The Complete History of Music, Part 3: The Early Baroque

Explore how the Baroque era, spanning 1600 to 1750, embraces irregularity and rich ornamentation, marks a move away from Renaissance tradition, and ushers in opera.

Explore how the early baroque affections, grounded in humours and Descartes’ passions of the soul, shaped music as a healthful, emotive collaboration across arts, culminating in opera.

Explore how Baroque music centers on bass and continuo with improvised inner parts guided by figured bass, and how the concerto emerges as a dialogue between soloist and orchestra.

Explore how baroque harmony evolves with freer dissonance, chromatic passages, and emerging norms, while ornamentation and cadenza reshape notation.

Listen to Monteverdi's early Baroque opera excerpt from act 3, featuring a tenor with continuo and violin, and notice ornamentation such as trills.

Explore how baroque opera integrated drama, music, and libretto to express affections, drawing on Greek tragedy, with arias as vocal solos that showcase singers.

Explore the earliest surviving opera, a Florence setting of Orpheus and his wife by Jacobo Perry, introducing rest to teach style with basso continuo on cello and lute.

Monteverdi rises as a pioneer of the baroque opera, composing three operas (two survive) and becoming maestro di cappella at St. Mark's, Venice, after a prolific sacred and madrigal career.

Impresarios finance lavish opera productions, fostering the diva phenomenon as a star-driven era. Anna Renzi and other sopranos tailor roles and arias, shaping touring, virtuosity, and star worship.

Explore sacred music in the Catholic Church, balancing big operatic styles with old polyphony. Examine the rise of oratorio and the small sacred concerto across churches.

Explore Carissimi's Jephte, a famous oratorio based on Judges, featuring a narrator, some paraphrasing, a small ensemble of six singers, and a modest instrumental ensemble.

Explore how Lutheran church music embraced the small sacred concerto and polyphony, with Heinrich Schütz applying Italian style and text painting to enhance church drama.

Polyphony enters synagogue music in the 17th-century baroque era, championed by Rabbi Leon Madina; Solomon Rosie adapts Monteverdi-influenced Italian chant with Hebrew text in the first polyphonic Jewish liturgical book.

Differentiates instrumental music from vocal, establishing it as equal in status during early baroque. Illustrates violin as a leading instrument, parallel to the solo voice with vibrato and virtuosic embellishment.

Explore the improvised toccata form in early baroque music, with brief, varying figures for harpsichord or organ, as Frescobaldi's preludes and toccatas showcase instrumental focus and endings at natural cadences.

Trace the early formation of the sonata, typically violin with continuo, featuring idiomatic violin writing, leaps, double stops, and trills, as heard in Biagio Marini’s Opus 8.

Explore early baroque dance suites linked to social dancing, theater, and chamber music, written for lute, keyboard, or strings, with twenty suites sharing a common sequence and melodic ideas.

Trace how Louis XIV's court in 17th-century France shaped music through court ballet, royal chapel, chamber, and great stable, with 24 violins and 18 strings, birthing modern ensembles.

Explore how French opera developed as a distinct genre under Louis the 14th and Luli, featuring diverted amounts, long dancing interludes, and grand overtures to usher in the king.

Explore Lully's Armide overture as a French opera piece that shows the shift from modal systems to a tonal language built on major and minor scales.

Tracks the rise of lute and harpsichord music in France, the shift to dance suites in binary form, and the French suite's flexible order versus the German tradition.

Explore how English music blends Italian and French influences with native traditions, the mask as a collaborative operatic form, and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas amid England's puritanical restrictions.

Examine Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, a short miniature opera blending English mask with French and Italian influences, featuring dance and English-language recitatives in a compact three-act form.

Explore how 17th-century English music expanded from royal commissions and Purcell’s home pieces to the first public non-dramatic concerts, funded by theatres and paid musicians.

Explore how Spain's vast empire, including the new world, shaped early baroque music through zarzuela, a Spanish musical theater with alternated sung and spoken dialogue, ensemble and solo singing.

Survey Spanish and colonial instrumental music, organ and guitar, an improvised 'tanto' style, harp and guitar chamber works, and dance rhythms; plus vernacular polyphonic church mass and Christmas pieces.

Explore how an early baroque piece by Araujo uses two troubled choirs that alternate with rapid text and syncopation, narrating a boy's journey to Bethlehem to find infant Jesus.

Explore Italian opera and cantata as they develop in Venice, Naples, and Florence, with arias, refrains, and dance forms like jig and sarabande, leading to de capo aria and Scarlatti.

Explore the cantata as Rome's intimate vocal chamber form, with short, non-staged performances for audiences, and learn how Scarlatti popularized the da capo aria with an ABA form inviting ornamentation.

Explore Scarlatti's cantata 'Clori vezzosa e bella,' a solo cantata featuring an aria where a shepherd proclaims his passionate love for a nymph, introducing early baroque music.

Explore the early baroque rise of the violin, Stradivarius craftsmanship, and the evolution of the sonata into multi-movement forms, including chamber, church, and trio sonatas with bass continuo.

Shaped italian orchestras and wrote violin sonatas, Corelli, 17th-century composer and violinist, pioneered a vocal-like violin style despite writing no vocal music in his church sonata op. 3 no. 2.

Explore the development of the instrumental concerto from the vocal model as the orchestra forms, and learn about the orchestra concerto, concerto grosso, and solo concerto.

Germany’s 17th century landscape remains decentralized, with town pipers and court musicians shaping a guild-driven culture through public ceremonies, parades, and city hires, while instrumental and organ music dominate.

German audiences embraced Italian opera, and many German composers wrote Italian works in Germany, giving rise to the first German opera houses in 1678 and a cosmopolitan, hybrid operatic style.

Explore organ music in northern Germany within the Lutheran church, tracing the Bach family, Canon in D, and the rise of the fugue and imitative counterpoint.