bigideas

To complement our upcoming event on classical music, we’ve created a timeline of classical music from the early Renaissance to the present.

Sometimes a simple tool like this can be very helpful in visualising an historical progression. It’s not perfect, of course; for instance, it indicates only when the most famous composers lived, not when they were active and wrote their most important works. It also doesn’t take account of the relative importance of the various figures, although in principle it could. But packing in too much information, in too many dimensions, might well be uninformative.

So here it is, a rough-and-ready representation of who-lived-when among the acknowledged master-composers. Many are missing, including some important ones, and of course it’s hard to be sure who of the more recent figures will be considered important in the future, but we hope you find it a useful guide.