You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hello, sprouts. Today is Thursday, March 16th, and I'm Cecilia Leskowitz from the Hildegard Collective, a ministry for Catholic musicians. We're time traveling this week through musical

history in the Catholic Church, and today we'll be picking up where we left

off in the early 1800s, and we'll travel to the beginning of the 1900s. But before we begin,

let's review what we learned about yesterday. We traveled through the Baroque and the classical

time periods. We learned about how Catholic composers in this time were writing music

for both sacred settings and settings outside church, and we met the composers Antonio Vivaldi

and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Today, we're going to learn about the romantic time period.

Now, you might hear the word romantic and think about falling in

love, like in fairy tales or Disney movies. But in the 1800s, the word romantic meant more than that.

There was a whole movement in books and art called the Romantic Movement, and it focused on

things like nature and the meaning of life.

Remember how we learned the other day that new things in music come after new things in art?

This happened here in the Romantic time period, too.

Music historians say that the Romantic era began around the year 1827, which was a little later than the romantic

movement started in art and books. Composer still used key signatures and counterpoint

during this time, but they started to push the rules and explore something called chromatic notes.

These were notes that didn't fit inside a key signature,

but they make melodies glide around and become either flashier or more thoughtful, depending on

how the composer wants to use them. During the romantic period, composers were still writing

sacred music, but it was more because it was a thing to do for the

composers, rather than because they loved God. See, the world was changing really quickly during this time.

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