Music is the art of arranging various sounds in sequence to create a composition typically through the five elements of melody, harmony, pitch, rhythm, and melodic timbre. Music has been an important part of every culture since ancient times and has been acknowledged as a source of communication and self expression for many cultures. In particular, music is a key source of inspiration for the creative minds of artists and composers throughout the history of recorded sound and musical expression. Music is a major component of any culture’s cultural tradition. Furthermore, it has been crucial to the process of identifying and expressing emotion across many cultures and has been an essential factor in the evolution of language.
Music notation is used to record the sequence of musical beats within a piece of music. The use of musical notation dates back to the earliest civilizations such as the Egyptian Pyramids and the Aztec sun god, and it first became widely utilized within Europe during the Renaissance. However, over the years, with the advancements in different mediums such as the invention of the piano and the violin, notation began to fade out of popularity, until it was virtually forgotten in the 18th century. Today, some concert music still utilizes musical notation.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is widely regarded as the most influential European composer in the history of Western music. Mozart’s innovative style of composing highly complex and poetic compositions like “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Tenderness” are well recognized and are staples of many classical music compositions. Mozart is also credited as being one of the first musicians to use the contemporary “chord scale” system of chord construction. This system allows for the incorporation of non-traditional scales (like the minor and dominant seventh chords among others) which were previously used only in classical music. Other musicians who also used the chord scale system of chord construction include Johann Sebastian Bach, Arnold Schoenberg, and Johannes Brahms.