Which musical period and/or composer had the.....

[Shagdac]

Which composer and/or musical period had the biggest impact on shaping classical music during the time they were living as well as how we know it today?

[bernhard]

Here are my big five:

1.      J. S. Bach – I do not think he had such an impact during his life time (communications were not what they are today). However he had the most impact on Western music of anyone else by championing (and proving it was possible) the equal temperament system. This changed everything. Music as we know it today simply would not exist without equal temperament. So, thank you very much Johann Sebastian.

2.      Things went pretty much downhill after Bach until the next giant came around: Beethoven. He revolutionised everything, including the musician’s stand in the social hierarchy.

3.      Next Chopin. His way of playing and his compositions again changed everything. It was like a breath of fresh air. No one had ever heard music such as this before.

4.      Debussy: like Chopin he extended the possibilities of the piano and explored overtones as no one had before him.

5.      Prokofiev. As Chopin and Debussy, he extended the possibilities of the piano by using it as a percussion instrument.

By the way, these are not necessarily my favourite composers, just the ones I believe had the greatest impact and (with the exception of Chopin) not only on the piano but on music in general.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bitus]

I would add Wagner and his book on drama and opera, which offered a completly new way of looking at music in the light of creating drama.
The Bitus.

[ahmedito]

hmmm.... well the first post would certainly have applied to the composers who changed the way we look at the keyboard, but not to the ones that changed musical history...

I would say that my top 5 are:
1. Monteverdi. (If you look at it, Bach really didnt change all that much. He was a bit of a traditionalist and kept composing baroque even though Hayden and his sons were full at it... although he was a genius and nothing produced in the Baroque I think could compare to him)
2. Beethoven (He completly changed the way we look at music)
3. Wagner (He brought tonality to the limit)
4. Debussy (First guy to start thinking outside of the box)
5. John Cage (After him, there really is nothing that you couldnt call music without getting argued about it)

[donjuan]

I would most certainly agree with Bernhard when he says Bach.  Without Bach, no composer would have done what they did.  For example, Liszt's chromatisism in the pieces was derived from Bach.  

I think Beethoven was a prelude to the Romantic period- being one of the first to show bleak hardship in the music.  If it weren't for him, Chopin, Schubert, none of them would have been who they were.

For pianists, Liszt was the groundbreaking factor in musical history.  When he invented the piano recital in 1840, and around the time when the keyboard was expanded to 7 octaves..Liszt wrote some of the most virtuosic music ever.  The Opera Transcriptions seem to have died out in performance nowadays, but their very existence is a symbol of the piano when it was first tested-when the piano became a limitless power device.
donjuan

[bet33]

hey,

for me,

BACH-         = temp.
BEETHOVEN-        pushing the musician's role in society to a new (not a servant level).

LISZT- influenced wagner, and to a degree took some of his later compositions further then wagner towards the 20th century, the true bridge composer to the 20th century.

DEBUSSY-

STRAVINSKY-