History of Music in Timeline

Music is a cultural universal involving the arrangement of sound to create form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or other expressive content. While definitions vary, it's generally agreed that music involves specific elements, though consensus on those elements is lacking. It is a versatile medium for human creativity, encompassing composition, improvisation, and performance. Music can be performed using instruments, including the human voice, or produced mechanically or electronically.

1900: Harmony in Classical Music

Around 1900, classical music, pop, rock, and traditional music generally used the system of major-minor tonality, where the key of a piece determines the "home note" or tonic to which the piece resolves. Complex classical music from the Romantic era (written from about 1820–1900) often contained multiple keys.

1900: End of Romantic Music Era

Around 1900, the Romantic music era concluded, sharing characteristics with Romantic styles in literature and painting. This era emphasized emotion, individualism, and glorified the past and nature, expanding beyond classical forms into more expressive compositions.

1929: AFM Protests Canned Music

In 1929, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) protested the replacement of live musicians with mechanical playing devices such as "Canned Music", placing newspaper advertisements to voice their opposition. One ad featured an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction Whatever".

1941: Herzog's Question on Animal Music

In 1941, George Herzog questioned whether non-human animals have music, sparking interest in the study of animal sounds from a musical perspective.

1972: Ruwet's Segmentation Analysis

In 1972, Nicolas Ruwet developed paradigmatic segmentation analysis as described in Language, musique, poésie which was later used in the study of ornitho-musicology to analyze bird songs.

1983: Mache's Study of Bird Songs

In 1983, François-Bernard Mâche's work Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion used paradigmatic segmentation analysis to demonstrate that bird songs are organized based on a repetition-transformation principle.

1990: Nattiez on Defining Music

In 1990, Jean-Jacques Nattiez argued that the definition of music is uniquely human, determined by the human mind perceiving and organizing sound, regardless of its origin.

November 2006: Music Therapy for Schizophrenia

In November 2006, Michael J. Crawford and his colleagues discovered that music therapy aided schizophrenic patients, highlighting music's potential in mental health treatment.

2010: Musicology Scholarship

Around 2010, musicology scholarship often divided into music theory, music history, and ethnomusicology, with research frequently enhanced by cross-disciplinary work, such as in psychoacoustics.

2012: Women in Vienna Philharmonic

In 2012, women constituted only 6% of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra's top-ranked members, highlighting the underrepresentation of women in major orchestras.

2013: UK Curriculum Changes

In 2013, the UK curriculum added "appropriate musical notations" to its list of elements, renaming the list from "elements of music" to "inter-related dimensions of music." These dimensions include pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure, and appropriate musical notations.

2015: Gender Disparity in Music

In 2015, an article highlighted that 84% of concerto soloists with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra were men, indicating a gender disparity in classical music solo performances.