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Baroque: Baroque Era
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The era of Baroque music was an age of spectacular progress of knowledge. It was the age of the scientific discoveries of Galileo and Newton, the mathematical advances of Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz, and the philosophical explorations of Descartes, Spinoza and Locke. There was a new and vibrant intellectual, artistic and social atmosphere which in so many ways signaled the birth of modern Europe.
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In every way Baroque music is like a teen-ager. Ok, maybe not in the pimply-faced-criticize-everything-even-though-you-don’t-pay-for-it kind of way we have come to expect from our modern teen-agers. But what is a teen-ager anyway? Simply put; a teen-ager is no longer a child and not yet an adult. It is that awkward in-between stage when all the rules get broken, nothing ever seems to fit, and emotions fluctuate wildly. This is exactly how it was with the Baroque Era of Music.
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Baroque performance practice had a renewed influence with the rise of "Authentic" or Historically informed performance in the late 20th century. Texts by Quantz and Leopold Mozart among others, formed the basis for performances which attempted to recover some of the aspects of baroque sound world, including one on a part performance of works by Bach, use of gut strings rather than metal, reconstructed harpsichords, use of older playing techniques and styles. Several popular ensembles adopted some or all of these techniques, including the Anonymous 4, the Academy of Ancient Music, Boston's Handel and Haydn Society, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, William Christie's Les Arts Florissants and others. This movement then attempted to apply some of the same methods to classical and even early romantic era performance.
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The dominant trends in Baroque music correspond to those in Baroque art and literature. Among the general characteristics of Baroque art is a sense of movement, energy, and tension (whether real or implied). Strong contrasts of light and shadow enhance the dramatic effects of many paintings and sculptures. In music, the Baroque era is the era of style-consciousness. The means of verbal representation in Baroque music were indirect -intellectual and pictorial-. In Baroque music, representation of extreme affections called for a richer vocabulary.
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The Baroque style of music shares many commonalities with jazz. In addition to the small ensembles that most Baroque pieces were intended for (during that time there was no feasible way of generating a 100 piece orchestra), similar to a jazz quartet, most Baroque pieces used a variety of improvisation on the performer's part. A very solid theory background was required to understand figured bass, a notational method for keyboardists to fill out and embellish a bass line. Most baroque music employed figured bass, and consequently no two Baroque-era performances of the same piece were exactly alike.
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In the Classical era, which followed the Baroque, the role of counterpoint was diminished (albeit repeatedly rediscovered and reintroduced), and replaced by a homophonic texture. The role of ornamentation lessened. Works tended towards a more articulated internal structure, especially those written in sonata form. Modulation (changing of keys) became a structural and dramatic element, so that a work could be heard as a kind of dramatic journey through a sequence of musical keys, outward and back from the tonic. Baroque music ... modulates frequently, but the modulation has less structural importance. Works in the classical style often depict widely varying emotions within a single movement, whereas Baroque works tend toward a single, vividly portrayed feeling.
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Baroque Era