The Baroque Period

768 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The baroque era music essay

The Baroque Period

The Baroque Period (1600-1750) was mainly a period of newly discovered ideas. From major new innovations in science, to vivid changes in geography, people were exploring more of the world around them. The music of the baroque period was just as extreme as the new changes. Newly recognized composers such as Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Monteverdi were writing entirely new musical ideas and giving a chance for new voices to be heard that were normally not thought of sounds. Their musical legacy is still recognized today, and is a treasured discovery of outstanding compositions being reiterated with every performance of them.

Baroque which came from the French word barroque and the Portuguese word barroco originally meant deformed and misshaped. In a sense baroque is an appropriate term to describe this new for of ideas in time. On the other hand, no real word can describe the richness of this time period. Baroque music, just like any other music, reflects the time period that it was written in. The baroque era opened with the Thirty Years War, which included the siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683, and ended with the development of independent nation states throughout Europe. The face of Europe was completely changed during the baroque period. Most music in the baroque era ended up being predominantly vocal, and its biggest factors were the opera and its styles. Most composers of the baroque period shared the same ideas of how their music should...

Show More
Related

  • Sonata Allegro Form

    434 Words  | 1 Pages

    With the rejection of complicated Baroque style of music, the classical era came about. The idea of simpler music would appeal to a broader audience, thus making the classical era more popular. The change was not sudden; rather, the Rococo style was like a transition period. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was an important character in the changing of styles. The Rococo style was known as an expressive or sensitive style. Baroque music usually remained in the same mood throughout a piece, whereas this new style would sometimes change moods abruptly with highly contrasting ideas. The use of ornaments in music gradually went out with the complicated baroque music. Simpler, more original melodies emerged with this new style. During the Baroque era, instrumental music and vocal music were equally important. This contrasts the Classical era where instrumental music was more prominent than vocal.

    Read More

  • The Late Baroque Style Compared to the Classical Style

    526 Words  | 2 Pages

    As the late Baroque period morphed into the new period known as the classical period, technological advances and new compositional techniques and ideas created new opportunities for the musicians of the period. The changes allowed for new performance techniques, forms, performance venues, and newly available compositional orchestrations to be improved and evolved into something new and improved for the new period.

    Read More

  • Georg Phillip Telemann: The Culture Of The Baroque Period

    1311 Words  | 3 Pages

    The composers and their works gave definition to their time eras from the free-form ways of the Modern era to the concrete more formal structure of the Baroque period. Each composer brings a new aspect to their time and brings further value to the music, creativity and knowledge of their time periods.

    Read More

  • John Rupert Martin's "Baroque"

    1152 Words  | 3 Pages

    This book by John Rupert Martin is a good introductory book in the understanding of Baroque artists and their tremendous variety.  Martin defines the Baroque characteristics, but only very broadly leaving a significant amount of room for the reader to make his own deductions.  In general, Martin believes that the typical definitions of the Baroque are "too restrictive and hence likely to create more problems of classification and interpretation than it solves."  Even the time of the Baroque is left open to the reader when Martin says the Baroque is roughly comprehended by the seventeenth century.  It is important to note at the outset that this is only a convenient approximation;  for epoch as a whole can certainly not be fitted into such a strait-jacket."  This helps to define the Baroque much more generally as a gradual change which can much easily be noticed from the present than the past.

    Read More

  • Baroque

    525 Words  | 2 Pages

    Classicism of the Renaissance has been replenished during the Baroque period. During the Baroque artistic period, the exploration of the fundamental components of human nature and the realm of senses and emotions were very crucial. The Baroque era was a very dynamic time that showed an abundance of radiance and color. Artists of this time are passionate and sensual. Their works were many times considered to have an overpowering emotional effect.

    Read More

  • Renaisssance versus Baroque Periods

    958 Words  | 2 Pages

    Baroque era covers the period between 1600 and 1750 beginning with Monte Verdi (birth of opera) and ended with deaths of Bach and Handel. The term baroque music is borrowed from the art history. It follows the Renaissance era (1400-1600). It was initially considered to be a corrupt way of Renaissance by conservatives. The dominant trends in Baroque music correspond to those in Baroque art and literature. Some features of Baroque art included a sense of movement, energy, and tension (whether real or implied). Strong contrasts of light and shadow enhance the effects of paintings and sculptures. Opera is one of the types of music in the Baroque era. It represented melodic freedom. Baroque era was usually referred to as the thorough-bass period. In early Baroque era no tonal direction existed, but experiments in pre-tonal harmony led to the creation of tonality. [1] Baroque genre included instrumental suite, ritornello, Concerto grosso and chant. There were important composers of the Baroque period such as Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi William Byrd Henry Purcell and George Phillip Telemann. Starting in northern Italy, the hierarchical state -- led by either the urban bourgeoisie or despotic nobles -- replaced the fluid and chaotic feudal system of the middle Ages. [2] For this reason, some historians refer to the Renaissance as the Early Modern Era. Sculptors, building on the techniques of artists such as Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680), found ways to create the illusion of energetic and even violent movement in their works. Painters created larger and more crowded canvases. Virtuosity was used in all the arts. The arts became an important measure of learning and culture. Music moved from the science of number to an expressive art viewed as an equal to rhetoric.

    Read More

  • “The Martyrdom of St. Matthew” - Painting Analysis

    967 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...ic landscapes. The baroque marked the time in which painters considered using subjects other than scenes from the Bible and from classical traditions. The baroque period also was the period in which artists painted portraits, and everyday life scenes. Baroque artist broke away from trying to make the calm balance known to the renaissance artists. Artists from the baroque era were interested in no longer tried in the extreme. They wanted to paint subjects possessing strong emotions; they wanted to capture those emotions and feelings in their work. Instead of just extremes of feeling sometimes, these strong emotions were personal. More often artists tried to portray intense religious emotions. Baroque art attempted to explain how and why their subjects fit as strongly as they did by representing their emotional states as vividly and analytically as possible.

    Read More

  • Classical Music

    1052 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Baroque era contains three phases: early, middle, and late. During the early phase of Baroque, harmony became the central idea to music. The Florentine Camarata reinvigorated this style and were the ones who opposed their contemporary music. This group started in Italy and influenced composers in France. Baroque music would help create the popular form of music known as opera. Since it focuses on the soloist rather than a group of people singing simultaneously. It also focuses on the harmonic aspect of music (Palisca, 25).

    Read More

  • The Baroque Era

    1278 Words  | 3 Pages

    one cantata a week while he was music director at Leipzig. Due to the pace

    Read More

  • Baroque and Classical Periods in Music

    813 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Music” as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, is “vocal or instrumental sounds combined in such a way as to produce the beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.” Emotion, and the treatment of emotion, is indubitably an important aspect of music from all eras, but the manner in which emotion is expressed, has changed over time. Throughout the Baroque period (c. 1600 – 1750) musicians attempted to cause a specific extreme emotion in the listener, while during the Classical period (c. 1750-1825) composers sought to produce a balance of emotions. Due to philosophical and artistic movements that occurred, emotion, a critical element of music, was conveyed differently between the Baroque and Classical periods.

    Read More

  • Baroque Art

    1244 Words  | 3 Pages

    Baroque art can be described as a “distinctive new style” in which artists embraced “dynamism, theatricality, and elaborate ornamentation, all used to spectacular effect, often on a grandiose scale”. Baroque art encompasses a vast range of art from the dramatic and theatrical Italian pieces, as the quote suggests, to the more simple and every-day life but still fabulous Dutch pieces. Baroque art can hardly be contained in one description because it describes so many types of art, in great part due to the religious, socio-economic, and political scenes of the time. Religiously, the Catholic Church was responding to the Reformation by creating dramatic pieces to invoke piety and devotion. Politically, monarchies and rulers were using commissioned art to emphasize their authority and their given right to rule. Socio-economically, the middle class was rising and therefore wanting to buy and commission pieces of art to boost their reputation and validate their status in the social scene. These three changes were extremely significant but can by no means generalize the entire historical context of Baroque art. Instead, they stand as specific examples of important reasons for the range and breadth of Baroque art.

    Read More

  • Comparing the Baroque Era and the Classical Era

    1287 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...al era differ greatly in regards to style and structure but both succeeded at impacting musical history. The greats that we acknowledge today stemmed from these very eras. The Baroque era ushered in the genre of Opera, while the Classical era introduced a new outline for structuring musical compositions. The Baroque and

    Read More

  • A Comparison Of The Baroque And Neoclassical Periods

    1167 Words  | 3 Pages

    The earlier period between the two, the Baroque era, took place roughly during the seventeenth century and lasted into the early eighteenth century. Characteristically, the Baroque period with respect to its style is widely known for its typical shape being more complex than compared to earlier times. A Baroque era building may have a shape that more so represents an oval or an ellipse, compared to the square, circle, or cross depicted in the Renaissance era, for example. (Visual-Arts-Cork.com, 2014) It is also known for being built more on a grandiose and dramatic appearance. Another characteristic that is known about the Baroque era buildings is that the planners of that era tended to build entire cities to fit a sort of preset arrangement around its most magnificent or important buildings and structures. The builders and architects would have the tendency to place grand parks and gardens around important city focal points. It really was a modern day equivalent of city or town planning. (Visual-Arts-Cork.com, 2014)

    Read More

  • Baroque Art Essay

    1446 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Baroque era was the age of magic. Flat surfaces became three-dimensional and paint on plaster became alive. It was the age of masterful illusion. Nothing exhibits this mastery better than Baroque ceiling paintings.

    Read More

  • Classical Music Influence On Modern Music

    1292 Words  | 3 Pages

    This era is recognized by the creation of tonality, as well as the establishment of the opera, cantata, and concerto. Different from the classical era, this era featured a unity of mood, a continuous rhythm and melody, and a predominantly polyphonic texture, meaning that there were two melody lines, each fighting for the listener 's attention. The composers from the Baroque period were well-known for their extravagant, frivolous and bizarre usage of their instruments and their performances. The most notable influence from this era is in modern music especially rock music, because in rock music emotions are intense and the mood are usually unified just like the music from the Baroque period. Some artists and rock bands have adopted this bizarre style, for example Prince and Lady Gaga. Many rock bands were inspired by composers of this era such as Bach because of the intensity of his

    Read More

More about The Baroque Period

Open Document