7 articles
20th-century classical music
20th-century classical music is the Western art-music tradition written from 1901 to 2000, when composers broke down tonality and developed styles like atonality and minimalism.
Avant-garde music
Avant-garde music: music that deliberately defies or extends accepted musical conventions, spanning Schoenberg's twelve-tone works, Cage's chance operations, Stockhausen's electronic textures, IRCAM, and influences on jazz, rock, and pop.
Concert
Concert: a live music performance before an audience, from solo recitals to orchestral and popular events. Traces its 1672 London paid-audience origins, 18th-century rise, classical concert crisis, ageing audiences, and streaming.
Contemporary classical music
Contemporary classical music: recent art music in the Western classical tradition, a chronological catch-all spanning modernist, post-minimalist, spectral, and electroacoustic styles; Arvo Pärt was Bachtrack's most performed contemporary composer in 2025.
List of classical music composers by era
List of classical music composers by era: catalogs Western composers under Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and modern periods, with approximate date ranges, representative figures such as Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven, and the debate over era boundaries.
Program music
Program music (programme music) is instrumental music descriptive of non-musical ideas, contrasted with absolute music; its main genres are the program symphony and symphonic poem, flourishing in the nineteenth century.
Vienna New Year's Concert
The Vienna New Year's Concert (Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker): annual Strauss-family concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, 1 January 11:15, Musikverein Golden Hall; founded 31 December 1939 under Clemens Krauss in the Nazi era, televised since 1959, 50 million viewers in 150+ countries, conductor rotates yearly since 1987.