On the Baroque age
The music of the Baroque period was from 1600 to 1750 and it flourished in Europe, particularly in the regions of Italy, Germany, England, and France. This period was an age of Adventure and Innovation. The churches and courts were the center of music. The texture of the music was sung in the churches in the native tongue. The music played in the church was performed in sacred polyphonic and monophonic texture, the main instruments used was the organ and harpsichord in which skillful church musicians played in the church. The modern Churches today still use sacred polyphonic and monophonic texture. The music in the Baroque period focused on the Harmonic and choral writing of the music. What initially came out of this were the major and minor tonality systems which shifted from church modes to major and minor tonality systems. This was as system of scales in which focused on a cord of rest and a dominant cord of movement. This system changed in how people heard music. The term Modulation refers to a change from one key to another frequently by a harmonic progression.
The Baroque period was an era of innovation and great intellectual accomplishment. The sciences and new traditions in philosophy came into play and it was romantic and an era of the heights of accomplishment in music as well. The princes of the era created wealthy palaces which functions on the basis of creating new music for the kingdom. There were court-appointed composers and musicians, artists were deemed needed to supply the royal court with music and also to entertain the growing population of aristocrats. But even in the lower quarters, secular music and folk music was heightening in popularity. Protestant music became a significant contributor to Western music's harmonal shift and added to the repetoire of musical motifs and functions. There was a shift away from the polyphony of the Renaissance; songs were no longer sung in Latin nor were they founded on the structures of the Gregorian chants that we have previously covered in this course. Now the Lutheran chorale became the model for compositional structure and musical tonality formation.
Most of the time, music was being created to be sung by congregations and the chorale harmonization evidenced character or styles that were simple, chordal, homophonic, strophic and hymnlike. One of the great styles of music that we still continue to this day is the Opera and it had its genesis in the Baroque period; its development of the aria and the recitative were two great elements that caused this artistic style to thrive and bring a narrative element to music that was tremendously popular with both the royals and the commoners. The harpsichord and the organ were made the focal instrument of many works giving new artistic life to the instrument. Orchestras came into being and gave a new artistic palette for the composers and composers started to write music with the intention of evoking specific emotions, qualities of mind and with the purpose of focusing on specific instruments in the orchestra.
Musicians in the Baroque period became masters of their instrument as never before, displaying a musical virtuoisity hitherto unknown. The Baroque period witnessed the emergence of new genres and forms which remain in use even in contemporary times. Many of the instruments in our current listening repetoire first came into musical artistic production values during the Baroque period. Polyphonic music was still being composed, but now there was a shift in compositional activity to music with homophonic texture, a key component in writing music featured in Operas. The older, polyphonic style of music typically contained two or multiple melodic lines. A second significant development was the creation of the major-minor tonal system, which allows music to be written in the way we are familiar with today; diatonic writing, notes written in a key for a particular instrument is how we listen to music today still. Most of the music of the Baroque period was diatonic, with notes outside the key being referred to as chromatic or altered notes.
With the emergence of the continuo, the musician who was responsible for the base line stressed the key musical signatures of the chordic harmonies. The role of the keyboard player is to "realize" the harmonic features of the work, working in conjunction with the continuo to reify or make the vocal melody line into a thing which structures and supports a new tonal music; this is in contrast to the model music we have covered in previous weeks and musical eras. Composers found the liberties gained through this new mode of music making allowed them to compose with more skill and surprise; their composition took on a new life as word painting as Renaissance composers came to be able to communicate more thoroughly through music specific feelings or emotions. Composers used music to represent text or scenes in literature and were able to do so more positively through their increasing adaptation of the word painting techniques up until the late Baroque period where they became more accomplished practitioners of the art.
In a Baroque piece of musical art, the rhythm of the music is noted for its regularity, energy, and time-sequences. The figured bass is noted for its improvisational movements, maintaining an even rhythm and dynamism throughout the piece. Now dances in both the courts and popular culture became the genesis for baroque pieces. As these dance pieces began to proliferate, so did the appearance of pieces in which the voice -- for the first time in the history of Western music -- came to assume the status of equal import as a musical instrument. While there was no set standard for instruements in an orchestra, the instruments in orchestras were mostly similar to those used today. With these musical changes and innovations, there was also a continuation of older forms of Renaissance music featuring polyphony as these forms were adapted and used for Baroque music that was instrumental. New musical forms exploded onto the scene taking on a new range of expression such as chamber music and multimovement orchestra pieces, choral works and of course operas.
In 1600 the opera was given birth from taking a new form "from the spirit of music" and came into being from a variety of factors including the previously mentioned Word Painting movement where Baroque composers used music to convey the emotions of meaning of texts; the first featured use to accompanied melodies which was a shift from polyphonic to homophonic compositional elements and textures, the first features use of words presented in a cogent manner meant to be understood by listeners. The first operas, produced in Italy around 1600, were works such as Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi and Dido and Aeneas by an Englishman, Henry Purcell (which was produced in 1689). From this opera comes the era's most notable aria, which had its genesis in Virgil's Aeneid, a story of two people who falls madly in love with one another.
Orchestra were occasionally performed in conjunction with dance suites. The predominant dances were called the allemande, the courant, sarabande and the gigue, there were used sets of contrasting dances to form a single multimovement work. Writing to produce multiple combinations of instruments -- whether in orchestras or as solo performance pieces -- were the church sonata and the champer sonata. Likewise, there were two major choral forms in the Baroque period, known as the cantata and the oratorio. The oratorio was a complex composition performed in concert and the cantata was part of the worship ceremony. But a similarity in both cantatas and oratorios was the use of arias. The accompanying musical figures were different for both forms however; cantatas were frequently accompanied by an organ, while oratorios were accompanies by an orchestra.
The most famous musical presence to come from the Baroque period is one still played frequently, the name is Johann Sebastian Bach, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest composers of music of all time. He was part of a noted musical German family. He was a court organist in Weimar and wrote music for the organ. His famous choral music he did not compose until the end of his life, when he resided in Leipzig, where he was employed as cantor for St. Thomas's Church. More than any parallel figure from his day and age, Bach's music innovations and accomplishments continue to be praised and celebrated even today. His musical achievements include his use of tonal counterpoint in choral music, his adaptation of chord progressions in chorale harmonizations and his use of the art of the fugue in paino music. He is simply the universal master of compositional technique, and is noted for his mastery of polyphonic usage of tonal harmonic compositional works. His most significant works of art more than compositions are his Mass in B Minor, St. Matthews Passion and more than 300 church cantatas. Through my interest in this course I was led to borrow a CD copy of my friend, it was Glenn Gould plays Bach's Goldberg Variations and I was tremendously impressed. It is also worth noting that Bach's music was not appreciated to a great extent during the Baroque period, it was more or less rediscovered during the early 1800s.
I liked the Goldberg Variations so much that I decided to do a little research on it. The Goldberg Variations was composed in 1741 when Bach was employed as a cantor in Leipzig. The Goldberg Variations were published as part of a series of musical practice exercises called the Clavierubung ("keyboard practice") in German, but was considered to difficult to play so the music did not sell well. At this time in Germany music publishing was Bach's many way of earning a living but Bach was not so much interested in catering to his public audience as he was interested in exploring music of "higher dimensions". This work was composed for the harpsichord and is an example of a high Baroque lyricism that is distinctly German. It begins with an aria, a sarabande -- in this case a regular dance with binary metrics in sixteen bars. The aria is repeated at the end of the piece and in between there are regular canons spaced out at regular internals; they are based and arranged around the number three. A surprising feature of this work is that Bach introduces the concept of a Quadlibet. According to my research on the internet, a quodlibet is "a contrapuntal piece built upon several different melodies" and Bach injects some humor into the work by incorporating two folk tunes. There are even some unvoiced lyrics given here, including the lines: "Cabbage and turnips have driven me away/Had my mother cooked meat, I would have chosen to stay." I now see Bach as one of the most playful composers we have studied thus far.
Another native of Germany who was among the great composers of the Baroque era is George Frederick Handel. Handel gained widespread fame and musical acclaim as a master of the Opera during his lifetime (unlike Bach). His most significant acclaim came from his composition of oratorios, especially Handel's Messiah. While researching on the internet, I discovered that Handel's Messiah has a long and complex history. It was composed after Handel left Germany and after a trip to Italy, when he settled in England; it was first presented at the Royal Music Hall in Dublin on April 13, 1743. Handel's Messiah is unlike other Baroque oratorios in that it does not present a story in the traditional manner. The Messiah is unlike most of Handel's oratorios because here the soloists do not dominate the music and the choir does not sing only brief choruses, as is typical of Handel's work. According to Laurence Cummings, director of the London Handel orchestra, the chorus is responsible for carrying the action forward and moves the story forward. I found this quote in the Smithsonian online magazine. It is interesting to note that this is the best known work by Handel. The Messiah is a Christmas tradition and is still being performed by orchestra over two hundred years after the death of its composer.
What was a music consciousness dominated by sacred and polyphonic choral music changed after the early Renaissance and late Middle Ages. The rise of the Baroque period changed the given musical forms and elements of style available to composers. Now composers had the ability to choose between choral and instrumental music and between sacred and secular music forms. The Baroque period allowed for new forms to take root including the major-minor tonal system, homophonic textures and compositions for orchestras. Opera came into being and orchestras came into play using instruments that are common still today; the foundation was laid for symphonic works and the string quartets that would become common during the classical period. In my opinion, the most important distinguishing characteristic of the Baroque period was the use of music to mimic dramatic actions as understood in a narrative text.
The Baroque period was an era of innovation and great intellectual accomplishment. The sciences and new traditions in philosophy came into play and it was romantic and an era of the heights of accomplishment in music as well. The princes of the era created wealthy palaces which functions on the basis of creating new music for the kingdom. There were court-appointed composers and musicians, artists were deemed needed to supply the royal court with music and also to entertain the growing population of aristocrats. But even in the lower quarters, secular music and folk music was heightening in popularity. Protestant music became a significant contributor to Western music's harmonal shift and added to the repetoire of musical motifs and functions. There was a shift away from the polyphony of the Renaissance; songs were no longer sung in Latin nor were they founded on the structures of the Gregorian chants that we have previously covered in this course. Now the Lutheran chorale became the model for compositional structure and musical tonality formation.
Most of the time, music was being created to be sung by congregations and the chorale harmonization evidenced character or styles that were simple, chordal, homophonic, strophic and hymnlike. One of the great styles of music that we still continue to this day is the Opera and it had its genesis in the Baroque period; its development of the aria and the recitative were two great elements that caused this artistic style to thrive and bring a narrative element to music that was tremendously popular with both the royals and the commoners. The harpsichord and the organ were made the focal instrument of many works giving new artistic life to the instrument. Orchestras came into being and gave a new artistic palette for the composers and composers started to write music with the intention of evoking specific emotions, qualities of mind and with the purpose of focusing on specific instruments in the orchestra.
Musicians in the Baroque period became masters of their instrument as never before, displaying a musical virtuoisity hitherto unknown. The Baroque period witnessed the emergence of new genres and forms which remain in use even in contemporary times. Many of the instruments in our current listening repetoire first came into musical artistic production values during the Baroque period. Polyphonic music was still being composed, but now there was a shift in compositional activity to music with homophonic texture, a key component in writing music featured in Operas. The older, polyphonic style of music typically contained two or multiple melodic lines. A second significant development was the creation of the major-minor tonal system, which allows music to be written in the way we are familiar with today; diatonic writing, notes written in a key for a particular instrument is how we listen to music today still. Most of the music of the Baroque period was diatonic, with notes outside the key being referred to as chromatic or altered notes.
With the emergence of the continuo, the musician who was responsible for the base line stressed the key musical signatures of the chordic harmonies. The role of the keyboard player is to "realize" the harmonic features of the work, working in conjunction with the continuo to reify or make the vocal melody line into a thing which structures and supports a new tonal music; this is in contrast to the model music we have covered in previous weeks and musical eras. Composers found the liberties gained through this new mode of music making allowed them to compose with more skill and surprise; their composition took on a new life as word painting as Renaissance composers came to be able to communicate more thoroughly through music specific feelings or emotions. Composers used music to represent text or scenes in literature and were able to do so more positively through their increasing adaptation of the word painting techniques up until the late Baroque period where they became more accomplished practitioners of the art.
In a Baroque piece of musical art, the rhythm of the music is noted for its regularity, energy, and time-sequences. The figured bass is noted for its improvisational movements, maintaining an even rhythm and dynamism throughout the piece. Now dances in both the courts and popular culture became the genesis for baroque pieces. As these dance pieces began to proliferate, so did the appearance of pieces in which the voice -- for the first time in the history of Western music -- came to assume the status of equal import as a musical instrument. While there was no set standard for instruements in an orchestra, the instruments in orchestras were mostly similar to those used today. With these musical changes and innovations, there was also a continuation of older forms of Renaissance music featuring polyphony as these forms were adapted and used for Baroque music that was instrumental. New musical forms exploded onto the scene taking on a new range of expression such as chamber music and multimovement orchestra pieces, choral works and of course operas.
In 1600 the opera was given birth from taking a new form "from the spirit of music" and came into being from a variety of factors including the previously mentioned Word Painting movement where Baroque composers used music to convey the emotions of meaning of texts; the first featured use to accompanied melodies which was a shift from polyphonic to homophonic compositional elements and textures, the first features use of words presented in a cogent manner meant to be understood by listeners. The first operas, produced in Italy around 1600, were works such as Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi and Dido and Aeneas by an Englishman, Henry Purcell (which was produced in 1689). From this opera comes the era's most notable aria, which had its genesis in Virgil's Aeneid, a story of two people who falls madly in love with one another.
Orchestra were occasionally performed in conjunction with dance suites. The predominant dances were called the allemande, the courant, sarabande and the gigue, there were used sets of contrasting dances to form a single multimovement work. Writing to produce multiple combinations of instruments -- whether in orchestras or as solo performance pieces -- were the church sonata and the champer sonata. Likewise, there were two major choral forms in the Baroque period, known as the cantata and the oratorio. The oratorio was a complex composition performed in concert and the cantata was part of the worship ceremony. But a similarity in both cantatas and oratorios was the use of arias. The accompanying musical figures were different for both forms however; cantatas were frequently accompanied by an organ, while oratorios were accompanies by an orchestra.
The most famous musical presence to come from the Baroque period is one still played frequently, the name is Johann Sebastian Bach, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest composers of music of all time. He was part of a noted musical German family. He was a court organist in Weimar and wrote music for the organ. His famous choral music he did not compose until the end of his life, when he resided in Leipzig, where he was employed as cantor for St. Thomas's Church. More than any parallel figure from his day and age, Bach's music innovations and accomplishments continue to be praised and celebrated even today. His musical achievements include his use of tonal counterpoint in choral music, his adaptation of chord progressions in chorale harmonizations and his use of the art of the fugue in paino music. He is simply the universal master of compositional technique, and is noted for his mastery of polyphonic usage of tonal harmonic compositional works. His most significant works of art more than compositions are his Mass in B Minor, St. Matthews Passion and more than 300 church cantatas. Through my interest in this course I was led to borrow a CD copy of my friend, it was Glenn Gould plays Bach's Goldberg Variations and I was tremendously impressed. It is also worth noting that Bach's music was not appreciated to a great extent during the Baroque period, it was more or less rediscovered during the early 1800s.
I liked the Goldberg Variations so much that I decided to do a little research on it. The Goldberg Variations was composed in 1741 when Bach was employed as a cantor in Leipzig. The Goldberg Variations were published as part of a series of musical practice exercises called the Clavierubung ("keyboard practice") in German, but was considered to difficult to play so the music did not sell well. At this time in Germany music publishing was Bach's many way of earning a living but Bach was not so much interested in catering to his public audience as he was interested in exploring music of "higher dimensions". This work was composed for the harpsichord and is an example of a high Baroque lyricism that is distinctly German. It begins with an aria, a sarabande -- in this case a regular dance with binary metrics in sixteen bars. The aria is repeated at the end of the piece and in between there are regular canons spaced out at regular internals; they are based and arranged around the number three. A surprising feature of this work is that Bach introduces the concept of a Quadlibet. According to my research on the internet, a quodlibet is "a contrapuntal piece built upon several different melodies" and Bach injects some humor into the work by incorporating two folk tunes. There are even some unvoiced lyrics given here, including the lines: "Cabbage and turnips have driven me away/Had my mother cooked meat, I would have chosen to stay." I now see Bach as one of the most playful composers we have studied thus far.
Another native of Germany who was among the great composers of the Baroque era is George Frederick Handel. Handel gained widespread fame and musical acclaim as a master of the Opera during his lifetime (unlike Bach). His most significant acclaim came from his composition of oratorios, especially Handel's Messiah. While researching on the internet, I discovered that Handel's Messiah has a long and complex history. It was composed after Handel left Germany and after a trip to Italy, when he settled in England; it was first presented at the Royal Music Hall in Dublin on April 13, 1743. Handel's Messiah is unlike other Baroque oratorios in that it does not present a story in the traditional manner. The Messiah is unlike most of Handel's oratorios because here the soloists do not dominate the music and the choir does not sing only brief choruses, as is typical of Handel's work. According to Laurence Cummings, director of the London Handel orchestra, the chorus is responsible for carrying the action forward and moves the story forward. I found this quote in the Smithsonian online magazine. It is interesting to note that this is the best known work by Handel. The Messiah is a Christmas tradition and is still being performed by orchestra over two hundred years after the death of its composer.
What was a music consciousness dominated by sacred and polyphonic choral music changed after the early Renaissance and late Middle Ages. The rise of the Baroque period changed the given musical forms and elements of style available to composers. Now composers had the ability to choose between choral and instrumental music and between sacred and secular music forms. The Baroque period allowed for new forms to take root including the major-minor tonal system, homophonic textures and compositions for orchestras. Opera came into being and orchestras came into play using instruments that are common still today; the foundation was laid for symphonic works and the string quartets that would become common during the classical period. In my opinion, the most important distinguishing characteristic of the Baroque period was the use of music to mimic dramatic actions as understood in a narrative text.
posted by Andrew B. Noselli at 1:10 PM
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