Composers

The oldest music in the catalog, roughly 500 to 1400. Most of it was written for the church, by monks, nuns, and cathedral musicians, and it is where Western composers first started writing their names on their work.

Roughly 1400 to 1600: choirs singing several independent melodic lines at once, in cathedrals, courts, and chapels across Europe. Much of it is unaccompanied voices, and it can be some of the calmest listening in this catalog.

Roughly 1600 to 1750, the era of Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel. Opera was invented, the orchestra took shape, and music gained the driving, ornamented energy that still makes this period instantly recognizable.

Roughly 1750 to 1800: clarity, balance, and conversation-like phrasing, centered on Vienna. Haydn and Mozart perfected the symphony and the string quartet here, and their forms carried music for the next century.

The first decades of the 1800s, when composers began treating music as personal confession. Beethoven cracked the Classical frame; Schubert, Chopin, and Mendelssohn filled the space with melody and feeling.

The mid-1800s: bigger orchestras, longer works, and music about something, whether a story, a landscape, or a nation finding its voice. Verdi and Wagner remade opera while Brahms carried the symphony forward.

The end of the 1800s and the turn of the century, when Romantic music reached its fullest size. Mahler and Strauss wrote for enormous orchestras, and harmony grew rich enough that something had to give.

Everything gave. Stravinsky's rhythms, Debussy's colors, Schoenberg's break with traditional harmony: the first half of the 1900s scattered music in a dozen directions, and the catalog here is correspondingly varied.

Composers writing after 1945, from strict experiment to film-adjacent lushness. This is where minimalism began, where electronics entered the concert hall, and where the century's arguments about what music should be played out.

Living composers and recent voices. The style wars have cooled; what remains is variety, from meditative stillness to orchestral spectacle, much of it written for the players and audiences of right now.