Chapter 3

THE BAROQUE PERIOD (CA. 1600–1750)

The word baroque, originally referring to a misshapen pearl, eventually became a term of derision for the florid architecture of the seventeenth century, which was out of fashion in the next generation. Among other things, the grandiose style of baroque churches, with their cloudy decoration, their painted ceilings seeming to stretch up to a heaven teeming with angels, was part of an initiative by the Catholic Church to challenge the appeal of the Protestant Revolution with grandeur to dazzle the senses. As often happens, over time baroque lost its negative connotations and simply became a label for the period.

In music, the baroque we’re concerned with started in Italy around 1600, when a group of intellectuals known as the Florentine Camerata resolved to re-create ancient Greek drama—which they understood to be stories entirely sung. Their historical knowledge was dicey, so in practice they created an entirely new kind of artwork: opera, sung drama. Along with this new medium came a revolution in musical texture. In early opera the music was considered entirely the servant of the text and story. Declaring that Renaissance-style polyphony was not able to express concise emotions in a drama, the Camerata created a style in which a text was recited in a kind of singsong over simple harmonies, what was called recitative.

In terms of musical texture the result was a generally new kind of music we call homophony, which as previously noted refers to a single tune with chordal accompaniment—in other words, what has been the main definition of a song or instrumental piece ever since. As a result, harmony, which had always been seen as a kind of by-product of polyphony, now took on a new significance in itself. Composers began to think of harmony as a progression of chords. Often in early opera only the voice part and the instrumental bass line were written down; from the bass line and number symbols representing the chords, keyboard players improvised the accompaniment. This “figured bass” was much like a modern song lead sheet, which has only the tune and chord symbols.

In the seventeenth century Claudio Monteverdi called the old polyphonic style “first practice” and modern homophony “second practice.” Monteverdi did not write the first operas, only the first great ones—Orfeo and The Coronation of Poppea. He began the process of moving beyond virtually all-recitative operas, in which the text was king and the music relatively simple, to richer musical fabric: songful and expressive arias, choruses, colorful instrumental accompaniments. Recitative persisted in opera into the nineteenth century, but more and more the musical elements and therefore musical interest tended to edge it out, until by the late eighteenth century Mozart declared the music in his operas more important than the words.

Still, polyphony, a.k.a. counterpoint, never died out. Both homophony and counterpoint coexisted, often in the same piece. Baroque composer Handel wrote plenty of tuneful homophonic music but was also a master of counterpoint. The supreme genius of counterpoint was a contemporary of Handel: Johann Sebastian Bach, who died in 1750. Bach’s dedication to counterpoint marked him as a backward-looking composer among his colleagues, though he was also intensely aware of opera and other contemporary trends.

Bach was history’s greatest writer of the contrapuntal procedure called fugue, another term that requires explanation. A fugue is a contrapuntal procedure/genre that was often used in the baroque, but was so effective and flexible that it lasted into the twentieth century: high-modernist Béla Bartók began his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta with a massive fugue. A fugue can have any number of voices/lines, but usually involves three to five. It is based on a scrap of tune called the subject. The idea is that the subject gets passed from voice to voice, each voice picking it up like a topic in a conversation.

In practice the matter is more complicated. For one thing, in some (not all) fugues there’s a countersubject, which is another scrap of melody that accompanies the subject throughout. Each time a new voice picks up the subject, the preceding voice continues on with the countersubject. Here’s a diagram of the beginning of a three-voiced fugue with countersubject:

 

As you see, after each voice has stated subject and countersubject, it goes on to mess around on its own. Meanwhile the entries of the subject are not all in the same key; the entries change keys as the fugue progresses. While all this pertains to the melodic lines, the whole shebang also has to make effective harmony, otherwise it would sound like random nonsense. As musicians put it, you have constantly to reconcile the demands of the horizontal (melody) and the vertical (harmony).

If all this seems complex and hard to manage for the poor composer, it bloody well is. Fugue and canon are some of the most difficult musical disciplines, which is why so many composers have been challenged and fascinated by them. And this is only the simplest form a fugue can take.

The diagram lays out what is called an exposition section in a fugue, which means a stretch where the subject is entering. Every fugue has several expositions, usually spaced by what are called episodes, which are sections of free counterpoint with no subject entries—but using material derived from the subject. So, in its large form a fugue will progress in the pattern exposition–episode–exposition–episode…, moving through various keys, for as long as you like. At the end there may be an exciting effect called a stretto (the Italian means “tight”), where the entries of the subject come in sooner, before each has finished, as if in its eagerness to be heard the subject steps on the heels of its twin. If a composer wants to end with a stretto, he or she has to plan it from the beginning in creating a subject that will allow for the effect. (Good counterpoint rarely happens by happy accident.)

There can also be double fugues, triple fugues, and so on, in which there is more than one subject in the course of the piece. All this describes a freestanding fugue. But any number of works, such as movements of symphonies and string quartets, have integrated fugal sections. Those sections often don’t have complex structures involving episodes, strettos, and the like; they can be a fughetta (little fugue) or fugato (fugue-ish).

With enough brain-breaking practice and a modicum of talent, any composer can learn to write canons and fugues. Thousands have been written over the centuries, many of them clever and technically impeccable. The trouble is, most of them are boring, because in addition to the daunting technical requirements, the piece is of little use if it doesn’t also manage to be expressive—to be moving, charming, amusing, those kinds of things that we expect of music.

This is where the supremacy of J. S. Bach in contrapuntal music comes in. He seems to have had an Einsteinian sort of mind that could handle the most outlandish difficulties of fugue and canon with ease: whole fugues that are heard right-side up, then upside down; he produced fiendishly obscure puzzle canons; and so on. But as Bach told his composer sons: never do anything, not even a little chorale harmonization, that does not say something. In other words, that is not expressive, and in the case of a text, expressive of the feelings and images of that text.

Very few composers have had the gift of making complex counterpoint warm and human, as Bach did. A wonderful example of this is in his jazzy and dazzling Contrapunctus IX, a double fugue with inversions of the subject, from The Art of Fugue. That latter collection, a chain of fugues of increasing complexity all featuring the same subject, is one of the most esoteric pieces ever written, and yet it speaks to audiences in the most compelling and visceral way.

Another important formal pattern of the baroque period was the concerto grosso (big concerto), which sets off a small group of instruments against a larger group. The full group is called the tutti (meaning “everybody”); the solo group, the soli. The form of a concerto grosso is simple. It begins with a tutti, everybody playing an expansive tune on which the whole piece will be based; then there is a section for the soli, answered by the tutti on a bit of the opening theme; and so on: tutti–soli–tutti–soli–tutti… until you’re done. Meanwhile the music changes key here and there for the sake of tonal variety, and at the end, everybody joins in on a big restatement of the full theme in the home key. Baroque concertos for solo instrument follow the same pattern. Handel and Bach wrote some supreme examples, such as the latter’s six Brandenburg Concertos.

The baroque also saw a new interest in instrumental music (without vocals) and with writing music particular to the instruments that are playing it. In the Renaissance the instruments used in a piece tended to be somewhat ad hoc, because vocal and instrumental lines were written pretty much the same. In the baroque arrived schools of violin playing, of keyboard playing, and the like. Composers were concerned for the first time with writing, say, idiomatic fiddle music as distinct from flute music, flute music as distinct from vocal music, and so on. In a natural corollary, there was a new emphasis on instrumental and vocal virtuosity. At the same time, however, while the baroque had lots of orchestral music (and the Renaissance none) there was as yet no standard makeup of the band. You picked the instruments you wanted for a given piece and/or what instrumentalists you had at hand—music in those days was often performed as soon as the ink was dry.

This new emphasis on instrumental music led to a new concern with ways of organizing music, which is to say with “abstract” musical form. The old procedures of fugue and canon were still around, but we also see the forms and rhythms of dance music getting into big pieces, leading to such things as Bach’s solo violin and cello works put together in dance genres of the time—allemande, sarabande, gigue, chaconne, and the like, each with its allied rhythms and moods.

It was the florid grandeur of composers such as Bach and Handel in their large works that allied them with the atmosphere of baroque churches. Tonally, Baroque counterpoint was distinct from the older Renaissance polyphony in being richer in sound, more concerned with harmony and concise progressions of chords. To our ears baroque harmony sounds more modern than it did in the Renaissance; it uses the familiar major and minor scales rather than modes, and in its course it changes keys more often. Meanwhile, especially in eighteenth-century Germany, composers adopted a “doctrine of the affections,” in which a vocabulary of gestures in the melody, harmony, and rhythm were used to represent more or less specific emotions. Each movement of a work was founded on one basic musical idea and one expressive affect. An example is the Crucifixus of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, with its mournful descending bass line.

Baroque music ranges from grand and magisterial to intimate, depending on the forces and the expression. How to tell a baroque piece by ear? I can’t provide a handy guide to that other than to say when you’ve listened to some Handel and Bach and Vivaldi, you’ll learn to recognize the sound, because among them they epitomized the period. You’ll notice that, after the Renaissance, music got bigger, grander, more colorful in sound and harmony, and more expressive. The Renaissance went for an exquisite realization of something within limited means; the baroque went for lavish.

In brief, to understand the baroque you need to look at the invention of opera and the musical chain of events it unleashed. The new emphasis on a single melodic line with some kind of accompaniment, whether simple or florid, led in turn to all kinds of developments: solo song in its many manifestations, more elaborate and idiomatic instrumental music, a more harmonically controlled kind of counterpoint, and a new concern with form. What we call a song had been born.