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Baroque: French Baroque
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The dividing line between middle and late Baroque is a matter of some debate. Dates for the beginning of "late" Baroque style range from 1680 to 1720. In no small part this is because there was not one synchronized transition; different national styles experienced changes at different rates and at different times. Italy is generally regarded as the first country to move to the late Baroque style. The important dividing line in most histories of Baroque music is the full absorption of tonality as a structuring principle of music. This was particularly evident in the wake of theoretical work by Jean-Philippe Rameau, who replaced Lully as the important French opera composer.
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Music from the Baroque period is of many styles. There is Italian, French, English, and German Baroque music. There is early, middle and late Baroque music. There is secular and sacred Baroque music. And there are distinctive personal styles of many of the composers. One result of this diversity is a certain difficulty in defining Baroque music in terms of a large number of common elements.
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The Baroque preference for extreme contrast had a decisive influence on the range of musical instruments. The desire for deeper bass resulted in lowering the register of harpsichord and organ, addition of bass strings to the lute and enlargement of the lute family by bigger members. The double bassoon and contrabass trombone were created. With its treble character, the violin became the queen of the instruments. Among the wind instruments, the bassoon and shawm, reborn as oboe, survived. At the close of the seventeenth century, the French horn and clarinet were added to the wind ensemble.
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E[N]gland's introduction to the Baroque style occurred after the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed most of London. Charles II set out to rebuild London in grand style and appointed Christopher Wren (1632-1723) as surveyor to his court. Wren had traveled to Paris in 1665 and returned to England with countless engravings depicting the ornate French Baroque style. The grandiose nature of the French Baroque style had impressed the king; ... it was ill-suited for London.
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T[A]blature in the Baroque period was written in one of two ways. Italian style tablature... used in Spain, used numbers to indicate on which fret to place the fingers, but was written upside down to what we are used to today; that is, the bottom line of the tablature represented the first (high E) string.French tablature, also used in England and Germany, was written right way up, the first string represented by the top line of the tablature, but used letters instead of numbers, a for an open string, b for first fret, c for 2nd, etc. The letter j was not used, so
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The word "Baroque", like most period or stylistic designations, was invented by later critics rather than practitioners of the arts in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It is a French translation of the Portuguese word "Barroco" (meaning an irregular pearl, or false jewel—notably, an ancient similar word, "Barlocco" or "Brillocco", is used in Roman dialect for the same meaning—and natural pearls that deviate from the usual, regular forms so they do not have an axis of rotation are known as "baroque pearls"). Alternatively, it may derive from the now obsolete Italian "Baroco" (meaning, in logical Scholastica, a syllogism with weak content). A common definition, before the term Barocco was used, called this genre simply the style of The Flying Forms.
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French Baroque