CLASSICAL
• Beginning around 1720 new developments once again began to
undermine the prevailing musical style.
• Younger musicians found baroque counterpoint too rigid and
intellectual; they preferred a more spontaneous musical expression.
In addition, the late baroque ideal of establishing a single emotional
quality and maintaining it throughout a composition seemed
constricting to these younger composers.
• The climax of 18th-century musical development came at the end of
the century in the music of a group of composers known as the
Viennese classical school.
• The most important of these composers were Joseph Haydn,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven