Piano Music by Decade
A chronological view of the public-domain piano repertoire — every work in the ClassicNotes library organized by the decade in which it was composed. Use these pages to trace the evolution of keyboard music from the late Baroque through the early 20th-century cutoff for public-domain status.
The keyboard's history is also the history of an instrument transforming under the composer's hands. The harpsichord and clavichord of the early decades give way to the fortepiano of Mozart's Vienna, the iron-framed Érard and Pleyel of Chopin's Paris, and the modern Steinway concert grand of the late Romantic stage. Music written in each decade reflects what the instruments of that decade could do — and what they could not.
Reading the repertoire chronologically, decade by decade, surfaces details that the broader era labels obscure. The 1720s and the 1740s are both "late Baroque," but they are also two very different worlds: the first dominated by Bach's Cöthen and early Leipzig output and Scarlatti's first Iberian sonatas, the second by the Goldberg Variations, the Art of Fugue, and the early galant style emerging in C. P. E. Bach. Browsing one decade at a time makes those distinctions visible in proportion to how prolific each composer actually was in that window.
The decades below span roughly 1680 to 1920 — the full range covered by the public-domain piano repertoire. Earlier decades skew toward harpsichord and clavichord music well-suited to modern piano transcription; later decades include the first major modernist works whose copyrights have now expired. Each entry links to a full index of the works composed in that ten-year window, with short editorial context describing the musical centres of gravity of the period.