Did you know that the epoch that gave us Bach and Handel was called "fancy"? Moreover, it was called far from in a positive context. "The pearl of the irregular (bizarre) form" is one of the meanings of the term baroque. Still, the new culture was wrong from the point of view of the ideals of the Renaissance: harmony, complex images and forms replaced the harmony, simplicity and clarity.
Baroque aesthetics
The musical culture of the Baroque reduced the beautiful and the ugly, tragedy and comedy. “In trend” were “the wrong beauties”, replacing the naturalness of the Renaissance. The world no longer seemed holistic, but was perceived as a world of contrasts and contradictions, as a world full of tragedy and drama. However, this is a historical explanation.
The Baroque period covers about 150 years: from 1600 to 1750s. This is a time of great geographical discoveries (remember the discovery of America by Columbus and the circumnavigation of Magellan), the time of the brilliant scientific discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, the time of terrible wars in Europe. The harmony of the world collapsed before our eyes, just as the picture of the universe itself changed, the concepts of time and space changed.
Baroque genres
New fashion for pretentiousness gave birth to new forms and genres. To convey the complex world of human experiences could operamainly through vivid emotional arias. The father of the first opera is Jacopo Peri (opera "Eurydice"), but it is precisely as a genre that the opera took shape in the works of Claudio Monteverdi ("Orpheus"). Among the most famous names of the baroque opera genre are also known: A. Scarlatti (opera "Nero, who became Caesar"), G.F. Telemann ("Mario"), G. Purcell ("Dido and Aeneas"), J.-B.Lyully ("Armida"), G.F. Handel ("Julius Caesar"), J. B. Pergolesi ("The Maid - lady "), A. Vivaldi (" Farnak ").
Almost like an opera, only without decorations and costumes, with a religious plot, oratorio took an important place in the hierarchy of baroque genres. Such a high spiritual genre as an oratorio also conveyed the depth of human emotions. The most famous baroque oratorios written by G.F. Handel ("Messiah").
From the genres of spiritual music, spiritual cantatas and Passion (Passions are "passions"; perhaps not by the way, but just in case, we all remember one cognate musical term - appassionato, which means "passionately" when translated into Russian). Here the palm belongs to JS Bach ("Matthew Passion").
Another major genre era - concert. A sharp game of contrasts, soloist and orchestra rivalry (recital), or different groups of the orchestra among themselves (genre concerto grosso) - well echoed the baroque aesthetics. Maestro A. Vivaldi ("The Seasons") ruled here, I.S. Bach "Bradenburg Concerts"), G. F. Handel and A. Corelli (Concerto grosso).
The contrasting principle of alternation of different parts was developed not only in the genre of the concert. He formed the basis sonatas (D. Scarlatti), suites and partitas (I.S. Bach). It should be noted that this principle existed even earlier, but only in the Baroque epoch it ceased to be accidental and acquired orderliness of form.
One of the main contrasts of the musical culture of Baroque is chaos and order as symbols of the time. The accident of life and death, the uncontrollability of rock and at the same time the triumph of "rationality," order in everything. Etuantinomy brightest conveyed musical genre foreplay (tokkaty, fantasies) and fugues. I.S. Bach created unsurpassed masterpieces in this genre (Preludes and Fugues for The Well-Tempered Clavier, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor).
As follows from our review, the contrast of the Baroque was manifested even in the scale of the genres. Along with volumetric compositions, laconic opuses were also created.
Baroque musical language
The era of Baroque has contributed to the development of a new style of writing. On the musical arena goes homophony with its division into the main voice and accompanying.
In particular, the popularity of homophony is also due to the fact that the church made special demands on the writing of spiritual compositions: all words must be choosy. So the vocals came to the fore, overgrown with the same numerous musical decorations. Baroque tendency to pretentiousness manifested itself here.
Instrumental music was also rich in decorations. In this regard, was distributed improvisation: the open era of the baroque ostinatny (that is, repetitive, unchanged) bass gave room for fantasy for a given harmonic series. In vocal music, however, long cadences and chains of forchlags and trills often decorated operatic arias.
At the same time, flourished and polyphony, but in a completely different direction. Baroque polyphony is the polyphony of free style, the development of counterpoint.
An important step in the development of a musical language was the adoption of a tempered mode and the formation of tonality. Clearly defined two major frets - major and minor.
Theory of affects
Since the music of the Baroque era served as the expression of human passions, the goals of the composition were revised. Now each work was associated with an affect, that is, with a certain state of mind. The theory of affects is not new, it goes back to antiquity. But in the Baroque era, it became widespread.
Anger, sadness, exultation, love, humility - these affects were associated with the musical language of the compositions. Thus, the perfect affect of joy and fun was expressed in the use of the third, fourth, quint, runaway pace and three-part size in a letter. On the contrary, the sadness affect was achieved by the inclusion of dissonances, chromatics and a slow pace.
There was even an affective characterization of tonalities, in which the stern E-major for a couple with a grumpy E-major resisted the mournful A-minor and tender G-major.
Instead of a conclusion ...
The musical culture of the Baroque had a great influence on the development of the subsequent era of classicism. And not only this era. Even now, echoes of Baroque are heard in the genres of opera and concert that are still popular today. Quotes of Bach's music appear in a hard rock solo, most pop songs are built on the baroque “golden sequence”, and jazz in some measure adopted the art of improvisation.
And no one considers the Baroque "strange" style, but admires its truly precious pearls. Albeit a fancy shape.
Leave Your Comment