Music and dance in the Western tradition: periods, styles, genres and works
This domain asks you to place a work, composer or dance in its period and justify the placement with audible style features. Balearic PAU questions rarely ask for bare dates; they give a short description or a known title and expect period, genre and reasoning.
Period fingerprints
- Medieval (c. 900–1450): monophonic plainchant; Notre-Dame organum (Léonin, Pérotin); Ars nova notation (Vitry's treatise, c. 1320); Machaut, Messe de Nostre Dame. Dance: carole, estampie.
- Renaissance (c. 1450–1600): imitative modal polyphony (Josquin, Palestrina), madrigal (Gesualdo, Monteverdi), instrumental ricercar and canzona. Dance: basse danse, pavane–galliard pairs, Arbeau's Orchésographie (1589).
- Baroque (c. 1600–1750): basso continuo and figured bass, ritornello, terraced dynamics, dance suite (allemande–courante–sarabande–gigue), French overture, fugue, concerto grosso, opera from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607).
- Classical (c. 1750–1820): sonata form, periodic phrasing, homophony, string quartet, symphony (Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven).
- Romantic (c. 1820–1900): expanded harmony and orchestration, Lied, character piece, programme music; ballet's golden age (Giselle 1841, Swan Lake 1877, Sleeping Beauty 1890).
- 20th–21st centuries: impressionism (Debussy), Second Viennese School expressionism and serialism (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), neoclassicism and the Ballets Russes (The Rite of Spring, 1913), minimalism (Reich, Glass), later pluralism.
Worked example
Prompt: a piece opens with a repeated four-bar bass pattern, a harpsichord continuo and a solo violin, and dynamics change in blocks. Ground bass plus continuo rules out Renaissance and Classical (the Classical style dissolves continuo into written accompaniment); terraced dynamics are Baroque. Answer: Baroque, likely a late-17th-century ground-bass sonata or chaconne.
Traps that cost marks
- Using "classical" for the whole tradition instead of the 1750–1820 period.
- Dating by a composer's birth rather than by the style of the work.
- Calling Debussy or Ravel "Romantic" because their harmony is lush.
- Forgetting that dance genres (sarabande, galliard, bolero) are also music-history content.
- Confusing the Baroque dance suite with later ballet: the suite is instrumental dance-derived music, not staged dance.