In our last segment we looked at the Baroque Period
and what was happening in the world
and we looked at some of the artwork from that period of time. So now let's talk
about the music itself before we move on to some very specific pieces from the
period.
So we're talking about the period of time from 1600 to about 1750.
This was a time where equal temperament came into play where we have...
we talk about things in terms of scale, so we talk about pieces being in minor
keys
and major keys and that's a very important aspect of Baroque music that
didn't happen before this
and it's going to continue happening even to the present day.
So our understanding of that is very important.
As far as instruments go in the Baroque Period, there are a couple of instruments that
are... if you hear them in a piece of music
you can pretty much say that's gotta be from the Baroque because they really
don't get used much beyond that.
One of those is the pipe organ.
The pipe organ is the biggest instrument there is, you know it takes up massive
amounts of space just for the part you play,
and then you have
sometimes thousands of pipes
arrayed somewhere in the building to make that happen.
So the pipe organ is
the quintessential Baroque instrument.
It's big.
It can be very loud.
It's very
dramatic looking and you know, and you could put all those little gold Cupids and
things that we loved from our architecture all over your organ,
and then you've just got, this is Baroque heaven here,
big Baroque organ,
lotsa little Cupids dancing around it and big,
big, big sounds.
So that's one extreme. On the other end instrumentally
we have the harpsichord,
which as we saw when we looked at it is a very small instrument and it doesn't play very
loudly.
So we've got the giganticness of the organ
and we've also got
the very intimate
Baroque harpsichord.
If you hear either of those instruments in a piece of music, it's probably Baroque.
They sort of make a resurgence in the 20th Century but then the sounds are going
to also be very different, and the music itself, so you probably wouldn't get confused
about that.
The recorder, that lovely little instrument you played in the third grade,
is actually,
comes back, it's from the Renaissance and earlier but it's very prominent in the Baroque
Period as well.
In this period of time composers didn't always write music saying,
"This is for this specific instrument."
They would just write a melody line and then all the other lines and whoever could
happen to play that could.
So you might hear the same piece played
with the
lead instrument, the recorder,
or it might be the violin,
or it might be
some relative of the flute.
It might even be trumpet.
Those could all play in sort of the same register, the same
level of pitch,
and they could all do the same sorts of things, so they would just interchange and whoever
was available, that's who would play.
Now the trumpet that we had in the Baroque Period is not like the trumpet you know
today.
It's a smaller instrument, it plays much higher,
so we actually refer to it as the Baroque trumpet. It's a lighter sound, not so
brassy marching band kind of sound that you would think.
So, string instruments, obviously those have been around a long time so we
continue to have those.
Violins are particularly important because they can play the melody. So those are the
instruments that you would typically see in Baroque
music, whether it's choral music or instrumental music.
You may remember that we talked about that this is the period of time of the
Thirty Years War where we had all this
conflict
because somebody decided that they wanted to make their country all be under one
religion and that didn't play out very well.
So things that are religious
are important in this period of time in music as well.
We see the development of the chorale or what most people now think of as
being a hymn.
That's really a Baroque thing; comes around with Martin Luther.
The oratorio, which we will talk about in more detail later, that's a religious
based thing. The cantata, all of these come from church
backgrounds
and they're all big vocal
genres during the Baroque Period.
Now, so what's the music itself sound like?
For the most part it's going to be
a very steady beat.
You don't hear a lot of slowing down, you don't hear a lot of speeding up.
At the very end of a piece,
you may hear a slowing down just because that sort of ties everything together to make it
stop
but mostly the beat just,
as Sonny and Cher used to say, "The beat goes on,"
and you are not going to hear too many accents in places that you wouldn't
expect them. So, no big surprises rhythmically happening in the Baroque Period.
The melody in Baroque music
tends to
be very continuous, and what I mean by that is that
there's not really a stopping point, particularly in instrumental music.
It just kind of rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls.
Now, part of the reason that happens,
as we, if you remember we talked about
polyphonic texture and we listened to that Bach invention,
is that the melody keeps moving from one part to another, so
it's not that one instrument or one singer has to just keep singing and singing without ever
breathing.
It's just that the melody keeps kind of piling over itself and therefore
it's very continuous.
So if you're listening to a piece of music and you're finding it very difficult to imagine
where they might breathe in the middle of it,
that's probably a good clue that it's from the Baroque Period because that's very typical.
The melody tends to be mostly disjunct
and
when we say mostly, you know,
don't think that if it's disjunct, it has to be Baroque, or if it's not disjunct it can't
be Baroque.
Obviously not all music in the period is going to fit every single category.
These are general trends.
But, a lot of disjunct movement, a lot of jumping around, think about those
Cupids jumping around on the ceiling again.
We also have the
sort of predominant texture would be polyphonic texture.
So fugues are very big.
Even in vocal music you will hear vocal fugues,
where we have the same line running in multiple places or different lines
running
parallel to each other.
All that polyphony tends to create
a lot of dissonance,
where the notes clash with each other.
But it happens really quickly because in Baroque music
the harmony changes very fast,
which is not like what we will see later so,
we have all these lines running parallel to each other. They're crossing over each other.
You might imagine it like
rush hour
and you have all these cars just sort of scurrying.
Well, occasionally some of them bump into each other. So, got a little dissonance there,
hopefully we just had a minor fender-bender and we go on.
The music is also very
decorated, what we would call ornamented in musical terms
and what that means is that
you might have your melody line, la la la la la la la la
but we are going to ornament it by putting
trills,
mordents, appoggiaturas, they're all sorts of fancy names you don't need to know those
but basically they're extra notes above and below
the pitches that are already in the melody.
So, if I can remember what I just sang to you la la la la la la la la. So if I ornament that it means
it might be la la la la la la la la.
I just put extra notes in.
I might trill. I don't trill very well.
Singers, it's hard to trill. But, you'll hear those kinds of little decorative elements
on the melody. If you take out all the little extra bits you would have just a
straight melody, and
that's typical.
This happens a lot in da capo arias, which we'll talk about later.
It was designed so that the singer could come back and put in
all those lovely decorations that we liked
to hear in that style.
So what about dynamics?
In the Baroque Period, the dynamic contrasts are not
dramatic.
You will rarely see anything beyond
piano or forte marked in the music as a dynamic marking.
It's not... I don't think it's that people couldn't play louder or softer at the time, they just didn't
mark it that way.
But what's
kind of unique about the Baroque Period is the way that they got from soft to loud,
and we know about crescendos and decrescendos, we talked about earlier. We
can get loud or you can get softer.
In the Baroque Period, they didn't do that very much. They basically just went
from very loud
to very soft,
just like that. There was no transition getting from one to the other.
The term for that is terraced
dynamics.
If you imagine a set of terraces like if you've ever seen vineyards
in the mountains where they
sort of cut off shelves and go down, you're on one terrace and then, phoomp, you're on the next
terrace.
There's no
gradual slope down to that.
That's where we get term from so
sudden changes in dynamics are more common,
but again they're not big dramatic changes
in the level of dynamic, so it's not like you go, "Wow,
listen to that."
You would just say, "Oh, that was nice, they just changed dynamics there."
One of the
things that we do with harmony in the Baroque Period
is something called the basso continuo.
Basso continuo or continuing bass, so I guess would be a good translation for that.
What happens in basso continuo is that
for almost every piece of music in the Baroque Period that has instruments of any sort
there's this ensemble called the basso continuo.
It takes at least two people to do this.
One of the people
would be playing some sort of bass instrument, so it might be the cello, it
might be bassoon,
something that can play bottom
notes, and basically they're just playing single notes because that's what they do.
The other instrument has to be some sort of instrument that can play chords.
So, it might be
the harpsichord.
It could be the organ although you don't often hear that used because it
drowns out everything else, it's so massive.
It could be something like guitar or lute.
Anything that you could make more than one note at a time to make harmony.
So you have your bass instrument playing the bottom and then you have somebody else playing
basically what would be the chord structure.
So what they're looking at as musicians
is they've got their music there
is basically, they're both looking at the same thing. They've got a piece of music and it's got a
baseline written out,
but instead of having all the chord notes written out for the
keyboard or
string part, whoever is playing the other part,
it just has a bunch of numbers.
So we might have the note C written on the staff and below it, it might have
6 and 4
and that would tell
me, say I am the harpsichordist who is playing this piece,
that above that C I need to play
F & A so that makes that an F major chord.
And so I'm reading that and I have to be able to look at those numbers and go okay
that's this chord and I play it.
So it's...
the performances will be different every time because it's not like they were just going to go chord,
chord,
chord.
That's not very exciting for the performers or for the audience,
but it gives them a structure. It's very similar to what jazz musicians
do today.
They have a chord structure that they improvise on.
Improvisation is not new. They've been doing this for a long time. In the
Baroque Period,
it's big.
If you're a keyboard player or a lutist or you're playing one of those instruments that plays
continuo,
you had to improvise
because all you were given was that line and some numbers and then you would improvise your
accompaniment based on that. So musicians had to be very, very good at their theory
part. They had to understand the construction of the music so they could do that
improvisation.
So the musicians tend to be very gifted in this period of time.
We hear some amazing music
from this time frame
and think about the instruments that they were playing. Some of those instruments were not particularly technologically advanced
The recorder, you know it's a
tube with some holes in it,
but there's all this wonderful music written because the composer's has these
fabulous musicians
who could play the music for them.
So
we have these wonderful musicians.
What can they do?
So if you're a man, you have lots of options obviously.
Women had far fewer.
So you might be...
you might work for a court if you're a composer.
You might work for the church.
You could be in somebody's court orchestra, so if you were a violinist you
probably played in somebody's court orchestra.
We don't really have the idea of
like, the Boston Symphony. Those sorts of things arent really big. There's no public
audience for that. So everything is private.
Lots of what we would call chamber music, where it's in a smaller space for the smaller
audience.
So you could play in one of these orchestras, you could compose, you could be a
church musician. Those are like the big jobs.
But opera starts in the Baroque Period.
So here's a big place
for performers.
Now, as I said, women don't get to do very much.
So what do we do in opera?
Do we have all male roles in opera?
As we will see when we get to looking at opera in a little more detail later,
no, they're still going to have male characters and female characters.
You've got to have a love interest and there's nothing else so we need that
variety.
But what happens is that the women's roles
are often sung by men.
So
men dressed as women and sang those roles.
That was common practice at the time. Even in Shakespeare, the actors
in Shakespeare were often
young boys or men who played the female roles.
Now, in music we have sort of an
interesting side-bar that goes with that.
They discovered somewhere back there, and we don't even want to think about
why they came up with this, how they discovered this, because it's just kind of too
painful to decide,
to even think about that they did this,
but they discovered
that with a
very appropriately applied
piece of cutting
they could make men
not have their voices change.
So, a little snip of
lower body parts
and they would be sopranos for life.
We call those men who had this particular surgery...
we'll dignify with surgery as a name...
we call these men castrato or plural would be castrati
and you can see where that word comes from.
So basically they did a little surgery on them and if it worked
then
they would retain their higher voice. They would never... their voice would never drop
into the male range, lower ranges.
So you might go to the opera and you would see
even
male heroic characters
being sung by castrati.
In Handel's Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar we think of as this big mainly
warrior kind of guy
[high voice] and he's singing way up here,
because that would have been sung by a castrato.
Today obviously we don't use... do that to people anymore,
but we did right up until the early part of the 20th Century. There were still
living castrato, so
it was big.
The down side is if it didn't work
you might not have any singing voice at all.
So it was a risky proposition but if it did work and you were good at it
these guys were the rock stars of their time. Women chased them and just...
it was... they were... they were stars
and of course the men said well you know
he's had his surgery, what's he gonna do, they didn't know that that didn't really
cause any other issues so
they were very popular with the ladies we'll say.
So, thats' something we don't see much beyond the Baroque Period but it was very
prominent to do that and to
make those men play the female roles.
There were some places where women could sing in the opera, and if they could,
if they were in an area where they allowed that, they did.
So the last thing I would like to talk about in terms of the style or the sound of music
is something we call the Doctrine of the Affections.
This is a period of time we're starting to get a little scientific
about things but they haven't quite got all the details worked out.
So they believed at the time that
if you
played music in a certain key
you could
physically affect
your body.
So, and those
bodily functions were called the affections or the affects. So if you are
having trouble with your liver function,
then you might be recommended to listen to music in a certain key.
So they actually would write music with the intention that this would be good for
your digestion or you know its
kind of a strange idea for us to think about now, but
you think about music therapy, it's the very same idea. Let's use music to affect
our bodies.
But it's a very
sort of codified thing during the Baroque Period to this Doctrine of the
Affections
where we had...
we are going to say that these things go together and we're going to make
those connections.
That happens in both instrumental music
and vocal music.
Unlike word painting which we talked about when we talked about the
madrigal
where the words would be representing...
trying to represent...
the music would represent sounds of the words or what the word meant.
That could only happen in vocal music. Doctrine of the Affections happens in both
instrumental
and vocal music, so that's one of the terms you can apply both ways.
So to sum it all up,
highly decorated,
continuously moving,
pretty predictable,
lots of chord changes,
mostly polyphonic texture,
those are things you might think of as you're listening to Baroque music. Listen
for harpsichords.
Listen for the organ. Listen for recorder and trumpet
and that will give you a clue if you're listening to something, you don't know what it is,
there's you starting point to think that it might be from the Baroque Period.
Now let's take a look at some very specific types of pieces from the Baroque
Period and how this style plays out in those works.