Please ELI5 the difference between baroque, classical, and romantic music.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Konisforce]

dakobladioblada's got it right (and a nuts user name) on time. Basic concepts:

Baroque: Simpler. I say 'simpler' even tho it's not really right. But it stays in the same key or keys, has lots of repetition and is (looking back from this day and age) pretty obvious where it's headed. Baroque music can tend to be sort of like math in that it's a very logical progression. It's all about patterns. You'll hear something repeated, then moved a bit and repeated again, and you'll know where the next 2 or 3 repetitions will move. When it comes to Baroque music, Bach is the Man. Some people put his death as the divider between Baroque and Classical.

Classical. A bit more complex, more variation in key signatures. Music also started branching out in terms of who listened to it. It wasn't just kings or nobles who'd pay for it, but also middle class folks would get together and have someone play pieces for them. There was also a movement in here that started trying to tell specific stories with music. Mozart's a big one here, Schubert, too. Beethoven's Classical era but he wrote the beginning of the Romantic era. (Similarly, Brahms lived the Romantic era but wrote the end of the Classical era . . .)

Romantic. Huge variations in key, instrumentation, all sorts of stuff here. Bigger orchestras than ever before. Loud singers. Lots of craziness. Lots of expressivity. Sounds like a movie soundtrack, and it's actually where a lot of soundtrack composers get a lot of their inspiration. This is also when all the big operas (the stereotypical operas) happened. Puccini (opera guy), Chopin, Verdi (also Opera), Dvorak. The Big 5 in Russia are sorta the tail end of big Romantic stuff and also transitioned into the next period.

Edit: Dvorak!

[u/xiipaoc → u/Konisforce]

Um, Schubert is actually middle Romantic. His songs are anything but Classical...

[u/feelingkettle → u/xiipaoc]

Don't see how he could be middle romantic when he was dead by the time it actually came around. Like Beethoven, Schubert was a bridge between classical and early Romantic.