The Baroque

Baroque is derived from the Italian barocco, meaning bizarre, though a better translation is exuberant more accurately reflecting the sense. The use of this term originated in the 1860s to describe the highly decorated style of 17th and 18th century religious and public buildings in Italy, Germany and Austria.

Later, during the early-to-mid 1900s, the term baroque was applied, to music of the 17th and early 18th century. Today the term baroque has come to refer to a very clearly definable type or genre of music that originated around 1600 and came to fruition between 1700 and 1750.

Music of the period 1200 -1400 is a relatively primitive sound in terms of melody and harmony. By the1500s a great difference occurs as Italian music began to blossom and English composers like Dowland, Morley and Tomkins produced the wonderful melodies and surprisingly sensitive poetry which accompanied them - or vice versa.

A major theme underlying music at that time was the exploration of form.

In north Germany and Holland, composers such as Dietrich Buxtehude were concentrating mainly on the art of counterpoint, especially the fugue. Here, organ and voice were the major elements.

At the other end of Europe, in Rome, the instrumental forms of the sonata and concerto were being formalised. Much of what is typical in baroque music, specifically cadences and snatches of melody, can be traced back to Archangelo Corelli, who seems to have influenced just about everybody, from his Italian contemporaries and students to Handel, who lived in Rome from 1704 to 1710.

From Rome, the "Italian" influences spread northwards while the stricter north German forms flowed southwards, intermingling to produce a common baroque vocabulary. Indeed, the inter-mingling of musical trends from different parts of Europe was surprisingly extensive, considering the relatively poor methods of travel and communication. Vivaldi, Geminiani, Corelli, Scarlatti, Handel and many others all met one another or were thoroughly conversant with one another's music.

Bach journeyed north from Thuringia and Saxony, southern Germany, to hear Buxtehude, and his later travels included Dresden and Berlin. Bach owned and/or copied the music of many of his contemporary composers, often re-writing them for different instruments. Indeed this was a recognised method of study widely practised at the time.

It is important to understand the circumstances under which composers of this period worked in. Vivaldi, in what is now Italy, composed many fine concertos (like the Four Seasons and the Opus 3) but also many works that sound like five-finger exercises for students. Vivaldi was "employed" for most of his working life by the Ospedale della Pietà. Often termed an "orphanage", it was in fact a home for the female "offspring" of noblemen. The Ospedale was thus well endowed by the "anonymous" fathers; its furnishings bordered on the opulent, the young ladies were well looked-after, and the musical standards among the highest in Venice. Many of Vivaldi's concerti were indeed exercises that he would play with his many talented pupils.

There were two major influences in Germany, at this time, the church and the state(s). Germany did not exist as we know it today. It was a complex mass of small principalities, each with its own Court. Alliances came and went as princely families inter-married thus uniting, for a time anyway, their respective territories. Many a composer's success rose or fell with the status accorded to music at the court in which he was serving. Composer-musicians would try to seek a position in a city or court where music was known to be thriving under the patronage of an enthusiastic king or prince. The courts at which he was employed influenced Bach's early music. The greater part of his working life, however, was spent in Leipzig where his position as Cantor of St Thomas' Church required church cantatas in abundance (200 have come down to us, some 100 more are supposed lost).

It is in the music of JS Bach that the different forms and styles of the baroque period came together. Johann Sebastian Bach came from a musical family stretching back through many generations, and the Bachs were well-known throughout what is now southeast Germany. The Bach family members were church and court musicians, teachers, and one or two were instrument-makers. Though Bach himself travelled less than some of his contemporaries, he seems to have been able to draw freely and widely on the developments taking place throughout the western European musical world. Later in Bach's life, during his Leipzig years, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote that "no musician of any consequence visiting Leipzig would fail to call upon my father". Leipzig was an important and cosmopolitan university city, and visiting musicians would call upon Bach or stay at his apartments in the Thomas School building where they would make music together on whatever ensemble of instruments the occasion could muster. Many of Bach's later concertos were written or modified for such occasions - the 3 and 4 harpsichord concertos for example. When he died in 1750 JS Bach left a legacy that summarised his art, his life's work in which he had, by general recognition, brought baroque musical forms to the peak of their development. He left 48 Preludes and Fugues for the keyboard adopting. The new "equal temperament" enabling all keys to be played equally and modulation between keys. The Art of the Fugue (complete, though many deny this, attaching an incomplete fugue which is not part of the "Art"), and the Goldberg Variations, a set of 30 Variations on a popular tune. He also left numerous collections of chorale variations, canons, and fugues, as well as many pieces in more standardised form such as preludes, sonatas and concertos. Add to that, some 200 cantatas, the Passions, and the monumental B-Minor Mass (plus the Four Shorter Masses which Bach "assembled" drawing upon what he considered as his finest cantata movements).

After Bach music changed again Even the music of his sons, with the possible exception of Wilhelm Friedemann, was quite different in character, expressing the new "gallant" style which was lighter, with less stress on pure form., a system to be used by composers such as Haydn and Mozart and the "romantic" composers such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Mendelssohn led the baroque revival, while Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven and many others produced fugues in strict baroque style. Max Reger, as well as writing many pieces in baroque contrapuntal style, adapted Bach's Six Brandenburg Concertos for two pianos.

Many instruments reached the peak of their development at the height of the baroque era; the organs of Arp Schnitger (north Germany) and Bach's close friend Gottfried Silbermann (Saxony, south Germany) were among the period's finest and are still regarded as such today. Likewise the violins and other stringed instruments of the baroque Italian masters are the prized possessions of today's professional string players. The domestic, and later concert keyboard instrument provides an example of disappearance, replacement, then rediscovery. The baroque age favoured the harpsichord, in which the strings are plucked and the player cannot vary the tone through finger touch. After 1750 the piano took over, offering touch sensitivity, and developing later into the "iron grands" needed for concert-hall performances of the great romantic concertos by such as Beethoven. However it was the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann, working with Bach, who contributed substantially to the development of the piano. King Frederick the Great is said to have owned no less than fourteen Silbermann fortepianos (as they were then called) in his Sans Souci palace at Potsdam, just west of Berlin. It was ostensibly in order to "try out" such an instrument that JS Bach was invited to Potsdam in 1747. The result of this visit was The Musical Offering.

Music which is melodious yet so constructed as to reflect the "perfect order" of the universe: that is the essence of the baroque In the words of baroque composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux: "A composition meets the demands of good taste if it is well constructed, avoids trivialities as well as wilful eccentricities, aims at the sublime, but moves in a natural ordered way, combining brilliant ideas with perfect workmanship."