Music in the Age of Enlightenment:

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CHAPTER 43

• Music in the Age of Enlightenment
• Keyboard Music

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• In his Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith
  provides a seminal account of capitalism, an
  economic system in which the means of production
  of goods are privately owned and bring wealth to
  private individuals. At this time, women of the
  growing middle-class had the opportunity for the
  first time to make music in the home. They did
  so with the keyboard. And composers quickly
  rushed to supply music for this emerging amateur
  market.

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• To make keyboard music more accessible to the
  amateur keyboardist, composers developed several
  simple accompanied techniques such as
• Alberti bass, which imitates the triad by
  playing the notes successively
• Murky bass, which provides a rumbling octave bass

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• Pianoforte invented in Florence around 1700 by
  Bartolomeo Cristoforo. The strings of the piano
  are not plucked, as those the harpsichord, but
  stroked with a hammer that quickly retracts. For
  the first time a keyboard instrument could
• Play all dynamic ranges from piano to forte
  (hence, pianoforte)
• An ampler range of articulations like staccato
  and legato

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• Domenico Scarlatti the son of opera and cantata
  composer Alessandro Scarlatti, he became
  keyboardist to the king of Naples at the age of
  fifteen. He then served as keyboardist and music
  teacher at the courts in Portugal and Madrid.
  Among his compositions, Essercizi probably served
  as exercises to develop specific keyboard skills.
  
• Hand-crossing a keyboard technique in which the
  left hand continually crosses over the right to
  create a three-level texture. It is one of the
  hallmarks of Scarlatti's style.

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• Acciaccatura Italian for something battered and
  bruised. Scarlatti famously makes use of
  acciaccatura in the form of crunching downbeat
  dissonances before the arrival of a new section.

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Frederick the Great

• King of Prussia, he was an enlightened leader
  with strong interest in poetry and music. At his
  court he hosted French philosopher Voltaire, and
  composers Johann Quantz and C.P.E. Bach. Every
  evening he played flute sonatas and concertos for
  two hours.

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• C.P.E. Bach, the second son of J.S. Bach, worked
  at the court of king Frederick the Great in
  Berlin. Although he composed in all musical
  genres except opera and Catholic Mass, music
  keyboard was at the heart of his creative work.
  As Quantz had done for the flute before him,
  C.P.E. wrote an influential instructional book
  for the keyboard titled Essay on the True Art of
  Playing the Keyboard.
• Empfindsamer Stil a term applied to the
  hyper-expressivity that affected northern
  European arts in the second half of the
  eighteenth century.

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• Bebung "quaking," a clavichord technique in
  which the performer holds and wiggles the key up
  and down to produce a vibrating sound.
• Fantasia in the eighteenth century a rhapsodic,
  improvisatory work, often unbarred, in which the
  composers gives free reign the musical
  imagination without concern for conventional
  musical forms.

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The Piano Comes to England

• In 1750 the piano was virtually unknown in
  England by 1800 it had almost completely
  replaced the harpsichord.
• Square piano a small box-shaped piano with
  strings running at right angles to the keys that
  could be placed on a table or a stand. Johannes
  Zumpe began manufacturing these popular
  diminutive pianos in the 1760s.
• Grand piano originally called "grand" to
  distinguish it from Zumpe's small pianos.

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• J.C. Bach the youngest of J.S. Bach's sons, he
  first made a living composing operas in Italy and
  then moved to London, where he mostly wrote
  keyboard pieces. He was the first to publish
  keyboard sonatas that indicated the piano on
  their title page and to play the piano in public
  concerts. His piano pieces, in galant style, are
  not technically difficult and appealed to
  amateurs.
• Bach-Abel concerts a subscription series of
  public concerts in London organized by J.C. Bach
  and Carl Abel.