Baroque Period

In the years around 1600, music underwent rapid changes at the sophisticated courts and churches of northern Italy. The Baroque Period is a period of dramatic expression, of a vigorous, highly ornamented art. With new exciting resources, composers began to write motets, madrigals, and other pieces with new simplicity. This new style took over Italy and it spread out to most of Europe. The term Baroque means imperfect pearl which is used to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, which sharply contrasted the rationality of the Renaissance. Back in the nineteenth century, the term was interpreted as overly ornamented or exaggerated. This emotional, and exaggerated fashion lead to a break down in the fluid of High Renaissance style.
Many of the Baroque personalities from the first part of the period hail from Italy, including Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Corelli, and Vivaldi. Cantata, concerto, sonata, oratorio, and opera, were all forms identified with Baroque music originated from Italy. Although this period initialized in Italy, creating a national style, differences between nations are audible. There was a particular contrast of composition and performance between Italy and France.
One of the major philosophical currents in baroque music comes from the Renaissance interest in ideas from ancient Greece and Rome. Both believed that music was a powerful tool of communication that could arouse emotion to its listeners. Their philosophy made composers aware of the music’s potential power and cultivated the belief to their own compositions. In fact, Claudio Monteverdi defined a first and a second practice. The first practice consisted of harmony and counterpoint which took precedence over the text. The second practice on the other hand, consisted of expressing the meaning of there words which surpassed any other concern. During the Baroque Era, the second practice was more dominating because it used the power of music to communicate.
Some characteristics that the Baroque music included were, the timbre, the pitch and the performance technique. Pitch varied widely at different times and in different places; the music notated on a score might have sounded as much as a half tone lower than how it would traditionally be performed today. Timbre is the harmonic profile that consisted of string instruments such as the violin, viola, and cello.
The Baroque art had such a feeling of movement, energy and tension. Intense spirituality and realism are present. Baroque art degraded the Renaissance style of art and was more exaggerated. There was contrast between light and shade, lines were usually diffused, color was monochromatic and distance indefinite. The spirit of Baroque art added ornamentation and vigor to architecture and laid the roots to a revolution in music. Although the Baroque period ended over 250 years ago, vestiges of the era can be heard anywhere and the spirit of the baroque, an unwavering belief in the power of music to touch people’s lives, changed music history forever.