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Baroque music ( or ) refers to the period or dominant style of 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 music). Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" Western canon, and continues to be widely studied, performed, and listened to. Key composers of the Baroque era include Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first ; 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 Polyphony music, in which multiple independent melody lines were performed simultaneously.
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 while a group of bass instruments—viol, cello, double bass—played the bassline. A characteristic Baroque form was the dance suite. While the pieces in a dance suite were inspired by actual dance music, dance suites were designed purely for listening, not for accompanying dancers.
Other authors in the 18th and 19th centuries used the term as a pejorative, to describe works which were extravagant, or in some way strange or dissonant. Noel Antoine Pluche wrote of a concert directed by Jean-Baptiste Anet that Anet would "wrest laboriously from the bottom of the sea some baroque 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
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).
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.
| + Phases of Baroque music ! Subperiod ! Time ! In Italy ! Elsewhere | |||
| Early baroque | 1580–1650 | ||
| Middle baroque | 1630–1700 | ||
| Late baroque | 1680–1750 |
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 (or ). 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 triad). 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., bass viola, 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).
One pre-eminent example of a court style composer is Jean-Baptiste Lully. He purchased patents from the monarchy to be the sole composer of operas for the French king and to prevent others from having operas staged. He completed 15 lyric tragedies and left unfinished Achille et Polyxène. Lully was an early example of a Conducting; he would beat the time with a large staff to keep his ensembles together.
Musically, he did not establish the string-dominated norm for orchestras, which was inherited from the Italian opera, and the characteristically French five-part disposition (violins, violas—in hautes-contre, tailles and quintes sizes—and ) had been used in the ballet from the time of Louis XIII. He did, however, introduce this ensemble to the lyric theatre, with the upper parts often doubled by recorders, flutes, and oboes, and the bass by bassoons. Trumpets and were frequently added for heroic scenes.
The middle Baroque period in Italy is defined by the emergence of the vocal styles of cantata, oratorio, and opera during the 1630s, and a new concept of melody and harmony that elevated the status of the music to one of equality with the words, which formerly had been regarded as pre-eminent. The florid, coloratura monody of the early Baroque gave way to a simpler, more polished melodic style. These melodies were built from short, cadentially delimited ideas often based on stylized dance patterns drawn from the sarabande or the courante. The harmonies, too, might be simpler than in the early Baroque monody, to show expression in a lighter manner on the string and crescendos and diminuendos on longer notes. The accompanying bass lines were more integrated with the melody, producing a contrapuntal equivalence of the parts that later led to the device of an initial bass anticipation of the aria melody. This harmonic simplification also led to a new formal device of the differentiation of recitative (a more spoken part of opera) and aria (a part of opera that used sung melodies). The most important innovators of this style were the Romans Luigi Rossi and Giacomo Carissimi, who were primarily composers of cantatas and oratorios, respectively, and the Venetian Francesco Cavalli, who was principally an opera composer. Later important practitioners of this style include Antonio Cesti, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Alessandro Stradella, who additionally originated the concerto grosso style in his Sonate di viole.
Arcangelo Corelli is remembered as influential for his achievements on the other side of musical technique—as a violinist who organized violin technique and pedagogy—and in purely instrumental music, particularly his advocacy and development of the concerto grosso. Whereas Lully was ensconced at court, Corelli was one of the first composers to publish widely and have his music performed all over Europe. As with Lully's stylization and organization of the opera, the concerto grosso is built on strong contrasts—sections alternate between those played by the full orchestra, and those played by a smaller group. Fast sections and slow sections were juxtaposed against each other. Numbered among his students is Antonio Vivaldi, who later composed hundreds of works based on the principles in Corelli's and concerti.
In contrast to these composers, Dieterich Buxtehude was not a creature of court but instead was church musician, holding the posts of organist and Werkmeister at the Marienkirche at Lübeck. His duties as Werkmeister involved acting as the secretary, treasurer, and business manager of the church, while his position as organist included playing for all the main services, sometimes in collaboration with other instrumentalists or vocalists, who were also paid by the church. Entirely outside of his official church duties, he organised and directed a concert series known as the , which included performances of sacred dramatic works regarded by his contemporaries as the equivalent of operas.
The four dance types (allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue) make up the majority of 17th-century suites. Later suites interpolate one or more additional dances between the sarabande and gigue:
There are many other dance forms as well as other pieces that could be included in a suite, such as Polonaise, Loure, Scherzo, Air, etc.
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