Music history for kids: a timeline from chant to today

The history of classical music runs for about 1,000 years, from monks singing chant in stone churches to orchestras playing film scores. Teachers divide it into six eras: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. This page gives the eras at a glance, a timeline of 30 dates, and ways to use it for a wall chart or a school project.

The six eras

Era	Years	Sounds like	Composers to know
Medieval	About 500 to 1400	Voices singing one line, and later two or three	Hildegard of Bingen
Renaissance	1400 to 1600	Choirs with many woven parts	Palestrina
Baroque	1600 to 1750	Busy and bright, with a steady beat	Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi
Classical	1750 to 1820	Clear, balanced, and tuneful	Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
Romantic	1820 to 1900	Big feelings, long tunes, and large orchestras	Chopin, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky
Modern	1900 to today	New sounds, new rhythms, and many styles	Debussy, Stravinsky, and Copland

The dates are rough, and the eras overlap. Beethoven began in one era and opened the door to the next.

A timeline of 30 dates

Medieval and Renaissance

Year	What happened
About 1025	An Italian monk, Guido of Arezzo, works out a way to write notes on lines. It grows into the staff we use today.
About 1150	Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess, writes down her songs. She is among the first composers we know by name.
1501	The first book of printed music with many parts comes off a press in Venice.
About 1560	Palestrina writes church music in Rome for choirs with no instruments.

Baroque

Year	What happened
About 1600	The first operas are staged in Italy.
About 1700	Bartolomeo Cristofori builds the first piano in Florence.
1721	Bach sends his six Brandenburg Concertos to a German prince.
1725	Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons is published.
1742	Handel’s Messiah is first performed, in Dublin.
1750	Bach dies. Historians use this date to mark the end of the Baroque era.

Classical

Year	What happened
1761	Haydn goes to work for the Esterházy princes. He stays for close to 30 years.
1762	Mozart, aged six, plays for the empress in Vienna.
1787	Mozart writes Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
1791	Mozart writes The Magic Flute, and dies at 35.
1808	Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is first performed.

Romantic

Year	What happened
1815	The metronome is patented.
1824	Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the “Ode to Joy,” is first performed.
1830	Berlioz writes the Symphonie fantastique, a symphony that tells a story.
1846	Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone.
1876	Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle is first performed in full.
1877	Thomas Edison invents the phonograph. Sound can be recorded and played back for the first time.
1892	Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is first danced.

Modern

Year	What happened
1894	Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun points to a new, hazy sound.
1913	Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring causes an uproar at its first performance in Paris.
1924	Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue brings jazz into the concert hall.
1933	The Chicago Symphony plays Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1. She is the first Black woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra.
1936	Prokofiev writes Peter and the Wolf.
1940	Walt Disney’s Fantasia sets classical music to animation.
1977	John Williams writes the music for Star Wars. Two spacecraft named Voyager leave Earth carrying records of music by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Today	Composers around the world write for concerts, films, and games.

Three big changes to notice

How music was written down. Before about 1000, music was passed on by ear. Notation let a piece travel from place to place and last for centuries.

Who paid for it. At first, the church paid. Then kings and princes hired composers as servants. From Beethoven’s time on, composers sold tickets and printed music to the public.

How big it got. A Baroque orchestra had about 20 players. Haydn’s had about 30 to 40. By 1900, some pieces called for more than 100.

Instruments have a history too

• The violin took its modern shape in Italy in the 1500s.
• The piano was invented around 1700 and replaced the harpsichord by about 1800.
• The clarinet joined the orchestra in Mozart’s lifetime.
• The tuba and the saxophone were invented in the 1800s.
• Electronic instruments arrived in the 1900s.

Read more about each era

• Baroque music for kids
• Classical era music for kids
• Romantic era music for kids
• Modern classical music for kids
• Living composers kids can hear today

Things to do together

Wall timeline. Tape sheets of paper in a long row, one for each century from 1000 to 2000. Add the dates from this page. Add a picture for each one.

One piece from each era. Listen to a chant by Hildegard, a movement of a Bach concerto, a Mozart serenade, a Tchaikovsky waltz, and a piece by John Williams. Ask what changed.

Your family on the line. Add the birth years of grandparents and great-grandparents. Which pieces were new when they were children?

History side by side. Add other dates your child knows, such as a first flight, a moon landing, or a date from your own country’s history. See what music was new at the time.

Guess the era. Play a piece without the title. Is it Baroque, Classical, Romantic, or Modern? Check the answer on the composer timeline.

Print and play

Print the music eras chart for the wall. Use the composer timeline to see whose lives overlapped. For a plan for the year, read composer study for homeschool and composer of the month ideas.

For the composers, see classical composers for kids.