Baroque music ( or ) refers to the period or dominant style of Western classical music composed from about 1600 to 1750. The Baroque style followed the Renaissance period, and was followed in turn by the Classical period after a short transition (the galant style). Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and continues to be widely studied, performed, and listened to. Key composers of the Baroque era include Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first operas; Alessandro Stradella, who originated the concerto grosso style; and Arcangelo Corelli, who was one of the first composers to publish widely and have his music performed across Europe.
The Baroque period saw the formalization of common-practice tonality, an approach to writing music in which a song or piece is written in a particular key; this type of harmony has continued to be used extensively in Western classical and popular music. Baroque composers experimented with finding a fuller sound for each instrumental part, leading to the creation of the modern orchestra; modernised musical notation, including developing figured bass; and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established the mixed vocal/instrumental forms of opera, cantata and oratorio and the instrumental forms of the solo concerto and sonata as musical genres. Dense, complex polyphonic music, in which multiple independent melody lines were performed simultaneously, was characteristic of the Baroque period.
During the Baroque era professional musicians were expected to be accomplished improvisers of both solo melodic lines and accompaniment parts. Baroque concerts were typically accompanied by a basso continuo group, in which bass instruments such as viol, cello, or double bass played the bassline. A characteristic Baroque form was the dance suite.
Definition
The French word baroque is derived from the Portuguese barroco, meaning an irregularly-shaped pearl. Although it was long thought that the word as a critical term was first applied to architecture, in fact it appears earlier in reference to music, in an anonymous, satirical review of the première in October 1733 of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734. The critic implied that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was filled with unremitting dissonaque pearls, when diamonds can be found on the surface of the earth". Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1768 in the Encyclopédie: "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, and loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, and the movement limited."Encyclopedie; Lettre sur la Musique Francaise under the direction of Denis Diderot
Chronology The systematic application by historians of the term "baroque" to music of this period is a relatively recent development. In 1919, Curt Sachs became the first to apply the five characteristics of Heinrich Wölfflin's theory of the Baroque, describing the visual arts, systematically to music. Critics were quick to question the attempt to transpose Wölfflin's categories to music, however. Whereas art historians consider the start of the Baroque period to be the middle or beginning of the 16th century, Robert Haas argued that in music it could not begin earlier than 1594, the year that Palestrina and Lassus died.
In the 1940s independent attempts were made by Manfred Bukofzer and to use autonomous, technical analysis rather than comparative abstractions, in order to avoid the adaptation of theories based on the plastic arts and literature to music. All of these efforts resulted in appreciable disagreement about time boundaries of the period, and challenges regarding the practice of grouping together works and composers in a broad era when stylistic developments occurred in different places at different times.
The term gradually gained acceptance to describe a period between Renaissance music and the Classical period. It is often split into three approximate phases, in the same manner that Wölfflin described the visual arts. According to Bukofzer these were "early Baroque" (15801630), "middle Baroque" (16301680), and "late Baroque" (16801730). Clercx instead separated them into "primitive Baroque" (mid-late 16th century), "full Baroque" (17th century), and "tardy Baroque (17001740 or 1765).
Characteristics A definitive set of characteristics which differentiate Baroque music from preceding or succeeding movements is difficult to enumerate. Many have been suggested, including "dynamism, open form, degree of ornamentation, sharp contrast, co-existence of diverse styles, individualism, affective representation and numerous others", but as the musicologist Claude V. Palisca points out, there is too much diversity within the repertoire of the time to make sweeping generalisations: "Although the style of Gesualdo is dynamic and open-formed, that of Alessandro Scarlatti is not. While Caccini's music is ornamented, Corelli's fundamentally is not (although it sometimes invited ornamentation); besides, the style of the 1740s or 1770s was also ornamented. The sharp contrasts observed in the late sacred concertos of Gabrieli are less striking or at least appear normal in an opera of Cesti. Diverse styles have co-existed in many periods, if perhaps less in the Renaissance."
It is possible to characterise Baroque music by its development as a means of affective expression. Prompted by a rediscovery of classical rhetoric and Aristotle's Poetics, which highlight the importance of stirring an audience's emotions, as well as the spread of Humanism and the classically inspired poetry of Petrarch, this focus on expression of subjective experience is what precipitated the pejorative connotations of the term "baroque" in its early usage, as its apparent extravagance or strangeness were caused by a new impetus to express emotion or states of mind.
Composers also looked to the ancient world for tonal inspiration, drawing on Ptolemy and Aristoxenus to develop chromaticism beyond the modes of the Renaissance period. A more scientific understanding of sound and pitch led to innovations such as equal temperament and modulation. The rise of the middle class in centres of trade led to a demand for subscription-based opera houses, and an increased preference for more realistic or historical operas over mythological subjects.
History Throughout the Baroque era, new developments in music originated in Italy, after which it took up to 20 years before they were broadly adopted in rest of the Western classical music practice. For instance, Italian composers switched to the galant style around 1730, while German composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach largely continued to write in the baroque style up to 1750. + Phases of Baroque music Subperiod Time In Italy Elsewhere Early baroque 1580–1650 Middle baroque 1630–1700 Late baroque 1680–1750
Early baroque music (1580–1650)
The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama. In reference to music, they based their ideals on a perception of Classical (especially ancient Greek) musical drama that valued discourse and oration. Accordingly, they rejected their contemporaries' use of polyphony (multiple, independent melodic lines) and instrumental music, and discussed such ancient Greek music devices as monody, which consisted of a solo singing accompanied by a kithara (an ancient strummed string instrument). The early realizations of these ideas, including Jacopo Peri's Dafne and L'Euridice, marked the beginning of opera, which was a catalyst for Baroque music.
Concerning music theory, the more widespread use of figured bass (also known as thorough bass) represents the developing importance of harmony as the linear underpinnings of polyphony. Harmony is the result of counterpoint, and figured bass is a visual representation of those harmonies commonly employed in musical performance. With figured bass, numbers, accidentals or symbols were placed above the bassline that was read by keyboard instrument players such as harpsichord players or pipe organists (or lutenists). The numbers, accidentals or symbols indicated to the keyboard player what intervals are to be played above each bass note. The keyboard player would improvise a chord voicing for each bass note. Composers began concerning themselves with harmonic progressions, and also employed the tritone, perceived as an unstable interval, to create dissonance (it was used in the dominant seventh chord and the diminished chord). An interest in harmony had also existed among certain composers in the Renaissance, notably Carlo Gesualdo; However, the use of harmony directed towards tonality (a focus on a musical key that becomes the "home note" of a piece), rather than modality, marks the shift from the Renaissance into the Baroque period. This led to the idea that certain sequences of chords, rather than just notes, could provide a sense of closure at the end of a piece—one of the fundamental ideas that became known as tonality.
By incorporating these new aspects of composition, Claudio Monteverdi furthered the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition—the heritage of Renaissance polyphony (prima pratica) and the new basso continuo technique of the Baroque (seconda pratica). With basso continuo, a small group of musicians would play the bassline and the chords which formed the accompaniment for a melody. The basso continuo group would typically use one or more keyboard players and a lute player who would play the bassline and improvise the chords and several bass instruments (e.g., viol, cello, double bass) which would play the bassline. With the writing of the operas L'Orfeo and L'incoronazione di Poppea among others, Monteverdi brought considerable attention to this new genre. This Venetian style was taken handily to Germany by Heinrich Schütz, whose diverse style also evolved into the subsequent period.
Idiomatic instrumental textures became increasingly prominent. In particular, the style luthé—the irregular and unpredictable breaking up of chordal progressions, in contrast to the regular patterning of broken chords—referred to since the early 20th century as style brisé, was established as a consistent texture in French music by Robert Ballard, in his lute books of 1611 and 1614, and by Ennemond Gaultier. This idiomatic lute figuration was later transferred to the harpsichord, for example in the keyboard music of Louis Couperin and Jean-Henri D'Anglebert, and continued to be an important influence on keyboard music throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries (in, for example, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frédéric Chopin).
Middle baroque music (1630–1700) The rise of the centralized court is one of the economic and political features of what is often labelled the Age of Absolutism, personified by Louis XIV of France. The style of palace, and the court system of manners and arts he fostered became the model for the rest of Europe. The realities of rising church and state patronage created the demand for organized public music, as the increasing availability of instruments created the demand for chamber music, which is music for a small ensemble of instrumentalists.