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Instrumental Baroque Music

INSTRUMENTAL BAROQUE MUSIC AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS

The 17th and early 18th centuries saw a dramatic change in musical styles, particularly with regard to instrumental music. Until the early 1600s, instrumental music was secondary to music for voice. Words were a key part of music, with instruments serving largely as accompaniment. That began to change as technology brought about better instruments and more varied instruments capable of producing varying dynamics and with a wider range in tones. Increasingly, composers focused on the intricacies of instrumental music, in some cases using the instruments as a substitute for the human voice. The Baroque musical period, as this time became known, saw the rise of opera·particularly in Italy·and also gave rise to one of the greatest composers of Western music, Johann Sebastian Bach. It is with Bach's death that the period is generally considered to come to an end and the Classical period to begin. The 150 years designated the Baroque period borrows the title from architecture, and is marked by a time of increased energy and movement. To understand the Baroque musical styles, it is also necessary to understand the style that preceded it and which formed the basis for the Baroque "reaction." This research examines the key characteristics of the Baroque period in instrumental music.

The starting point of the new epoch is usually taken as the year 1600, when the Italian melodrama (opera) came into being, and its end is generally considered to have come with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750. The history of music underwent extraordinary changes in this century and a half during which forms that were to exist for hundreds of years were devised, and the structure of harmony was established on foundations that lasted into much later times.

In music, the term Baroque has been used to describe a certain concept of art, a stylistic idiom, but also a method of composition b...

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Instrumental Baroque Music. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:02, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1696351.html