Musical Celebrations Around the World – Classical Music Month

Every September, Classical Music Month invites musicians, educators, students, and listeners to explore centuries of composition, performance, and musical change.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued Proclamation 6716, designating September 1994 as Classical Music Month. The proclamation recognized classical music as a living tradition that connects generations of composers, performers, audiences, teachers, and students.

The observance offers an opportunity to revisit familiar masterworks, introduce students to composers they have not yet encountered, attend live performances, study how musical styles developed, and consider how performers continue to reinterpret music written across many different eras.

Classical Music and the Classical Period

The phrase classical music can cause some confusion because it has more than one meaning.

The Classical period generally refers to music composed from roughly the middle of the 18th century through the early decades of the 19th century. Haydn and Mozart are closely associated with this period, while Beethoven’s career helped connect Classical traditions with the emerging Romantic style.

In everyday conversation, however, classical music is often used as a broader term for Western art music extending from early sacred and court traditions through contemporary concert music.

This broader tradition includes chant, Renaissance polyphony, Baroque concertos, Classical symphonies, Romantic art songs, operas, chamber music, experimental works, film-influenced concert music, electronic composition, and music being written by living composers today.

It is also important to remember that Western classical music is not the world’s only art-music tradition. Cultures throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Oceania, and other regions have developed their own sophisticated systems of composition, notation, improvisation, performance, theory, and musical transmission.

Musical Periods Are Helpful but Flexible

Dividing music history into periods helps students recognize important changes in style, instrumentation, harmony, form, performance practice, and the social role of musicians. Those divisions should be treated as guides rather than exact boundaries.

Musical styles did not change everywhere on the same date. Composers often continued using established techniques while experimenting with ideas associated with a newer style. Political events, religious institutions, technology, travel, patronage, publishing, instrument construction, and public concert life all influenced musical development differently from one place to another.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach provides a useful example. As a son of Johann Sebastian Bach, he inherited traditions associated with the Baroque period, including counterpoint and elaborate ornamentation. His own music also embraced sudden changes in mood, expressive contrasts, clearer textures, and other characteristics that helped shape the emerging Classical style.

Rather than asking exactly where one period ended and another began, students can examine which musical ideas were retained, transformed, challenged, or replaced.

A Brief Guide to Western Classical Music

Medieval Music

Medieval European music developed within churches, courts, towns, and traveling performance traditions. Surviving sources include sacred chant, early polyphony, songs of troubadours and trouvères, dance music, and compositions associated with figures such as Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume de Machaut.

This period provides an opportunity to explore modes, monophonic and polyphonic textures, the growth of musical notation, sacred texts, oral transmission, and the relationship between music and medieval institutions.

Renaissance Music

Renaissance composers developed increasingly intricate vocal polyphony while printing technology allowed music to circulate more widely. Sacred Masses and motets existed alongside madrigals, chansons, dances, instrumental music, and works created for courts and civic occasions.

Composers including Josquin des Prez, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and William Byrd demonstrate the variety found within Renaissance music.

Baroque Music

The Baroque period brought major developments in opera, instrumental music, tonal harmony, ornamentation, and dramatic musical expression. The concerto, suite, sonata, oratorio, and fugue became important forms.

Claudio Monteverdi, Barbara Strozzi, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre represent only part of the period’s broad musical activity.

The Classical Period

Music of the Classical period is often associated with clarity, balance, formal structure, contrast, and the development of the symphony, string quartet, concerto, and sonata.

Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven are among its most frequently performed composers. Their music also reflects a changing professional world in which public concerts, publishing, private patronage, and independent artistic careers became increasingly important.

Students can learn more about Mozart’s life, music, and travels in our article celebrating Mozart’s birthday. Our feature Beethoven at 200 explores his continuing influence and the 200th anniversary of his death in 2027.

Romantic Music

During the 19th century, composers expanded the expressive, harmonic, dramatic, and technical possibilities of concert music. Orchestras grew, pianos changed, public concert culture expanded, and composers increasingly drew upon literature, nature, national identity, personal experience, folklore, and political events.

Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Gustav Mahler demonstrate the period’s considerable variety.

Music of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Composers of the 20th century responded to rapid social, political, and technological change with an extraordinary range of musical approaches.

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel explored new approaches to harmony, texture, orchestration, and musical color. Igor Stravinsky transformed rhythm and orchestral writing. Arnold Schoenberg and other composers developed alternatives to traditional tonality. Florence Price, William Grant Still, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, Béla Bartók, and many others created distinctive musical voices shaped by different cultural and historical experiences.

Classical music did not end with the 20th century. Living composers continue writing for orchestras, bands, choirs, chamber groups, soloists, opera companies, electronic media, film, games, dance, theater, installations, and combinations that resist simple classification.

Expanding the Classical Music Story

Traditional music-history surveys have often focused heavily on a relatively small group of European men. Those composers created important and enduring music, but they do not represent the entire classical tradition.

Women, Black composers, Indigenous composers, composers of Asian and Latin American heritage, LGBTQ+ composers, disabled composers, and musicians working outside major European cultural centers have all contributed to concert music.

The challenge is not simply to add one unfamiliar name to a familiar list. Educators can examine why some music entered the standard repertoire while other works were excluded, unpublished, lost, or overlooked.

The Institute for Composer Diversity maintains searchable databases for choral, orchestral, wind-band, chamber, and art-song repertoire. These tools can help directors discover works by composers from historically excluded groups and identify music suited to their ensemble’s instrumentation and level.

Ways to Celebrate Classical Music Month

• Attend a live performance. Visit a local orchestra, choir, wind ensemble, chamber series, opera company, university program, or student concert.
• Compare two interpretations. Listen to different performers approach the same work and discuss tempo, articulation, phrasing, balance, tone, dynamics, and character.
• Explore one musical period each week. Use the month to move from early music through Baroque and Classical repertoire to Romantic, modern, and contemporary works.
• Feature a composer of the week. Introduce students to the composer’s historical setting, musical language, career, collaborators, and one representative work.
• Follow one form through history. Compare how composers from different periods approached the symphony, Mass, concerto, opera, sonata, motet, string quartet, art song, or dance.
• Study the concert program as a historical document. Use the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives to explore historic programs, scores, photographs, and other documents.
• Build a more representative listening list. Use repertoire databases to find composers and works that broaden the stories usually included in music-history lessons.
• Connect music with other subjects. Examine how a composition relates to literature, architecture, visual art, religion, politics, technology, migration, or scientific discovery.
• Program a student-led concert. Ask students to research works, select repertoire, write program notes, introduce the pieces, and explain the connections among them.
• Meet a living composer. Arrange a workshop, video conversation, rehearsal visit, or commission that allows students to experience classical music as a continuing creative practice.

A Four-Week Classical Music Listening Plan

A familiar work can provide an accessible starting point. This performance of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons demonstrates the energy, contrast, and descriptive possibilities of Baroque instrumental music.

Week One: Early Music and the Renaissance

• Hildegard von Bingen: a selection from Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum
• Guillaume de Machaut: a movement from Messe de Nostre Dame
• Josquin des Prez: Ave Maria…virgo serena
• William Byrd: Ave verum corpus

Week Two: Baroque and Classical

• Barbara Strozzi: Lagrime mie
• Antonio Vivaldi: a concerto from The Four Seasons
• Johann Sebastian Bach: a movement from a Brandenburg Concerto or cello suite
• Joseph Haydn: a movement from a London symphony or string quartet
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: a movement from a symphony, concerto, opera, or the Requiem

Week Three: Beethoven and the Romantic Era

• Ludwig van Beethoven: a movement from Symphony No. 5, No. 6, or No. 9
• Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor or a selected art song
• Johannes Brahms: a movement from Ein deutsches Requiem or a symphony
• Antonín Dvořák: a movement from Symphony No. 9 or a Slavonic Dance
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: a movement from a symphony, ballet, or concerto

Week Four: Modern and Contemporary Voices

• Claude Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
• Igor Stravinsky: a selection from The Firebird or The Rite of Spring
• Florence Price: a movement from Symphony No. 1 or No. 3
• William Grant Still: a movement from the Afro-American Symphony
• A work by a living composer selected by the students or ensemble

Questions to Guide Classroom Listening

Students do not need extensive music-history knowledge to listen actively. A few focused questions can help them move beyond deciding whether they simply like or dislike a piece.

• Which instruments or voices are most prominent?
• How does the texture change during the work?
• Where do you hear repetition, contrast, or development?
• How do dynamics, articulation, tempo, and register affect the character?
• What role does silence play?
• What might have surprised the work’s first audience?
• How might the performance change in a cathedral, concert hall, outdoor setting, or recording studio?
• What choices appear to belong to the composer, and which may belong to the performers?

Experiencing Classical Music Live

Recordings give listeners extraordinary access to repertoire, but live performance reveals dimensions that are difficult to reproduce elsewhere.

In a concert hall, listeners experience the physical movement of sound, the communication among performers, the scale of the ensemble, the architecture of the room, and the shared attention of the audience. Musicians also respond to the acoustics, atmosphere, and energy of each venue.

Local orchestras, choirs, bands, universities, conservatories, chamber groups, and school ensembles often provide affordable or free opportunities to hear classical music. Open rehearsals, pre-concert talks, student performances, and community concerts can make the experience especially accessible to first-time listeners.

Encore’s Concert Showcase offers another way to see how real choirs, orchestras, and bands bring repertoire to life in concert halls, churches, festival settings, and community venues around the world.

Classical Music Through Performance Travel

Travel allows musicians to experience classical music in the places where it was written, premiered, performed, preserved, and reimagined.

An orchestra might perform in a European concert hall, study the work of a composer connected to the destination, and participate in a workshop with local musicians. A choir may sing sacred repertoire in a cathedral whose architecture shaped centuries of choral sound. A band can explore regional traditions, collaborate with another ensemble, and introduce international audiences to its own repertoire.

Encore creates customized orchestra trips, choir trips, and band trips built around each ensemble’s musical goals, repertoire, instrumentation, and performance level.

Our international concert tours combine performances with workshops, exchanges, cultural experiences, historic venues, and the logistical support required to bring musicians and instruments to new audiences.

As explored in Why the Concert Experience Is at the Heart of Every Encore Performance Tour, the concert is not simply another activity on the itinerary. It gives the journey its artistic purpose and allows musicians to form a meaningful connection with the place and people they are visiting.

A Tradition That Continues to Evolve

Classical Music Month is not only about preserving music from the past. It is also about recognizing that each performance renews the repertoire.

Conductors shape interpretations. Performers make decisions about phrasing, articulation, balance, tempo, tone, and expression. Scholars uncover overlooked works. Educators introduce music to new generations. Living composers respond to the world around them and expand what concert music can become.

September offers a reason to listen more closely, attend a performance, explore a new composer, revisit a familiar score, or share a meaningful work with an ensemble. The history may extend across centuries, but classical music remains alive whenever musicians gather to perform it.

---

This article is part of our Musical Celebrations Around the World series, created to help music educators and ensemble leaders explore the people, traditions, and observances featured in the Encore Tours Musical Celebrations Calendar.

Share Your Music With the World

Encore Tours creates customized performance tours for orchestras, choirs, bands, chamber ensembles, and other musical groups. Speak with one of our tour consultants to begin exploring the destinations, venues, and musical experiences that fit your ensemble.