The Classical period was an era of classical music between roughly 1730 and 1820.
The name classical is applied to the period because in art and literature, there was keen interest in, admiration for, and emulation of the classical artistic and literary heritage of Greece and Rome. Intellectually, this era has also been labeled the Age of Enlightenment.
Composers from this period sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and clearer textures.
The phase between the baroque and the rise of the classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to unify the different demands of taste, economics and “worldview”, goes by many names. It is sometimes called galant, rococo, or pre-classical, or at other times early classical. It is a period where some composers still working in the baroque style flourish, though sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present—Bach, Handel, and Telemann all composed well beyond the point at which the homophonic style is clearly in the ascendant. Musical culture was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older style had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C. P. E. Bach was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well and knew how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form.