5,000 years of the music of romance, courtship, and sex

How do you approach the history of love? Is it through psychology and the understanding of emotion? Is it through the great works of literature? Or is it through sound — from the chord that pulls the heart strings to the lyric that melts your heart?

But this music has a strange history of its own. We can trace our ‘saccharine’ comments to Ancient Rome and the language of servitude to the Convivencia. Discover the fascinating patterns in the history of love songs in the following timeline, based on the key findings and milestones from Ted Gioia’s Love Songs: The Hidden History.

Headline image credit: Music by Gustav Klimt. Public domain via WikiArt.