Musicatlas
Vast classical music collection — No Restrictions — Own Your Music!
In this list there are some links to timelines that contain all composers on this site who have known dates.
Select the period for which you want to see the timeline:
- Composer timeline from year 300-800
- Composer timeline from year 800-1200
- Composer timeline from year 1200-1400
- Composer timeline from year 1400-1600
- Composer timeline from year 1600-1800
- Composer timeline from year 1800-1900
- Composer timeline from year 1900-now
PDF files of composers timelines
Below there are also three PDF files with timelines that were made by John Gosling. He kindly offered them to me so I could put on this site.
This is what he says about them:
The timelines are somewhat selective and do not include all the data from your database, omitting many of the earlier composers. The document named "All Composers Timeline" shows all composers born on or after 1785. The document named "Well known Composers" contains a subset of the first listing, including all composers who are reasonably well known (in my opinion at least). The document named "Important Composers" contains just those composers who are normally considered as particularly important, but also includes some who are of particular interest to me personally and who others would not include in their list. Also, I have excluded from this document most composers who were composing after 1950 (simply because composers from this era are of less interest to me personally).
The listings show the date of birth and date of death and also (in brackets) the date when the composer reached the age of 20 (as this is a better indication of when composers start to become productive than date of birth). Also, I use a colour coding which indicates level of importance (and in some cases importance from my own personal perspective - which others probably will not agree upon).
- All Composers Timeline [PDF file]
- Important Composers Timeline [PDF file]
- Well Known Composers Timeline [PDF file]