Page 92 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 5.4
Imitative counterpoint
the stark blue and red colors add intensity, while the head of the victim, set at a right angle to his body, suggests an unnatural motion. Baroque art sometimes delights in the pure shock value of presenting gruesome events from history or myth in a dramatic way.
Music of the Baroque is also highly dramatic. We observed in the music of the Renaissance (1450–1600) the humanistic desire to have music reinforce the text so as to sway, or affect, the emotions, as ancient Greek drama had once done. In the early seventeenth century, this desire culminated in a new aesthetic theory called the Doctrine of Affections. The Doctrine of Affections held that different musical moods could and should be used to influence the emotions, or affections, of the listener—be it rage, revenge, sorrow, joy, or love. Not sur- prisingly, the single most important new genre to emerge in the Baroque period was opera. Here the drama of the stage joined with emotional music to form a powerful new medium.
Characteristics of Baroque Music
Perhaps more than any other period in the history of music, the Baroque gave rise to a bewildering variety of musical styles, ranging from the expressive mon- ody of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) to the complex polyphony of J. S. Bach (1685–1750). Yet despite the multiplicity of styles, two elements remain constant throughout the Baroque period: an expressive, sometimes extravagant, melody and a strong supporting bass.
Expressive Melody
Renaissance music, as we saw in Chapter 4, was dominated by polyphonic tex- ture, in which the voices of a choir spin out a web of imitative counterpoint. The nature and importance of each of the lines is about equal, as Figure 5.4 suggests.
S A T B
An equal-voice choir might be a useful medium to convey the abstract religious thoughts of the multitudes. To communicate raw human emotions, however, a direct appeal by a soloist seemed more appropriate. In early Ba- roque music, then, all voices are not created equal. Rather, a polarity de- velops in which the music projects more strongly from the top and the bot- tom. In between, the middle voices do little more than fill out the texture (Figure 5.5).
S A T B
Figure 5.5
Soprano-bass polarit
70 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 70 29/08/14 3:33 PM
<
<
© Cengage Learning®
© Cengage Learning®