The Classical time line of Western Music

The contrapuntal practices of the German Baroque began to give way in the first half of the eighteenth century to a highly ornamented style of melodic instrumental music, especially in France. This style has come to be called Rococo, after the same movement in the visual arts. The paintings of Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau are prime examples of the visual style of the time. This refined but ornamented style could already be heard in the music of French composers Couperin and Rameau, and pervades the music of Italian composer Giovanni Pergolas. It is evident as well in the music of the two sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach J. C. Bach eventually made his home in London and became known as the "London" Bach in order to distinguish him from his older brother. Johann Christian's many keyboard concertos had a profound influence on the eight year old Mozart when the two met in London in 1764. Bach's expressive keyboard sonatas came to influence the piano sonatas of later composers Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven. Each of these masters made the Austrian city of Vienna their home, thus equating the Classical style with the Viennese style.

With the increasing emphasis of the age on reason and enlightenment, the writings of thinkers like Voltaire, Diderot, and Jefferson served to fuel a sense of mankind's being in charge of its own destiny -- that through science and democracy, people could choose their own fate. Such prevailing philosophy and thought likely triggered such events as the French and American Revolutions. The results of these events brought to the artistic world an expanded freedom of thought, in which artists' creative impulses began to find a freer rein of imagination and felt less constrained to abide by the established "rules" of the preceding ages. Earliest among these thinkers in the realm of music was the "great reformer" of opera, Christophe.