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Baroque Music: Styles and Forms

The Baroque period of music from 1600 to 1750 is characterized by ornamentation and complex polyphony. Composers incorporated a sense of drama into vocal and instrumental forms like cantatas, operas, and concertos. Keyboard music from the period was often written in suites of separate dance movements that maintained a consistent key but varied in tempo and meter. Common dances included the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. Other keyboard forms included variations, fugues, preludes, and concertos.

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17 views2 pages

Baroque Music: Styles and Forms

The Baroque period of music from 1600 to 1750 is characterized by ornamentation and complex polyphony. Composers incorporated a sense of drama into vocal and instrumental forms like cantatas, operas, and concertos. Keyboard music from the period was often written in suites of separate dance movements that maintained a consistent key but varied in tempo and meter. Common dances included the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. Other keyboard forms included variations, fugues, preludes, and concertos.

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Teodora Tatu
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Baroque (1600 - 1750)

The music of the period reflects the decorative art in the use of ornamentation to embroider melodies. Thick and complex polyphonic texture prevails in many composers works. A sense of drama and urgency is incorporated into in vocal forms such as the cantata, mass, opera, oratorio and passion, and in instrumental forms such as the concerto, concerto grosso, prelude, fugue, toccata sonata and suite. Vibrant rhythms and expressive dissonances heighten tension in many Baroque works. Much of the Baroque keyboard music written for the harpsichord and clavichord was written in suites comprising separate dance pieces, changing in tempo and meter but maintaining key unity throughout. The suite (Italian: Partita, Sonata da Camera; German: Suite, Partita, Overture; French: Order, Suite; English: Lessons) consists of dances such as the allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue and others such as the gavotte, musette, bouree, minuet and pavane. Each dance movement is usually written in two sections called Binary form, and is generally performed with each section repeated. Other forms of keyboard music from the Baroque period are theme and variations, passacaglia, chaconne, invention, prelude, fugue, choral prelude, ricercare, fantasy, toccata and concerto.

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