The Baroque era, between about 1600 and 1750, was a time of the most startling transformation in music’s priorities as composers drove to manipulate the emotions and shock the senses. Flourishing in Italy at the same time as rich visual arts, a new style of theatre design was beginning to take shape that was marked by strong contrast, intricate detail and direct emotional involvement. The doctrine of the affections had directed composers in how to conjure certain moods — anger, glee, tenderness — by means of characteristic figures and rapid changes between opposites. Music jettisoned the balanced equality of voices that had characterized the Renaissance in favor of hierarchy: a tune soaring above a supporting bass line, with harmony filling out the middle. This polarization manifested the era’s obsession with magnificence and illusion, transforming sound into a theatrical weapon that could move listeners on a deep level.
At the center of Baroque transformation was the emergence of opera, invented in Florence around 1600 as intellectuals sought to regenerate Greek antiquity’s lost tragedy with drama sung. In Venice, Claudio Monteverdi raised the form to a high art by combining speechlike recitative with lyric arias in which characters could stop time and explore interior thoughts. Stages became elaborate, with machinery to allow gods to descend and settings to change miraculously. Opera rapidly spread throughout Europe, accommodating local tastes — with French versions focusing on dance and spectacle, English ones working in spoken dialogue. Theater aside, dramatic intensity also throbbed in oratorio presented in concert, recounting biblical sagas with blazing choruses and solo laments. Music turned into epic storytelling, calling for virtuoso singers to lavish ornamentation on tunes in thrilling flights of improvisation.
During these decades, instrumental music achieved a new and unprecedented degree of emancipation. The violin family itself had reached a level of maturity in the middle of the 18th century prompting composers to play on its expressive capabilities, ranging from fiery brilliance to deep intimacy. Concerti presented soloists alongside orchestral ensembles, and Antonio Vivaldi composed hundreds of them that illustrated seasons, storms and hunting scenes through colorful motifs. Johann Sebastian Bach unified northern and southern styles in Germany, creating fugues of intellectual complexity and monumental greatness as they served churchly urgings or princely purposes. His keyboard works probed every subtlety of harmony and counterpoint — they treated instruments as voices that could engage in profoundly human dialogue. It was George Frideric Handel, who was based in London and who pioneered operatic drama for choral writing with oratorios such as Messiah, combining massive choruses along such memorable tunes that many could be sung by amateurs.
It was the Baroque composers who formulated the basic tonal relations that underlie all music as we hear it. Major and minor keys had distinct emotional characters, with modulations offering travel to related lands. Functional harmony — tonic, dominant, subdominant — introduced a forward motion and resolution on broader terms than had yet been known. > Basso reportedly replied: “Soft bed, hard chamber” Which means today cembalo players and harpsichordists can make music “on the fly”, that is to apply basso continuo instantly turned every performance into a kind of jam session. Mold-like forms such as the da capo aria and the ritornello structure also provided containers for predictability and shock. This created structures with ever-increasing duration and ambition, in which music could spread out across extended works as though they were architectural plans.
The trend toward greater naturalness and simplicity reflected the same taste in appropriate settings for music that found expression in the cult of sensibilité through which, as the 18th century went on, Romanticism would emerge; it also anticipated trends later developed by Classical composers (Bowen 1961). The Baroque legacy lives on, however, in its emotional directness and sheer technical brilliance. The era showed composers that music could have depth and a cast-iron structure, in equilibrium: a stand which continues to caNews Rev. With its complex lacework and thunderous Hosannah chorus, Baroque music echoes the era’s deeply humanistic love of life in all it’s drama and grandeur, reminding us that sound was designed to reflect Man’s boundless soul.