Baroque Age: Achievement Era

The Baroque was a time of a great intensification of past forms in all the arts: painting saw the works of Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and El Grecian -- in literature it was the time of Moliere, Cervantes, Milton, and Racine -- modern science came into its own during this period with the work of Galileo and Newton. In music, the age began with the trail-blazing works of Claudio Monteverdi, continued with the phenomenally popular music of Antonio Vivaldi and the keyboard works of such composers as Couperin, and came to a close with the masterworks of two of the veritable giants of music history, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel.

In the last years of the sixteenth century, a group of musicians and literati in Florence, Italy experimented with a new method of composing dramatic vocal music, modeling their ideas after the precepts of ancient Greek theater. Their intent was that this new music should prove more direct and communicative to an audience, as the complex polyphony of the Renaissance could very often obscure the text being sung. They instead set a single melodic line against a basic choral accompaniment, and with this notion of homophony, a new era of music began. The Florentine Cameraman called this new form of musical-dramatic entertainment opera. The first operas were private affairs, composed for the Italian courts. But when in 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, Italy, opera became a commercial industry, and the genre in which many composers throughout history first tried out new ideas and new techniques of composition.

With the rise of purely instrumental music in the Baroque Age, there also arose a flowering of instrumental forms and virtuoso performers to play them. One of the earliest masters of the soon-to-be predominant form of the concerto was the Italian composer and violinist Archangel Corella. Corella pioneered the form of the concerto gross, in which the principle element of contrast between two independent groups of instruments is brought into play. The larger group is called the ripen and usually consisted of a body of strings with harpsichord continue, while a smaller group or concerting consisted of two to four solo instruments. The various sections of the concerto would alternate between fast and slow tempos, or movements. Later composers of the period such as Johann Sebastien Bach and Antonio Vivaldi transformed this genre into the solo concerto, in which the solo instrument is of equal importance as the string orchestra.

With a vast amount of choral and chamber music to his credit, Francois Couperin was recognized in his day as the leading French composer. But it is for his harpsichord music that Couperin is best remembered today. He composed a great many suites consisting of dance movements and character pieces with such titles as "Butterflies," "Darkness," "Goat-footed Satyrs," and "The mysterious barricades". This is a charming and graceful music, beguilingly ornamented, and it opened a new direction for composers of keyboard music.

The later French composer Jean Philip Ramo also composed some fine keyboard and chamber music in the new gallant style. At the age of fifty, Ramo successfully embarked on a new career composing the type of lavish operas and ballets so popular at the time in France. But Ramo is best known today as the music theoretician who first rationalized chords and choral relationships into the harmonic system still studied by today's music students.