Baroque music

The tradition & historical record

Baroque music (UK: or US: ) 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. ¹

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 dissonances, constantly changed key and meter, and speedily ran through every compositional device. 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." ¹

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 Suzanne Clercx-Lejeune 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" (1580–1630), "middle Baroque" (1630–1680), and "late Baroque" (1680–1730). Clercx instead separated them into "primitive Baroque" (mid-late 16th century), "full Baroque" (17th century), and "tardy Baroque (1700–1740 or 1765). ¹

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. ¹

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. ¹

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. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Baroque music”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Baroque music is style of Western classical music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 30 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²