• Note-taking Guide for Notion

History

• Death of Bach → 1600 to 1750
  • most important figure → Johannes Sebastian Bach
• expanding middle (merchant) class
• expanding wealth
  • a lot of money being made through trade and banking
• expansion of European colonial territories
• visual art reflected the growing importance of the middle class
  • domestic scenes, portaits, business men (Rembrandt)
  • Dutch business men
• no such thing as “Baroque” historical or political era
• courts still maintained most musical institutions
  • orchestras, opera companies, choirs but non-court musical activities expand
  • collegium musicum - university music societies
  • start of “ticketing” system
    • social hierarchy aspect
• a time of intellectual ferment
  • science continued apace (Newton, Harvey, Kepler, Descartes, Copernicus, etc.)
  • while intensely devout, rationalism and science were chipping away at religious dogma (Galileo example)
• scientific attitude reflected in the arts - order, organization, symmetry, geometry
  • obsession with order and symmetry
  • architecture → Versailles, Orangerie garden 1662
  • Painting: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Valazquez
• modern music industry has roots in the Baroque Era
• concertos - built on the idea of contrast
  • between entire orchestra and a small group, OR
  • between the orchestra and a single instrument
• camerata - Florentine group of musicians/composers
  • lot of elaboration and melisma
  • led to virtuoso - extreme specialization
• figured bass, baso continuo, major/minor system, equal temperament

Characteristics of Baroque Music

• doctrine of affections - not only to arouse emotions but experience it

  <aside> <img src="/icons/list_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/list_lightgray.svg" width="40px" /> PLAY: Purcell - Queen Mary Funeral

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• figured bass, baso continuo, major/minor system, equal temperament

• operas - large-scale productions, expressive, and elaborate

  • aristocrats built private theatres

• cantatas - short unstaged operas; for instruments + 1 to two voices portraying a single scene

  • church cantatas - baed on lithurgical themes
  • chamber cantatas - secular nature, stories of love lost and found, performed in salon or small room