Baroque Music
The musical period from about 1600 to 1750, marked by tonality, basso continuo, ornamentation, and composers such as Bach and Handel.
_Apollo_und_die_Musen.jpg)
Baroque music is the European art music of roughly 1600 to 1750, the era between the Renaissance and the Classical period. The name, from the Portuguese barroco for an irregular pearl, was originally a criticism — later generations heard the style as ornate and excessive. The period saw the birth of opera, the orchestra, and the modern tonal system of major and minor keys, replacing the older modal language.
The defining technical features grew out of the Florentine desire to set dramatic text to music: monody — a single expressive melody over simple accompaniment — and the basso continuo, a bass line with figures telling the keyboard or lute player which chords to improvise. Harmony became functional, organized around tonic and dominant, and rhythm became regular and driving. Instrumental music flourished with new forms: the concerto grosso (a small group of soloists against the full ensemble), the solo concerto, the trio sonata, the fugue, and the dance suite. Texture was often polyphonic, and ornamentation — trills, mordents, turns — was expected of performers, who were also expected to realize the continuo spontaneously.
Monteverdi's operas (Orfeo, 1607) began the period; Vivaldi's concertos, especially The Four Seasons, and Corelli's sonatas shaped the instrumental style; the culmination came with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, both born in 1685. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, organ fugues, and Well-Tempered Clavier — which cycles through all 24 major and minor keys and helped establish equal temperament — represent the summit of contrapuntal art, while Handel's oratorios, above all Messiah, brought drama to the concert hall.
The baroque ended around 1750 with Bach's death, as the galant style — simpler, lighter, melody-driven — gave way to the Classical era of Haydn and Mozart. The revival of interest in the 20th century (the historical performance movement) returned baroque music to the standard repertoire, and its influence persists in everything from church music to the continuo-like bass lines of popular song. It stands in direct stylistic contrast to the Gregorian chant of the medieval era, whose monophonic, modal lines the baroque replaced with tonality and harmony.
Tags
bach baroque classical music music history