What came after the baroque music period?

Answer 1

After Baroque comes the Classical Era which is not to be confused with the Classical Music in general. This era gave birth to musical giants such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, all who formed the 1st Viennese School. The Romantic period or the Rococo if you want to be specific, follows the Classical Period.

The Classical period starts roughly at 1751 after the death of J.S. Bach.

Answer 2

Good question! For years some of the music history textbooks just had a chapter titled "20th century", but as we got closer to the 21st century that started to seem a little lame--it was time to get a handle on what has happened during this period. "Contemporary" isn't much better.

I favor the term "Modern" or "Modernist" for the new things going on in classical music from the early 1900s up through the 1970s or so. And we're definitely past the point of this stuff being new, so it is arguable that we are currently in a "Postmodern" period.

The Wikipedia article "Modernism (music)" gives a good summary of different views on this, and I tend to agree on the dates: Modern (1900-1980s), Postmodern (1980s-present).

One of the essential problems with these labels (necessary though they may be) is that the last century of classical music pretty much defies a single descriptive term, at least if you want that term to have a useful meaning. It can be argued (cf. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music) that even during what we call the Romantic era, you really had Classical and Romantic styles as two viable options and blended in various ways. But the difference between these two styles is nothing compared to the distance between, say, Stravinsky, Copland, and Cage.

Answer 3

That would be Neoclassicism. In France, it is call Transition or Louis XV