Medieval: Anything written in the Middle Ages, until around 1450. This is the one with all the monks chanting. Melodies are simple and writing is mainly sacred music for voice. Modern tonality had yet to be invented so the scales used in the melodies sound really "ancient." Since this era is so long and featured many transitional periods, it's hard to come up with a list of composers who typified the period.
Renaissance: By the 15th century, music theory was advancing and the forms were getting more complex. Polyphony (more than one melody being played at the same time) comes to prominence and the laws of harmony are relaxed a bit to accomodate the needs of the new music. Composers in this period include William Byrd, Giovanni Palestrina, Jacob Obrecht and many others.
Baroque: Dating from the 17th to midway through the 18th centuries, this is the stuff with the harpsichords. The Baroque sense of melody was quite different from our own: repetition was minimal and Baroque composers wrote long, ornate, endlessly flowing melodies. This was also the period in which opera was invented (in Italy, of course). Important composers of this era include Purcell, Buxtehude, Telemann, Handel, J.S. Bach, Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Vivaldi.
Classical: Though classical is a catch-all term for all "concert" music, the Classical era in European music is considered to last from the mid-18th to the early 19th centuries (1740-1820 is often used for the timespan). This is the era in which our modern sense of melody and form were invented, chiefly by C.P.E. Bach (J.S. Bach's #1 son) and Haydn, who are considered the founders of the Classical movement. Basically this involved increasing the dramatic potential of the music through the use of various rhetorical devices, such as repetition and contrast, to create tension and resolution (thus giving the music a dramatic arc). In the Classical style, these techniques became the modus operandi by which composers generated and sustained a listener's interest. Composers of note include Haydn, C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Romantic: From mid-19th century into the early 20th century, composers generally followed Beethoven's lead in taking the Classical forms and expanding, loosening and personalizing them as they saw fit. Even as the methods of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven became institutionalized in music schools, composers of this era usually felt compelled to come up with more and more idiomatic and personal means of expressing greater depths of emotion. The result was a looser, more chromatic sense of harmony and a general move toward larger orchestral forces and forms.
A sense of nationalism as well as increased reliance on extra-musical literary and pictorial references also characterize the Romantic period. This is the era in which composers wrote vast symphonic poems, gigantic operas and virtuosic sonatas and concerti. Since this period is so diversified with so many composers from different nations with vastly different styles, it is somewhat difficult to characterize the "Romantic sound." Wagner and Brahms were two equally Romantic composers, but they could hardly be more different from each other, and in fact they were de facto leaders of rival schools of musical thought. The list of great composers from this era is imposingly large: Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt, Dvorak and Berlioz, just to name a few.
20th Century (pre-World War II): All bets are off as the available musical resources increase at a rapidly escalating rate. Composers take advantage of this bounty to come up with some of the most astonishly complex and diverse music yet written, in styles ranging from old-fashioned (neo-Romantic and neo-Baroque) to new and experimental (atonal, polytonal, serial, polyrhythmic). Important composers are too numerous to count but include Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Verdi, Mahler, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Varese, Ives, Holst and many, many more.
20th Century (post-WWII): The rise to prominence of several forms of popular music outside of the classical tradition (notably jazz and rock n roll among many others) creates a problem for composers who choose to continue writing "traditional" music. Some choose to ignore the outside world and continue the developments of those before them: Pierre Boulez, among others, develops serial music and others follow suit. Other composers take advantage of new advances in technology in various ways, composing pieces for magnetic tape and using samples of "found sounds" and manipulating them in various ways (the technique is called musique concrete and is first used by Edgard Varese and Pierre Henry, later taken up by Karlheinz Stockhausen and many others). Still others follow more idiosyncratic paths: John Cage experiments with "prepared" piano as well as compositions mediated through the operation of chance, making explicit the heretofore unacknowledged random ineffability of musical performance; Krystof Penderecki and others write music utilizing micro-intervals to create new levels of dissonance; Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass explore various aspects of minimalism in music; Frank Zappa uses the example of Varese's "blocks of sound" combined with his own love of rhythm & blues to create a savvy, satirical, heavily-ironicized music combining elements of rock, jazz, pop and 20th century classical. Other composers before and since WWII include: Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Gyorgi Ligeti, Arvo Part, and myriad others.
For much more detail on all of these eras, Wikipedia is your friend.
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