Baroque Instrumental Music

1
Baroque Instrumental Music

• Became as important as vocal music
• New instruments - improved old inst.
• Great virtuosos
• Early - not yet focus on individual color
• Performed on whatever instruments available
• Late - timbre became important
• Wrote more idiomatically

2
Baroque instruments

• Strings (with gut strings)
• Woodwinds - recorder, flute, oboe, bassoon
• Brass - trumpets, horns - natural instruments
• Keyboard - organ, harpsichord, clavichord

3
Baroque Concerto

• Opposition between two dissimilar bodies of sound
• Solo Concerto
• Virtuoso playing, experiments in sonority
• Allegro-Adagio-Allegro
• Concerto Grosso
• Opposition between small group - concertino - and
  large group - tutti or ripieno
• Bachs 6 Brandenburg Concerti

4
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

• Biography, works and Influences
• Report by ---- none this year
• Like Bach - renowned in his day as a performer
• Established ritornello
• Use of pictorial imagery

5
Vivaldi - The Four Seasons

• Based on poetry - word painting
• Programmatic concerto for solo violin
• First movement - Spring
• Birds joyous welcome of spring
• Murmur of streams, thunder and lightning
• Ritornello or refrain

6
Baroque Suite

• Dances - all in the same key
• Allemande - German
• Courante - French
• Sarabande - Spanish
• Jig - English
• Minuet, gavotte, bourée, passepied
• Binary structure (A-B) ---gt A-A-B-B
• Corelli, Bach, Couperin, de la Guerre

7
Jacquet de la Guerre (c. 1666-1729)

• Biography, Works and Influences
• Report by ----- none this year
• Sacred cantatas, chamber music
• Pieces for Harpsichord - suite

8
Baroque Orchestral Suite

• Handel - Water Music
• Lively rhythms and catchy melodies
• Opens with French overture
• 2 Alla Hornpipe
• English country dance in lively triple meter
• A-B-A form
• Terraced dynamics

9
Baroque Sonata, etc.

• Sonata da camera - chamber sonata
• Suite of stylized dances
• Sonata da chiesa - church sonata
• More serious and contrapuntal - s-f-s-f
• Trio sonata - 2 violins continuo (2 players)
• Passacaglia - ground bass, stately triple meter
• French Overture, Italian Overture

10
Baroque Keyboard Music

• Prelude
• Expansion of a melodic or rhythmic figure
• Homophonic
• Fugue
• Subject started alone - in one voice
• Imitated in another voice while 1st continues
  with countersubject
• Opposition between home and contrasting keys

11
J.S.Bach - Prelude and Fugue in C min.

• From Well-Tempered Clavier
• New system of temperament - 48 preludes fugues
• Prelude
• Unity of mood, single affection
• Improvisatory style - perpetual motion
• Fugue
• In 3 voices
• Subject, countersubject, bridge, episodes

12
Baroque Instrumental Forms

• Can you name 4 important instrumental forms of
  the Baroque period?
• Can you explain/describe each?
• Can you give an example of a piece in each form?