Big Ideas: A Classical Music Timeline

This page was created to complement the Big Ideas event, "What Happened to Classical Music?". See our main page for information about our free, public events.

The timeline shows the lives of the major composers in the classical tradition (blue bars) along with the broad periods into which the music is usually split (top section). The lower sections suggest some general context by indicating concurrent books and political events. Dates are correct to the year only, and in some cases are approximate. We've included a considerable period, wanting to avoid too many prejudgements about what counts as the "classical tradition". We've arbitrarily taken 2010 as the end-date for composers who are still living; we hope they all live much longer than that.

This page was created using a combination of open source javascript/CSS libraries and a bit of our own code. The basic timeline wdiget is part of the SIMILE family. The slider is a script.aculo.us component. Slider images from Aldenta.