Page 100 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Middle Baroque Instrumental Music: Three Favorites
When we think of classical music today, we usually think of instrumental music and instrumental performing groups—a symphony orchestra or a string quartet, for example. The equation classical = instrumental, while certainly not entirely true, nonetheless has some validity—about 80 percent of the Western classi- cal repertoire is instrumental. But when and why did this happen? It occurred during the seventeenth century, in part because of the rising popularity of the violin, which now came to enjoy the same position that the piano would in the nineteenth century, as the favorite instrument for making music in the home. Statistics prove the point. During the Renaissance, the number of prints of vocal music outsold those of instrumental music by almost ten to one; by the end of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, instrumental publications outnum- bered vocal ones by about three to one. The majority of this instrumental music was intended for members of the violin family.
Accompanying the growth of instrumental music was the emergence of a distinctly instrumental sound. Composers increasingly came to realize not only that voices and instruments were different, but also that the various instruments had different strengths—that a violin, for example, was an excellent instrument to run up and down a scale, whereas a trumpet was particularly good at leaping an octave. Accordingly, they began to engage in idiomatic writing (well-suited writing), composing in a way that exploited the strengths and avoided the weak- nesses of particular instruments.
Finally, during the Baroque era, the vocabulary of expressive gestures that had developed for vocal music came to be applied to instrumental music as well. Composers realized that the Doctrine of Affections was valid for instrumental music, too. By adopting devices used in vocal music, composers now made purely instrumental music express rage (with tremolos and rapidly racing scales, for example); despair (with a swooning melody above an ostinato bass); or a bright spring day (by such means as trills and other “chirps” high in the violins and flutes). Even without the benefit of a text, instrumental music could tell a tale or paint a scene, as Antonio Vivaldi does in his “Spring” Concerto.
The Baroque Orchestra
The symphony orchestra as we know it today had its origins in seventeenth- century Italy and France. Originally, the term orchestra referred to the area for musicians in the ancient Greek theater, between the audience and the stage; eventually it came to mean the musicians themselves. By the mid-seventeenth century, the core of the orchestra was formed by the violin family—violins, vio- las, cellos, and the related double bass. To this string nucleus were added wood- winds: oboes and then bassoons and an occasional flute. Sometimes, trumpets would be included to provide extra brilliance. When trumpets appeared, so, too, usually did timpani—trumpets and drums having traditionally sounded togeth- er on the battlefield. Finally, by the end of the seventeenth century, composers
78 chapter five baroque art and music
Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
56797_ch05_ptg01.indd 78 29/08/14 3:33 PM