A Period of Greatness.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European music underwent a series of dramatic changes. The beginnings of these transformations can be traced to a climate of experimentation that appeared in the later Renaissance, a time in which humanist intellectuals and musicians desired to revive the emotional power and force that they sensed had existed in the music of Antiquity. The experiments in new musical styles these figures helped to inspire produced the phenomenon of modern "classical" music—a repertory of serious works that are studied by well-trained musicians and which continue to be played before audiences. Opera and the tradition of public concert-going both trace their origins to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The modern orchestra—a collection of diverse, but complementary families of instruments—underwent a long period of maturation in these years as well. The development of the...