (or, "Tis the gift to be simple"...)
Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz and Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring both feature characters of this demographic.
Peasants
In part due to his robust musical education at an early age, this Romantic composer tends to sound more traditionally Classical than his contemporaries.
Felix Mendelssohn
This famous chord is thought to symbolize Wagner's pivotal role in pushing nineteenth-century music in a radical new harmonic direction.
The Tristan chord
This German technique of text setting is exemplified when Samiel, the evil sorcerer in Weber's Der Freischütz, speaks rather than sings his lines over orchestral accompaniment.
Melodrama
The finale of Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 4 in E minor is based on this type of baroque harmonic progression.
Chaconne
The titular characters of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes and Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire are both this kind of person.
Outsiders to society
This twentieth-century composer, known for writing "concentrated" music and utilizing Klangfarbenmlodie, believed that twelve-tone music is the natural result of musical evolution.
Anton Webern