Early Baroque Music

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CHAPTER 29

• Early Baroque Music

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• Baroque a term generally used to describe the
  art, architecture, and music of the period
  1600-1750. Derived from the word barocco
  (Portuguese for a pearl of irregular shape),
  critics applied the term "Baroque" to indicate a
  rough, bold sound in music and excessive
  ornamentation in the visual arts.
• Age of Absolutism The period of Baroque art
  roughly corresponds with what political
  historians call the Age of Absolutism. The theory
  of absolutism held that a king enjoyed absolute
  power by reasons of divine right. The pope in
  Rome, the Holy Roman Emperor, the kings of France
  and Spain, and, to a lesser extent, the king of
  England were the most powerful absolute monarchs
  of the seventeenth century.

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St. Peter's Square

• Much Baroque architecture, art, and music
  reflected and celebrated the absolute power of
  kings and popes, such as the vast palace of
  Versailles outside Paris and St. Peter's Square
  in Rome (text page 234). The music composed for
  such vast expanses could also be grandiose.
  Composers in Rome wrote choral works for up to
  fifty-three separate vocal parts, while the opera
  and ballet orchestra at Versailles sometimes
  numbered more than eighty instrumentalists.

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Bernini's The Throne of St. Peter

• Another characteristic of Baroque art and
  architecture is abundant decoration. In creating
  his Throne of St. Peter for the interior of the
  basilica in Rome, the sculptor Gian Lorenzo
  Bernini filled the vast spaces with twisting
  forms that energize the otherwise static
  architecture. Composers too created large-scale
  compositions, in which strong chordal blocks
  support highly ornamented melodic lines.

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CHARACTERISTICS OF EARLY BAROQUE MUSIC

• Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy A war of words in
  print initiated in 1600 by the conservative music
  theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, who attacked
  Claudio Monteverdi for breaking many of the
  established rules of counterpoint. Monteverdi
  responded by affirming that the text and its
  meaning were to be held above purely musical
  procedure. He called his new text-driven
  approach the seconda pratica (second practice),
  which he distinguished from the more traditional
  prima pratica.
• Doctrine of Affections The doctrine according to
  which different musical moods could and should be
  used to influence the emotions, or affections, of
  the listeners. A musical setting should
  reinforce the intended "affection" of the text.

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• Monody Term to describe compositions for an
  individual vocal line with accompaniment, such as
  solo madrigals, solo arias, and solo recitatives.
  A term derived from the Greek terms meaning "to
  sing alone," monody simply reflected the attempts
  of poets, scholars, and musicians to emulate the
  music of ancient Greece by making the words
  intelligible and enhancing their effect. The
  emphasis on solo voice quickly led to the
  emergence of the vocal virtuoso, the star of the
  court theater and operatic stage.

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A Lady with Theorbo

• Basso continuo commonly called "thorough bass"
  in England, it consists in a bass line that
  provided a never-ending foundation, or
  "continuous bass," for the melody above. Early
  in the Baroque period, the basso continuo might
  be played by a single solo instrument such as the
  lute or the theorboa large lute-like instrument
  with a full octave of additional bass strings
  (Fig. 29-4). Later, a low melody instrumentsuch
  as the viola da gamba, cello, or bassooncame to
  reinforce the bass line, while a chord-producing
  instrumentorgan, harpsichord, theorbo, lute, or
  guitarplayed the harmony above the bass.

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• Figured bass a numerical shorthand placed with
  the bass line that indicates which unwritten
  notes to fill in above the written bass note.
  Like a modern jazz pianist, the Baroque continuo
  player was to realize (play chords above) a
  figured bass at sight.

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Major and Minor Tonalities

• In the course of the seventeenth century, two
  scale patterns, major (the Ionian mode) and minor
  (the Aeolian mode), came to be employed to the
  virtual exclusion of all other church modes of
  the Renaissance and before. While earlier modal
  polyphony had emphasized triads only a second or
  third apart, the new tonal polyphony of the
  Baroque tended increasingly to construct chords
  upon notes a fourth or a fifth apart. In other
  words, in the Baroque period, modal harmony
  gradually gave way to tonal harmony.

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Instrumental Color and Musical Dynamics

• In the Baroque era, musicians privileged a great
  diversity of sound. A variegated ensemble in
  which a theorbo, viola da gamba, cornett,
  sackbut, violin, recorder, transverse flute,
  bassoon, cello, and harpsichord played together
  were not unusual, while the early Baroque
  orchestra was not yet dominated by the relatively
  new violin family. Moreover, it is around 1600
  that composers started to specify levels of
  volume in the music, at first simply writing
  piano and forte in the score.
• Setting loud against soft, winds against strings,
  soloist against chorus, major against minorall
  these helped create the brilliant colors and
  strong contrasts that mark Baroque music.

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Idiomatic Writing for Instruments and Voice

• Baroque music welcomes for the first time truly
  idiomatic writing for both instruments and voice.
  Composers recognized that the violin, for
  example, can play a scale faster than a human
  voice can sing one. At the same time, they wrote
  vocal lines with starkly different levels of
  rhythmic activity and ornaments that underlined
  the acrobatic potential of the voice.