Five Hundred Years of Composers

An A3 wall chart of 37 composers from Palestrina to Bernstein, each drawn as a lifespan bar to scale on one shared timeline, spanning the Renaissance through to the Modern era, with panels on what the eras mean and overlaps worth noticing.

What's inside

• 37 composers from Palestrina (1525) to Bernstein (1990), each shown as a lifespan bar drawn to scale on a single 1500–2000 timeline
• Five era bands — Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern — laid over the same timeline
• A panel on what each era means, from Renaissance voices without bar lines to Modern rule-breaking
• Overlaps worth noticing, including Bach and Handel's shared birth year and Haydn outliving Mozart by eighteen years
• A panel on reading the ruler — the even fifty-year scale, and why era lines are conveniences, not switches