Music of the Baroque

1. Music of the Baroque Pachelbel Vivaldi Bach Handel

2. Baroque Forms • Cantata - • Opera - • Concerto - • Fugue -

4. Doctrine of Affections The "Doctrine of the Affections" was first suggested at the end of the Renaissance when a group of musicians attempted to restore what they perceived to be the pure word-to-music relationships advocated by classical Greek philosophers such as Plato. The idea began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when artists said that the motif of a composition was a statement of an emotional state of being. It was believed, for example, that sadness, or euphoria was expressed by certain combinations of notes.

5. Fundamental Bass Line All parts of Baroque music must be subservient to a bass line.

6. PartsSolo: lute, harpsichord, organ Ensemble: solo with continuo, chamber group with continuo Orchestra: more than one player on a part

7. Johann Sebastian Bach 1685 - 1750

8. Greatest composer of all time, Bach was known during his lifetime primarily as an outstanding organ player and technician. The youngest of eight children born to musical parents, Johann Sebastian was destined to become a musician. He traveled little, never leaving Germany once in his life, but held various positions during his career in churches and in the service of the courts throughout the country. During the years Bach was in the service of the courts, he was obliged to compose a great deal of instrumental music: hundreds of pieces for solo keyboard, orchestral dance suites, trio sonatas for various instruments, and concertos for various instruments and orchestra.

9. The Nikolaikirche, Leipzig It was home of Bach’s first cantata performance and of the first performance of the St. John Passion.

10. Bach brought to majestic fruition the style of the late Renaissance. The art of fugue, choral polyphony and organ music, as well as in instrumental music and dance forms. His adherence to the older forms earned him the nickname "the old wig" by his son, the composer Carl Philip Emanuel Bach. With the death of Bach in 1750, scholars conveniently end Baroque music.

11. Johann Pachelbel1653-1706 Johann Pachelbel was an early Baroque composer. In 1671 he moved to Vienna where he became a student and deputy organist to the Imperial chapel. In 1677 he was organist for one year in Eisenach, the city of Bach's birth eight years later. The following year he moved to Erfurt, where his son was born. While in Erfurt he taught Bach’s older brother. In 1690 Pachelbel became court organist at Stuttgart. Two years later Johann took his final post, in Nuremburg. Johann Pachelbel's repertory is the stylistic ancestor of J. S. Bach's, particularly his technique of chorale variations. Bach’s son named Pachelbel as a composer whose works his father had admired.

12. Pachelbel’s Canon and Gigue in D • for 3 violins and basso continuo • also in organ edition • Heard at weddings

13. Antonio Vivaldi Born: Venice, 1678 Died: Vienna, 1741

14. Another Italian composer and virtuoso violinist, Antonio Vivaldi is remembered today for the enormous number of concertos he composed throughout his lifetime. He most likely learned the violin from his father, himself a violinist at St. Mark's in Venice. Antonio took holy orders to enter the Catholic Priesthood, and became known as "The Red Priest" due to the color of his hair. He became a teacher in Venice at the Ospedale della Pietà (a school for foundling girls) in 1703, and later became the director of concerts there. His music was extremely popular, and he traveled a great deal over Europe, spreading his fame as a violinist and composer.

15. The Four Seasons • In 1725 the publication Il Cimento dell' Armenia e dell'invenzione (The trial of harmony and invention), opus 8, appeared in Amsterdam. This consisted of twelve concertos, seven of which were descriptive: The Four Seasons, Storm at Sea, Pleasure and The Hunt. Vivaldi transformed the tradition of descriptive music into a typically Italian musical style with its unmistakable timbre in which the strings play a major role. • The Four Seasons drawing activity

16. Georg Frideric Händel(George Frederick Handel)Born: Halle, 1685Died: London, 1759

17. Handel’s styleCosmopolitan: -of the world/traveled extensivelyComposer of Italian operas

18. Born in the same year and country as Bach , young Händel was playing the violin, harpsichord, oboe, and organ by the age of eleven. Drawn to the theater from an early age, Händel went to Hamburg in 1703 and began composing Italian operas. He traveled to England where the Queen gave the him an annual stipend of £200 in hopes of keeping him in London as court composer. Händel never returned to Germany. He remained in England for the rest of his life, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1726 and Anglicizing his name to George Frederick Handel.

19. Messiah • Baroque qualities: grand in scale, solos, chorus, orchestra, drama, • emotional, similar to opera • Oratorio: not allowed to be called opera because of its sacred nature; like an opera without actors and stage sets; large in scale, has chorus, soloists, orchestra • Part 1: coming/birth of Christ • Part 2: suffering and death of Christ • Part 3: redemption of humanity

20. Messiah continued… • Recitative: passage of music that gives much information • secco: dry--little instruments • accompagnato--more instruments • Aria: passage of music for solo voice with less information that is repeated • Chorus: rearticulates the information • omits, repeats, inverts to vary • Fugue: composition with musical line articulated in one voice and rearticulated by following voices in repeat, inversion, etc…

21. Water Music was written to accompany a royal barge trip down the Thames in 1717.