Broadcast Yourself. J.S. Bach - Choral from Cantata No.147. Bach Cantata BWV 78 II Leaving Cert Music. Music | About the “Baroque” Period | Music of the Baroque. Baroque Music What is “baroque,” and when was the baroque period? Derived from the Portuguese barroco, or “oddly shaped pearl,” the term “baroque” has been widely used since the nineteenth century to describe the period in Western European art music from about 1600 to 1750. Comparing some of music history’s greatest masterpieces to a misshapen pearl might seem strange to us today, but to the nineteenth century critics who applied the term, the music of Bach and Handel’s era sounded overly ornamented and exaggerated.
Having long since shed its derogatory connotations, “baroque” is now simply a convenient catch-all for one of the richest and most diverse periods in music history. In addition to producing the earliest European music familiar to most of us, including Pachelbel’s Canon and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, the baroque era also greatly expanded our horizons. Back to Top Who were the major baroque composers and where were they from? France: Couperin, Lully, Charpentier and Rameau.
Cantata. Historical context[edit] The term originated in the early 17th century simultaneously with opera and oratorio. Prior to that all "cultured" music was vocal. With the rise of instrumental music the term appeared, while the instrumental art became sufficiently developed to be embodied in sonatas. From the beginning of the 17th century until late in the 18th, the cantata for one or two solo voices with accompaniment of basso continuo (and perhaps a few solo instruments) was a principal form of Italian vocal chamber music.[2] A cantata consisted first of a declamatory narrative or scene in recitative, held together by a primitive aria repeated at intervals.
Fine examples may be found in the church music of Giacomo Carissimi; and the English vocal solos of Henry Purcell (such as Mad Tom and Mad Bess) show the utmost that can be made of this archaic form. With the rise of the da capo aria, the cantata became a group of two or three arias joined by recitative. Baroque[edit] References[edit]