Baroque

Term used by modern day historians to discribe all the styles of accompanied solo singing practiced in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.Various styles including recitative, aria and madrigal quickly made their way into all kinds of music, both secular and sacred. Made musical theater possible because it could convey in music everything from narration to dialogue to soliloquy with the immediacy and flexibility needed for truy dramatic expression.

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Becuase women were not allowed to perform on stage, women parts were sung by men who were castated before puberty to preserve their high vocal range. In Italy, women were not allowed to sing in church and from the mid-sixteenth century these males sang the high parts in church music. Later in the 17th and 18th centuries, males also sang in operas outside Rome, but almost always in mal rather than female roles.

By the late seventeeth century, the leading male roles in operas were almost always written for castrati, whoes increasing lung capacity made them ideal soloists and whose powerfu, agile voices were much prized.

Excelled in lyrical arias and duets musch like Cavalli but was one of Cavalli’s biggest competetors. Wrote one of the most performed operas of the `7th centruy, Orantea.

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concentration on solo singing, rather than ensembles and instrumental music

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The separation of recitative and aria

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The use of varied stles such as aria, recitative and arioso.

Means to be sung. The term was applied before 1620 to a published collection of arias in strophic variation form. By midcentury, it meant a secular compostion with continuo, usually for solo voice, on a lyrical or quasi-dramatic text, consisting of several sections that included both recitatives and arias. Among the leaders of this genre of the midcentury were Luigi Rossi and Antonio Cesti, Carissimi and Strozzi. Became the leading form of vocal chamber music in the late 17th century.

In 1700, Lutheran theologian and poet Erdmann Neumeister in troduced this as a sacred genre for musical setting. Throughout the seventeenth century, Lutheran composers had ste biblical, liturgical and chorale texts. Neumeister added petic texts, intended to be set as recitatives, arias and ariosos. that brought home the meaning of the day’s Gospel readings. The new church genre found widespread acceptance amoung Lutherans.

Modern style. This was a style in contrast to stile antico where there was avoidance of the contrapuntal old style and replaece with basso continuo, regularized rhythms and mahor-minor tonality. Johann Joseph Fux codified both styles with a quasi-Palestrinian counterpaoint in a more modern setting.

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Resmbles the opera without acting, costumes and scenery. Italy had a long tradition of religious performances outside the church such as the laude. Differs from opera in that its subject matter is religious. In the oratorio there was a narrator.

Leading oratorio composer was Giacomo Carissimi.

keyboard and lute composers wrote sets of these on borrowed or newly composed themes. The most common techniques for variations were:

1. contus-firmus variations

2. Melody with the top most voice, recieving different embellishment in each variation while the underlying harmonies remained unchanged

3. The bass or harmonic progresion,;rather than the melody is held rather than the melody is held constant while the figuration changes.;

Dances were composed for social dancing, for theatrical spectacles and in stylized form for chamber music for lute, keyboard, or ensemble. Dance music was so central to musical life that dance rhythms permeated other instrumental and vocal music, secular and sacred alike. The idea of linking two or three dances together, such as pavone and galliard was extended to create this collection of several dances, used either for dancing or as chamber music. One;early 17th century;composer Johann Hermann Schein wrote the Musical Banquet which contains twenty suites for five instruments with continuo, each having the sequence pavane, galliard, courante, allemande and tripla.

Many begin with a prelude in the style of a taccata or other abstact work.

sometimes called by the modern term style brise (broken style)

Lute style influenced the texture of harpsichord music. Since the lutenist often struck only one note at a time, they sketched tin the melody, bass and harmony by sounding the appropriate tones now in one register, inow in another and relying on the listener’s imagination to supply the continuity of the various lines.

In the first half of seveteenth century  cinsisted of a number of small sections differentialed by musical material, texture, mood, character , and sometimes meter and tempo. As composers developed the genre, these sections gradually became longer and more self-contained. Finally, composers separated the section s into distinct movements, so that in time it became a multimovement work with contrast between movements. Theses contrasts were i sympathy with the theory of the affections, which held that music stimulated the bodily humors and could keep them in balance by offering a diversity of moods. Some composers maintained thematic similarities between movements, as in the older variation canzona, but thematic independence of movements was much more common. By about 1660 the most common types were the sonata da camera and sonata da chiesa.

Also common were the solo sonatas and sonatas for large ensembles.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, musicians began to distinguish between music for chamber ensemble, with only one instrument for each melodic line, and music for orchestra, in which each string part was performed bytwo or more players.Louis XIII of France stablished a string ensemble, essentially the first orchesta, with four to six players per part. By the 1670’s similar ensembles were formed in Rome and Bologna, followed by others in Venice, Milan, and elsewhere.;Corelli often led a pick-up orchestra of forty or more, gathered from players employed by patrons throughout the city. While some pieces like the overtures, dances, and interludes of Lully’s operas, were clearly intended for orchestra, and others, like corellis solo violin sonatas could be played only as chamber music, a good deal of seventeenth and early eighteenth century music could be performed either way.

In the 1680’s and 1690’s composers created a new kind orchestral compositon that soon became the most important type of Baroque instrumental music andhelped to establish the orchestra as thte leading instrumental ensemble. In the long-standing tradition of adapting old terms to new uses, this genre was developed. Like the vocal version, it united two contrasting forces into a harmonious whole, n an instrumental version of the concertato medium. It combined this texture with other traits favored at the time: florid melody over a firm bass; musical organization based on tonality and mutiple movements with contrasting tempos, moods and figuration. Closely related to sonatas and served many of the same roles that were palyed at public ceremonies entertainments and privat musical gatherings and they could substitue for elements of the Mass. Three types were developed:

Orchestral

grosso

and solo

the red priest for his red hair. One of the best known Italian composers of the early eighteenth century who was born and spent most of his career in Venice. A virtuoso violinist, mate teacher and poplular composer of opera, cantoatas, and sacred msuic. He is know today primarily for his concertos which number around five hundred.

Worked as a teacher, composer, conductor and superintendent of musical instruments at the Pio Ospedale della Pieta. This was one of four hospitals in Venice, homes for orphaned illegitimate or poor boys and girls which were run like restrictive boarding schools and provided excellent instruction in music to girls who showed talent.

His influence on instrumental music equaled that of Corelli a generation earlier. His codification of ritornello form provided a model for later concerto composers.

Spent two decades as an organist in the provinces, winning recognition as a music theorist around the age of forty and achieving fame as a composer in hsi fifties. Attached then as a radical, he was assaled twenty years later as a reactionary.

Inspired by the works of Descartes and newton, Rameau approached music as a source of empirical data that could be expained on rational principles. Wrote Treatis on Harmony: Traite’ de I’harmonie, one of the most influential theoretical works ever written.

His first operas stirred up a storm of critical controversy. The Paris inteligentsia divided into two noisy camps, one supporting Rameau and the other attacking him as a subverter of the good old French opera traditio of Lully. The Lullistes found Rameau’s music difficult, forced, grotesque, thick, mechanical and unnatural. Rameau protested in a forward to his opera ballet that he had sought to imitate Lully, not as a servile copyist but in taking, like him, nature herself, so beautiful and so simple as a mode. As the quarrel of the Lullistes and Ramistes raged, Rameaus increasing popularity sparked many parodies of his operas, lighthanded imitations or adaptations fo the originals. By the 1750’s during the battle between critics on the relative merits of French and Italian music known as the war of the Buffoons, Rameau had become the most eminent living French composer, exalted as the champion of French music by the very faction that twenty ears earlier had castigated him for not writing like Lully.

Has been raised to the pinnacle of composers of all time. He was renouned in Protestant Germany as an Organ vertuoso and writer of learned countrapuntal works, but comparatively little of his music was published or circulated in manuscript. He embraced all the major styles, forms and genres of his time except opera blended them in new ways and developed them further. Bach learned composition; primarily from copying or arranging the music of Torelli, Vivaldi, Teleman and numerous others.

His posts included church organist at a church at Arnstadt then at Muhlhausen. Then was court msuician for the duke of Weimar, first as organist and later as concertmaster. Then He was appointed Kapellmeister (music director) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt in Cathen in 1717. Bach moved to Leipzig to become cantor of the St. Thomas School and civic music director of the most prestigious positions in Germany.

In the 1680’s and 90’s , composers created a new kind of orchestral composition that soon became the most important type of Baroque instrumental music and helped to establish the orchestra as the leading instrumental ensemble. In the long’ standing tradition of adapting old terms to new uses, the new genre was called concerto. Like the vocal concerto it united tow contrasting forces into a hamonious whole, in an instrumental version of the concertato medium. It combined this texture with other traits favored at the time: florid melody over a firm bass; musical organization based on tonality; and multiple movements with contrasting tempos, moods and figuration. Concertos were closely related to sonatas and served many of the same roles: they were played at public ceremonies, entertainments, and private musical gatherings, and they could substitue for elements of the Mass.

by 1700, composers were writing three kinds of concertos. The orchestral concerto was a work in several movements that emphasized the first violin part and the bass, distinguishing the concerto from the more contrapuntal texture characteristic of the sonata. The other two types were more numerous and, in retrospect more important. Both systematically played on the contrast in sonority between many instruments and one or only a few. The concerto grosso set a small ensemble (concertino) of solo instruments against a large ensemble (concerto grosso). In the solo concerto a single instrument, most often a violin, contrasted with the large ensemble. The large group was almost always a string orchestra, usually divided into first and second violins , violas and cellos with basso continuo and bass viol either doubling the cellos or separate. In a concerto grosso, the conertino normally comprised two violins, accompanied by cello and continuo, the same forces needed to play a trio sonata, although other solo string or wind instruments might be added or substituted. In both solo concerto and conerto grosso, the full orchestra was designated tutti (all) or ripieno (full).

This practice of contrasting solo instruments against a full orchestra goes back to Lully operas, where some of the dances included episodies for solo wind trio; to ortorio and opera arias by Stradella; and the sonatas for solo trumpets with string orchestra, opular in
Bologna and Venice. The melodic style idiomatic to the natural trumpet, marked by triads, scales and repeated notes was imitated by the strings and became characteristic of concertos.

Since Roman orchestras were typically divided between coertino and ripieno, Roman composers favored the certo grosso. Correlli’s Concerti grossi, Op. 6 written int he 1680

s and published in revised form in 1714, are essential trio sonatas, divided between soli and tutti. The larger group echoes the smaller, fortifies cadential passages, or otherwise punctuates the structure through doublings. Corelli’s approach was widely imitated by later composers in Italy, England and Germany. Indeed, one of the best discriptions of the Corellian concerto grosso is by a German, the compser Georg Muffat, introducing a collection of his own pieces that can be played either s trio sonatas or as concerti grossi.

While Roman practice treted the orchestra as an expansion of the concertino, in northern Italy the soloiest were adjucts to the orchestra. Composers there focused first on the orchestral; concerto, then on the solo concerto and concerto grosso. Giuseppe Torelli, a leading figure in Bologna school, composed all three types, including the first concertos ever published. In his concertos we can see a new notion of the concerto develp. He wrote trumpet convcertos for services in San Petronio and his Op 6 includes two solo violin concertos, perhaps the first by any composer. Six more violin concertos and six concerti grossi appeared as his Op. 8. Most of these works follow a three movement plan in the order fast slow fast, taken over from the Italian opera overture. This schema, introduced the concerto by Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni in his Op. 2 became the standard pattern for concertos.

Torelli often used a form that resembles and may have been modeld on the structure of the A section of a da capo aria. There are two extened passages for the solosist, framed bya ritornello that appears a the beginning and end of the movement and recurs, in abbreviated form and in a different key, between the two solo passages. The solos present entirely new material, often exploiting the virtuosity of the solosist, and modulate to closely related keys, providng contrasti and variety. The return of the ritornello then offers stability and rsolution. Torelli’s approach was developed by Vivaldi into ritornello form, the standard for eighteenth century concertos.

Vivaldi followed the three-movement plan introduced by Albinoni; an opening fast movement; a slow movement in the smae or closely related key (relative minor, dominant, or subdominant); and a final fast movement in the tonic, often shorter and sprightlier thant he first. By using this format so consistently, Vivaldi helped to establish it as the standard for concertos over the next three centuries. (Grout 397-400, 425)

Torelli’s structured the firast movements of his concertos lke the A section of a da capo aria, with a ritornello at the beginning, middle and end framing two long episodes for the soloist. Vivaldi’s concertos expand on this pattern, producing what isnow known as ritornello form. This is less a formal mold than it is an approach, or set of gudelines, that llows a gret deal of variety.

1. Ritornellos for the ful orchestra alternate with episodes for the soloist or soloists.
2. The opening ritornello is composed of several small units, typically two to four measures in length, some of which may be repeted or varied. These segments can be separated from each other or combined in new ways without losing their identity as the ritornello.
3. Lter statements of the ritornello are usually partial, comprising only one or some of the units, sometimes varied
4. The ritornellos are guideposts to the tonal structure of the music, confirming the keys to which the music modulates. The first and last statments are in the onic; at least one (usually the first to be in a new key) is in the dominant; and others may be in closely related keys.
5. the solo episodes are characterized by virtuosic, idiomatic playing, somtimes repeating or varying elements from the ritornello, but often presenting scales, arpeggiations, or other fiuration. Many episodes modulate to a new key, which is then confirmed by the following ritornello. Sometimes the soloist interupts or plays some part of the closing ritornello.