Placing a piece by ear: the ten-question routine

Eight bars of something you have never heard. You are not going to name the composer, and you do not need to. What you need is a routine that narrows four centuries to fifty years, reliably, in the order that the evidence is actually strongest. This topic is that routine. It assumes the period material in the rest of the track and concentrates on the procedure and the traps.

The governing principle: hard evidence first, idiom last. Instruments have birthdays and performance conventions have histories. Style is a matter of taste, and taste can be revived, imitated and outlived.

1. Is there a continuo?

Listen underneath everything. If a harpsichord, lute, theorbo or chamber organ is filling in chords while a cello or bassoon reinforces the bass line, you are hearing basso continuo, and you are in roughly 1600 to 1760. No other single observation narrows the field so far so fast.

The inference works in one direction only. Continuo present means Baroque; continuo absent means nothing in particular, since the practice fades away rather than being abolished. Anything after about 1780 that has one is quoting.

2. What instruments are present?

Instruments have dates of introduction, which makes them the hardest evidence available. Learn these floors:

Also count. A Bach orchestra is a dozen or two players; a Haydn orchestra thirty-odd with double wind and two horns; a Beethoven orchestra the same plus occasional trombones; an 1890s orchestra a hundred with quadruple wind, eight horns and two harps. Note that this is a floor, never a ceiling: Prokofiev wrote for a Haydn orchestra in 1917 on purpose.

3. How does the volume behave?

Terraced dynamics — sudden blocks of loud and soft with nothing in between, often as an echo — belong to the Baroque and to the harpsichord, which physically cannot grade its volume. A gradual crescendo used as a structural event arrives with the Mannheim orchestra in the mid-eighteenth century and becomes a Classical commonplace. Enormous, gestural swells and sudden hushes deployed for emotional effect are Romantic. A continuous crescendo therefore rules out the Baroque immediately.

4. How long are the phrases?

Count in bars. Baroque melody spins out: one motive generating a continuous line by sequence, with few breathing points. Classical melody is periodic: a four-bar statement answered by a four-bar response, with clear cadences dividing the music into sentences. Romantic melody keeps the units but stretches, elides and overruns them. Late Romantic melody is unbroken again, but by evasion rather than by spinning-out.

That last point is the common confusion. Baroque and late Romantic both sound as though they never stop. Separate them with question 1 (is there a continuo?) and question 5 (is the harmony diatonic and sequential, or chromatic and sliding?).

5. What is the harmonic language?

A rough ladder, from earliest to latest:

• Modal, no leading note, cadences that feel sideways — Renaissance, before about 1600. It reappears in twentieth-century folk-derived music, so check the scoring.
• Diatonic, driven by sequences, harmonic rhythm fast and relentless — Baroque.
• Diatonic, spacious, harmonic rhythm slow, dominant relations obvious — Classical.
• Chromatic but still tonal; mediant slips, diminished sevenths, distant keys — nineteenth century.
• So chromatic the tonic is barely asserted; enharmonic slides; whole-tone colour — roughly 1890 to 1910.
• No perceptible tonic at all — free atonality, after about 1908.
• Strictly non-repeating pitch ordering, every note equal — twelve-tone, from 1923.
• Static, slow-changing, consonant and repetitive — minimalism, from the 1960s.

6. What is the texture?

Continuous imitation between equal voices, each entering with the same figure, means Renaissance or Baroque. A single melody over a broken-chord accompaniment — the Alberti bass and its relatives — is the Classical default. A thick, doubled homophony in which the whole orchestra reinforces one line is Romantic. Layered repeating ostinati, blocks of static material and abrupt cuts belong to the twentieth century.

7. What is the rhythm doing?

A steady, motoric pulse that never yields is Baroque. Periodic, dance-derived rhythm with clear downbeats is Classical. Flexible rubato, with the beat stretching for expressive purposes, is Romantic. Irregular or frequently changing metre, additive rhythms and a percussive attitude to the orchestra point after 1910; jazz-inflected syncopation points after 1918.

8. How are they playing, and how does it sound?

This is the question most often confused with the others. Performance practice is not composition date. Gut strings, minimal vibrato, valveless horns and natural trumpets, tapered phrase endings, brisk tempi and a pitch standard around A = 415 Hz are the marks of historically informed performance, a modern movement in the concert world of the last sixty years or so. A 1720 concerto played that way sounds startlingly fresh — and was still written in 1720.

Similarly with voices. Continuous wide vibrato and a covered tone reflect nineteenth-century operatic training and most twentieth-century conservatory teaching; a straight, light, blended tone reflects consort and cathedral practice and the early-music revival. Both are choices made by the performers.

Recording quality is the same category error in another form. Hiss, narrow bandwidth and a boxy sound date the recording, not the work. The only legitimate inference is an upper bound on when the performance happened.

The four traps

Neoclassicism

Between about 1918 and 1950 a great many composers wrote deliberately in eighteenth-century proportions: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920) and Symphony in C (1940), Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (1917), Poulenc, Hindemith. The masquerade is the point, and it is detectable. The harmony contains notes Haydn would have called mistakes — a sour added second or a chord a semitone out of place — while the frame stays consonant. The scoring is lean, dry and percussive rather than blended. Development is replaced by ostinato and abrupt juxtaposition. And where a Baroque work would have a harpsichord filling in chords, a neoclassical one has a piano used as a percussion instrument.

Film-score pastiche

Late Romantic idiom never died; it emigrated. Korngold was a genuine late Romantic who went to Hollywood, and generations have imitated what he took. The give-aways are structural and technical rather than harmonic: material loops and repeats to fit a picture instead of developing; a climax arrives with no preparation because the cut demanded it; the recorded balance puts strings and percussion impossibly close; synthesised pads, drum-kit and wordless choir appear; and the chord progressions favour a flat-sixth and flat-seventh rise that is a twentieth-century popular idiom, not a nineteenth-century one.

Modern early-music performance

Covered above, and worth repeating because it catches people in both directions. A crisp, light, fast Handel is not “early for its date”; a lush, heavy, slow Handel from 1955 is not “late for its date”. Judge the notes.

Long-lived composers

Idiom implies a date only for composers with short careers. Richard Strauss was born in 1864 and wrote the Four Last Songs in 1948. Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony (1924) is contemporary with Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone works. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances are from 1940, Vaughan Williams composed into 1958, and Stravinsky crossed Russian primitivism, neoclassicism and serialism inside one lifetime. Give ranges, not years, and make the range asymmetric: tight at the bottom where the instruments constrain you, loose at the top where taste does not.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Listen underneath for a continuo. Harpsichord or lute chording under everything means 1600–1760, and you can stop most of the way there.
2. Name the newest instrument you can hear. Clarinet, trombone, harp, cor anglais, tuba, celesta, saxophone, synthesiser — each sets a floor, and the floor is the hardest fact you have.
3. Count the players. Twenty, forty, sixty or a hundred maps roughly onto Baroque, Classical, early Romantic and late Romantic.
4. Watch one change of volume. A sudden block shift means Baroque; a graded swell means 1750 or later; an overwhelming surge means Romantic.
5. Count one phrase in bars. Four answered by four means Classical; continuous means Baroque or late Romantic, which you separate with step 1.
6. Find the tonic. Obvious and diatonic, chromatic but present, barely present, or absent — that ladder is your century.
7. Identify the texture. Imitative, melody-with-accompaniment, thick doubled homophony, or layered ostinati.
8. Check for modal inflection. Flat sevenths, raised fourths and pentatonic tunes mean Renaissance or folk-derived twentieth century, not the common-practice middle.
9. Separate the performance from the piece. Gut strings, low pitch, no vibrato, tape hiss: all facts about the recording, none about the composition.
10. Run the four traps before you commit. Could this be neoclassicism, film pastiche, a period-instrument band, or a composer who lived a long time? If any is plausible, widen the upper end of your range and state the instrument floor as your firm claim.