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Baroque: Baroque Period
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In the 20th century, Baroque was named as a period, and its music began to be studied. Baroque form and practice influenced composers as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg, Max Reger, Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. There was ... a revival of the middle Baroque composers such as Purcell and Corelli.
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Baroque music sprang from the humanism of the 16th century and the study of the rhetorical principles of ancient Greece and Rome. There was a desire to restore music’s power to arouse and control human passions and emotions. This power was thought to have been well understood by the ancients, but to have fallen into disuse in the smooth polyphony of the Renaissance period. Composers, theorists, and performers strove to make music more dramatic, more forceful, and to give it a clear message and meaning.
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Baroque art falls into the period of Counter-Reformation led by the Catholic church against the Protestants. Much of the Baroque art, especially in Italy, reflects reaction to Mannerism, but ... the social turmoil of the time. According to the Council of Trent and the Catholic church artworks should be a clear, intelligible subject realistically interpreted in order to stimulate piety. This was part of the reason that the artwork turned towards naturalism, becoming emotionally engaging and intense.
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The Baroque period ... inherited from the Renaissance a gamut of fretted, bowed instruments. The most important among these was the viola da gamba, or gamba, an instrument with the approximate range of a cello. The gamba was most often used as a continuo instrument, and it disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century. There has recently been a revival of this instrument resulting from an increased interest in the performance of Baroque music using the instruments of the period.
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The Baroque period was ... a time of political and religious tension. Catholic authorities, alarmed by the Reformation, wanted a style of art to draw people back to the Catholic Church. They felt that art of the period should have only one aim: to glorify the Catholic religion and make Catholic beliefs more popular. Paintings and other art created during this time were full of high drama and emotional appeal, portraying vivid images of the Bible, saints, miracles and the crucifixion.
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Music conventionally described as Baroque encompasses a wide range of styles from a wide geographic region, mostly in Europe, composed during a period of approximately 150 years. The application of the term "Baroque", which literally means "pearl of irregular shape", to this period is a relatively recent development, first used by Curt Sachs in 1919, and only acquiring currency in English in the 1940s. Indeed, as late as 1960 there was still considerable dispute in academic circles whether it was meaningful to lump together music as diverse as that of Jacopo Peri, Domenico Scarlatti and J.S. Bach with a single term; yet the term has become widely used and accepted for this broad range of music. It may be helpful to distinguish it from both the preceding (Renaissance) and following (Classical) periods of musical history. A small number of musicologists argue that it should be split into Baroque and Mannerist periods to conform to the divisions that are sometimes applied in the visual arts.
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Baroque Period