Haute cuisine and shaping "haute cuisine", but their roles in the cuisine were what differentiated it from regular French cuisine. "Haute cuisine" was characterized by French cuisine in elaborate preparations and presentations served in small and numerous courses that were produced by large and hierarchical staffs at the grand restaurants and hotels of Europe. The cuisine was very rich and opulent with decadent sauces made out of butter, cream, and flour, the basis for many typical French sauces that are still used today. The 17th century chef and writer La Varenne marked a change from cookery known in the Middle Ages, to
French classical music the twentieth-century, composers took many different paths. Some composers looked backwards to the light, elegant Classical works, with the Neoclassicism of the Russian-French composer Stravinsky. Austro-German composers such as Schoenberg and Berg and used a tortured, dramatic style called Expressionism. The French composer Boulez abandoned the entire tonal (key-centered) tradition of Western music with a style called Serialism. Other composers explored electronic music (Stockhausen); chance-based or random (aleatoric) music and indeterminacy (Cage); and minimalism (Reich, Glass). French classical music French classical music began with the sacred music of the Roman Catholic Church, with written records predating the reign of Charlemagne.