For years folks have enjoyed the beauty of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music. In this instance, who can be listed because the artist? (Bernstein? Beethoven? The 100-plus players in the New York Philharmonic? Arroyo et al? The Juilliard Refrain or its conductor?) And as quickly as some individual plugs in one of those names within the “artist” field as the sole piece of metadata in that class, then the opposite pieces of information are all too usually primarily lost — and will not come up in searches.
Not all late 20th-century American music is atonal, minimalist, or based on digital sounds. The Oboe Concerto of John Harbison (b. 1938) is a more recent composition than any of the works reproduced above, but it’s thought-about to be relatively traditional by way of melody, harmony, rhythm, and using normal acoustic instruments.
The tradition of religious polyphonic vocal music continued in the Baroque era. Martin Luther, the creator of the Reformation, was additionally a musician; within the 16th century, he collected lots of of tunes to function devotional hymns for his new Protestant Church. In the 18th century, German composers created cantatas (“cantata”=sung), multi-motion works that elaborated on Luther’s hymns. The cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) included both chorales and aria-like solos. The chorale “Wachet auf” is among Bach’s most well-known. In contrast to the choral music of the Renaissance, “Wachet auf” included components written for devices.