Harmonia Mundi's Century Collection - A History of Music

With Century, the artists of harmonia mundi invite you on a thrilling voyage of discovery of music through the ages. Each CD provide the following information: a definition of the music of the period; reproduction of the complete painting featured in the cover detail, with a concise text relating it to its period; a map of the geographical region concerned at the relevant period… How? Every CD contains four or five general headings, each of which is given a page of detailed presentation intended to answer the most frequently asked questions.

On this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, you will hear astounding reconstructions of the music of the Mediterranean basin before and at the very start of the Christian era, from Athens to Jerusalem, from Constantinople to Lutetia.

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, constitutes an incredible jigsaw puzzle in sound which proves that Christianity did not forge its repertory in a single day, or even a single century – and certainly not all by itself!

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, presents some of the peaks of a repertory which, whatever its name suggests, was only unified well after the death of Pope Gregory the Great . . . Here is the music of Romanesque Europe.

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, features the poems and songs of the trouvères, troubadours and Minnesingers. These inventors of an (almost) exclusively secular poetic style were also the first musicians to emerge from anonymity . . .

On this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, you will find out how the clerks of the Middle Ages learnt to sing together in several distinct voices, from the most rudimentary ‘discant’ to the most complex sonic structures!

Here, shuttling between Rome and Avignon, you will plunge into the midst of the Trecento, the 14th century, which saw a drastic change in the relationship between western man and his God, evoked in masterly fashion by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, features the quintessentially Gothic Ars subtilior, a term referring to one of the most extravagant periods in musical history, which also saw the first glimmers of the Renaissance!

The Renaissance was not only the age of Humanism, it also marked the apogee of the motet inherited from the Middle Ages, and a certain . . . renaissance of the Mass – even though composers did not hesitate to draw their musical material from all over the place!

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, focuses on the three key schools of secular polyphony that flowered during the Renaissance: the Italian madrigal, the Franco-Flemish chanson and the Elizabethan song.

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, gives a glimpse of the innumerable occasions in the late Renaissance period when lutes, organs and sackbuts resounded with no need of help from the human voice.

With the programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, relive the extravagant, richly diverse creative adventure of Baroque Italy – the birthplace of modern music!

This CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, presents nearly 150 years of musical life in a (sometimes dis-) United Kingdom which gave birth to the supreme genius of Henry Purcell, and later offered Handel an opportunity to revivify Italian opera.

This CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, takes you through a day at the court of Louis XIV, no less – sacred music in the chapel, a few instrumental pieces for light entertainment, and to round things off, an evening at the royal opera!

The programme of this CD concentrates on the period that saw musical supremacy in Europe shift from Italy to Germany. Paradoxically, Bach was not particularly famous there in his own time – but his sons made the most of their musical inheritance . . .

On the programme of this CD, the three composers who, each in his own way, truly created the Classical style . . . so much so that they gave birth to the expression ‘classical music’: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Not forgetting the precursor, Gluck.

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, deals with that – surprisingly short – period when Romanticism flowered in its pristine glory, in the gigantic shadow of Beethoven.

This CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, charts the invigorating contribution of composers from many different backgrounds to the rise of a nationalism that was not necessarily aggressive. Together they founded the concert of Europe, rich in its diversity.

The programme of this CD explores the final splendours of a tonal system driven (apparently) to its furthest limits – before being insolently challenged by the irrepressible inventiveness of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the creative hub that was Vienna.

This survey of the years 1900-1950 explores the multiple paths followed by composers working within tonality or using the serial methods that challenged it. Though it was the most violent in history, the 20th century was also one of the richest artistically . . .

The programme of this CD, accompanied by full explanatory notes, is a varied if not exhaustive overview of avant-garde creation since World War II. ‘Experimental music’, it is sometimes called – but how many successful experiments there have been in the last 60 years!