Maurice André

Early avant garde refers to the first wave of radically experimental art music in the early 20th century, when composers deliberately broke with Romantic conventions of harmony, form, and timbre. It centers on innovations such as atonality and the emancipation of dissonance, fragmented and aphoristic forms, novel rhythmic organization, and an expanded conception of musical sound. Key figures explored noise, new instruments, and unconventional performance techniques, treating timbre and space as structural parameters. Movements like Viennese atonality (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) and Italian Futurism (Russolo) coincided with French and American experiments (Satie, Varèse, Ives), together laying the foundation for modern and postwar experimental music.

The galante era (or galant style) describes a fashion in early‑ to mid‑18th‑century music that prized elegance, clarity, and immediately appealing melody. It arose as a reaction against the learned counterpoint and dense textures of late Baroque music, favoring tuneful, balanced phrases over intricate polyphony. Typical features include homophonic textures with a clear melody supported by simple chordal accompaniment (often Alberti‑bass figures), short antecedent–consequent phrases, regular cadences, diatonic harmony, and light, graceful ornamentation. The galant taste spread quickly through opera, instrumental chamber music, and the nascent symphony, forming a crucial bridge between the late Baroque and the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart.

Classical music is the notated art-music tradition of Europe and its global descendants, characterized by durable forms, carefully codified harmony and counterpoint, and a literate score-based practice. The term “classical” can refer broadly to the entire Western art-music lineage from the Medieval era to today, not just the Classical period (c. 1750s–1820s). It privileges long-form structures (such as symphonies, sonatas, concertos, masses, and operas), functional or modal harmony, thematic development, and timbral nuance across ensembles ranging from solo instruments to full orchestras and choirs. Across centuries, the style evolved from chant and modal polyphony to tonal harmony, and later to post-tonal idioms, while maintaining a shared emphasis on written notation, performance practice, and craft.