Baroque Era Lecture 2 - Characteristics of Baroque Music

Hello. All right, so today the subject is musical characteristics of the Baroque era. We talked already about uh, things like what does the word Baroque mean? What's the significance of those dates, 1600 to 1750? We talked a little bit about what's going on, sort of historically in society in Europe during this time, and now we're going to talk more specifically about music. I'm starting from page 104 in the ninth brief edition of the Canyon text, and I'm going to go through [Music] oh, pages 104 to probably 107 or so, maybe 109, depending on how far I can get in the the limit that I like to impose on myself, which is about 50 minutes.

Now there's a lot of material in here, even though that's only a few pages. There's a lot of material, and a lot of it is sort of a technical musical nature. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to emphasize the things that I think maybe need the most help to understand. I'm not just going to go through and read everything in the book. I trust that you can read; whether or not you choose to read, of course, is up to you, but you can read. And the stuff that is easier to understand, I might just kind of gloss over. Just because I don't cover something in this lecture doesn't mean that I might not ask about it on the test. I'm just going to lecture about the things uh, which I think maybe need a little bit more help uh, for you to understand.

So uh, a lot of this stuff here on page 104 uh, is um, is review. So it says here, "In music, the Baroque style flourished during the period from 1600 to 1750." Um, they mentioned the names of the composers that we're going to look at. Now there are many, many different composers, but we're going to focus on six in particular, only six out of the thousands of composers and musicians during this 150-year period. Um, and in chronological order, which is the way that I always like to go, those six are going to be Claudio Monteverdi, and then Henry Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, uh, let's see who am I leaving out, uh, Antonio Vivaldi, uh, George Frideric Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach. So those six again: Monteverdi, Purcell, Corelli, Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach.

So as you are, as we are approaching the test, one facet of this information, one area of this big picture that you should acquaint yourself with is with these six composers, uh, where they were from, which part of the Baroque era chronologically did they exist in? As we're going to see, there's sort of an early, middle, and late Baroque, right? And there's some stylistic differences over that period. So you should know of these uh, different composers as we as we cover them; were they early, middle, or late Baroque? I should know, for example, what instrument they play. This is the era, by the way, of instrumental music, when most composers now tend to be more instrumentalists than vocalists, which was true of, let's say, the Renaissance. The greatest composers tended to be more like vocalists; like Josquin was primarily a singer. He could probably play some instruments too, but he was trained primarily as a singer, because of course that was the age of purely vocal music for the most part. Now we're moving into an age of instrumental music. So each of these composers specializes on an instrument, and it turns out that there are two particular types of instruments that are more important than the others, and those are the bowed stringed instruments—the violin, the members of the violin family—and the keyboard instruments, which we will talk about. Anyway, so they mentioned those six composers, and those six are the ones we are going to focus on. Obviously, there's many, many more.

Now, next paragraph gets into what I just talked about. The Baroque period can be divided into three phases: early, middle, and late. Now I am not going to get into like what are the exact dates of the early versus the middle versus the late. They give you the dates 1600 to 1640, so the first 40 years are early; the middle they say are the next 40 years, 1640 to 16... oh, I guess it's 50 years, 1640 to 1690; and then the late Baroque they give it 60 years, 1690 to 1750. It's it's not really that cut and dry though; there's just there's kind of a spectrum, and there is some change over this period; that's why we can divide it into an early, middle, and late. It wouldn't make any sense to have these divisions if there was not something changing to distinguish, let's say, the music of the early Baroque versus the middle versus the late.

Now the thing that changes most, I would say, from the early to the middle to the late is musical texture. So remember what texture is; specifically when we talk about music, texture is the relationship of the melody to the music as a whole. So, for example, monophonic texture means a single line of melody and nothing else; polyphonic texture means several lines of melody going on at the same time, each of which is considered to be equal and independent um, to each other; and then you have homophonic texture, the one that we're most familiar with because most popular music is in homophonic texture. That's when you have one main melody that's the most important thing, and it's out front, and then you have other stuff which is more in the background, which we would call accompaniment. So those are the three textures of music.

Now here's what changes over the course of the Baroque era. In the early Baroque era, composers tended to favor homophonic texture. This is a sentence right out of the book, by the way. Third paragraph for a sentence: Early Baroque composers favored homophonic texture over the polyphonic texture typical of Renaissance music. So that's something that changes from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Renaissance music, as we learn, one of the most basic things to know about Renaissance music is it tends to be in polyphonic texture, but early Baroque music, the style changes and it goes to homophonic texture. Why is this? Well, it has to do with opera. When we get to talking about opera, probably the next lecture, maybe the one after that, we will see that uh, homophonic texture was seen as really the only texture that would work for opera, right? So, and I also said, now I said last time that opera was the big trendsetter. So if if uh, homophonic texture is correct for opera, and opera is the most influential genre of music—meaning what happens in opera tends to influence all the other genres—then music generally will tend to follow that convention and be in homophonic texture. That's the fashion, and the fashion is kind of dictated by opera. So that's true of the early Baroque; it tends to be in homophonic texture. But what happens is, as we get to the middle Baroque and the late Baroque, composers probably just kind of can't help themselves, and they want to add little additional layers of melody, and so the trend then gets to be more and more polyphonic the later we go in the Baroque era. So that by the time we get to the late Baroque era, and the two greatest composers of the late Baroque era are generally acknowledged to be J.S. Bach and George Frideric Handel, much of their music, especially Bach's music, is almost always in polyphonic texture. It's almost always the case if you listen to Bach that there's more than one melody going on, right? So we could we could probably sort of instead of maybe dividing it into three and saying well this is more, you could see you could think of a trend, okay, over this timeline of the Baroque era, 1600-1750. We start out with homophonic texture being prevalent, but the farther we go we have a trend that's like more and more polyphony; more and more additional layers are added to the texture, so that by the time we get to the late Baroque, polyphonic texture is now the norm.

The other trend line that you could put, by the way, over this 150-year period is more and more instrumental music being composed; I mean purely instrumental music, instrumental music without singing, right? Remember instrumental music without singing was relatively uncommon in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. There was certainly instrumental music, but serious composers for the most part didn't bother with it, right? But now we are getting to the era in which serious composers do indeed spend considerable time and energy writing purely instrumental music. In fact, by the time we get to the end of the Baroque, instrumental music is sort of like dominant, right? There is more instrumental music being composed than vocal music. Okay. Uh, what's next?

Now here's something kind of important. The fourth paragraph: "To depict extreme emotions in their texts, early Baroque composers used dissonance with a new freedom. Never before were unstable chords so prominent and emphatic." Okay, so remember what dissonance is. Dissonance is when you have harmony that produces tension because there's sort of like a clashing instead of blending well together, which we call consonants. If we have two sounds, two different pitches, let's say, or three different pitches, however many, but if they tend to clash instead, we call that dissonance, and dissonance isn't like wrong or a mistake, or at least it doesn't have to be. It can be intentional, because oftentimes what the composer is trying to do is to create tension which will then later resolve, so that we have dissonance followed by consonants; so we have tension followed by resolution. Now there was dissonance in Renaissance era music, but the practice during the Renaissance was to blend the dissonances in so skillfully that they didn't sort of jump out at you and make you go, "That was ugly or weird," right? There's plenty of dissonance in Renaissance music, but there was a technique that Renaissance composers were trained in that allowed them to use this dissonance in a very subtle way, sort of like the way that a chef, a well-trained chef, will use seasonings uh, to keep the food from being too bland, but they're not going to use so much that the the taste of the seasoning kind of overwhelms uh, the the taste of the food itself, right? So that's what we call preparation, careful preparation of dissonance, which was the norm in the Renaissance, right? Because of course, if we had too much dissonance, it would sound ugly, and as I said last lecture, probably the main priority of the Renaissance composer is that the music always had to sound beautiful. If it wasn't beautiful, it would cease being music and it would become noise or something, right? However, we have a style change as we move into the Baroque era, and again the reason for this has to do with opera. In an opera you have characters, right? And uh, you have a story, and things happen to the characters, and the characters feel various emotions, very often negative emotions: grief, anger, whatever. These these emotions have to be depicted somehow in the music, have to be expressed in the music, and the more vividly expressed they are, the better, because remember now in the Baroque they're sort of a different priority, and now the expression of emotions is the top priority and kind of takes precedence even over pure beauty. So now composers are using what we call unprepared dissonance, dissonance that isn't blended in so skillfully that you can barely detect it, dissonance that is right there in your face that the composer wants you to hear, maybe even if it sounds ugly. The composer wants you to feel a little bit that ugliness, because that's the same kind of feeling that you get when you feel these negative emotions like rage or grief or tension or whatever it is, right? So uh, we have these unprepared dissonances, which at first were considered very controversial, especially when the first really great composer of the Baroque era, Claudio Monteverdi, who was the first great composer of opera—he didn't really invent opera, but he's considered the first master of opera; he pioneered this uh, this new treatment of dissonance—and was criticized for it. Um, other let's say composers and music critics who heard Monteverdi's music said, "Well, he doesn't know what he's doing; he's got these dissonances that just kind of jump out at you; they're unprepared, like he hasn't been well trained." And Monteverdi responded and said, "No, I am I'm inventing a new practice. What you're talking about is the old practice of trying to blend in dissonances, but I'm inventing a new practice because the the music in my music," speaking is Monteverdi, "the notes are not as important as the words, because it's the words that are um, in the case of opera, that are moving the plot along, that are driving, that are drawing people into the story, and therefore then whatever is going on with the notes has to serve the meaning of the words. So if the words that the singer is singing have to do with grief or anger or whatever, then there's no point making the music all, you know, pleasant and pretty sounding." So uh, that's the story. Beyond, we'll get into this a little bit more when we talk about opera, when we talk about Monteverdi, but just be aware of this very new idea of this unprepared dissonance, using dissonance for expressive purposes and not trying to blend it in or trying to hide it in the way that Renaissance composers did. Okay.

Um, now the book does say, last my last full paragraph of 104: "We focus mainly on the late Baroque period, which produced most of the Baroque music heard today." So they're basically just saying uh, in in their examination of the Baroque era, they're going to spend more time talking about late Baroque music because that's kind of like what's more familiar today. It's just sort of a choice that they made in this book, which means that all of this stuff that they're going to talk about as being typical of Baroque music is maybe more typical of late Baroque than of early Baroque, and they're just kind of like warning you that the the chapter is going to focus more on late Baroque. And we can certainly see this in the way that they deal with the different composers. Remember those six different composers that I mentioned? Only one of them is really an early Baroque composer, and that's Monteverdi. The Monteverdi is a huge, important, pivotal figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque; in fact, he kind of invented many of these practices that we are going to learn about, so kind of a revolutionary figure uh, in music. Monteverdi, you may never have heard of him, but he was as important in his own day and as sort of influential and controversial as Beethoven was a couple hundred years later. And so we have Monteverdi, who is early Baroque, and then the book deals with two mid-Baroque composers, Purcell and Corelli, and three late Baroque composers, Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach. So their coverage of the Baroque era is kind of weighted towards the late Baroque.

Right, now we get into characteristics of Baroque music. First one they mention is unity of mood, and um, actually before we talk about unity of mood, keep in mind that mood or emotion, or the word that they used back then, affect or affection—the word affection today you think of like petting your cat, you're being affectionate; that's not what was meant by the word back then—affect or affection kind of means what we would call mood or emotion. And remember that's the most important thing in the Baroque style is trying to project a certain mood or emotion and trying to get really as specific as possible, trying to get your audience or your viewer, if we're talking about the visual arts, to feel exactly the emotion that you want them to feel. It's about manipulating people's emotions, and if you're going to do that, then the logic kind of dictated at the time, you should focus on one particular emotion at a time. That's what they mean by unity of mood: A Baroque piece generally expresses one basic mood. What begins joyfully will remain joyful throughout, and the same is true; what begins sad, or what begins, you know, anger or tension or whatever. So the Baroque idea was, if you have a piece of music, there's no point like starting out happy and then having a turn sad in the middle and then happy again towards the end, because then you're sort of like pulling your punch; you're mixing your message. Instead, if you want people to feel happiness, you should you should kind of focus like a laser beam and keep sending that happy signal all the way through, right? Uh, now there is there is an exception to this though, if we are talking about a multi-movement composition. Now multi-movement compositions are not really found in popular music, but we've already talked about the existence of multi-movement compositions because the Mass, remember, is a five-movement composition because we have five different prayers in the Ordinary of the Mass. And so in a in a musical Mass—I'm talking about the musical genre now, not the not not the ceremony within the Roman Catholic liturgy—in a piece of music with the title Mass, you have five different movements corresponding to those five prayers, and each movement has its own beginning and ending. Similarly, now we have lots of different types of multi-movement pieces as we go from the Baroque era forward all the way up to the present day. In a multi-movement piece, each individual movement sounds kind of complete on its own; it has a beginning and an ending, but it turns out it's just kind of like one chapter in a multi-chapter work. So chapter is kind of analogous to movement. You could read a book, for example, that has different chapters, and each chapter on its own kind of works; like for example, in a novel, you know, maybe the first chapter, if you took it out by itself, it would might make a decent little short story, right? But in fact, you read on, and there are other chapters. Similarly with movements in multi-movement compositions. So if a Baroque composer is is creating a multi-movement composition, you definitely could have contrast from one movement to the next to the next. All right, so you could have a first movement that is happy and cheerful, a second movement that is sad and gloomy, and then a third movement which is happy and cheerful again, but within a given movement you will not usually have very much contrast of mood. We will stick to one basic mood within a given movement, and if we're composing a piece that only has one movement, we're only going to have one basic mood. Okay.

Um, they also mentioned a little bit in this uh, in this same section talking about unity of mood, this uh, this idea basically of the doctrine of affections—affections, remember, means moods or emotions—and this was an idea that begins during the Baroque; again, it really has its origins in opera. And the idea is that composers would have specific musical figures or structures that could be understood by the audience to represent certain specific moods or states of being, right? And we're talking about just notes now; we're not talking about words. Obviously, we can get the emotions uh, that let's say an opera singer is, you know, their character is supposed to be feeling by the words, but uh, what the the doctrine of affection refers to is using strictly notes, musical devices without words, to communicate a specific meaning. Now this goes a little bit against uh, the the assertion that I made very early in the semester when I said that music is not a language, because purely musical structures like a scale or a chord do not have a specific meaning the way that combinations of letters in language can form words which have a specific meaning that everybody understands as long as we understand the language. We understand that code; we know that c-a-t means a cat and not a dog or a rhinoceros, right? Same thing doesn't exactly apply to music, but what if enough composers consistently use some of the same musical figures in the same kind of context, particularly if it's a theatrical work where we can see something that's happening on stage and then associate it with a certain kind of musical pattern, right? Maybe over time the audience will come to understand that certain musical patterns can have a sort of meaning, uh, and this practice has continued over into the movies. Okay, so we're very familiar with if we are uh, sitting in the movies and let's say we're let's say it's a horror movie and we hear this kind of high dissonant uh, sound—I don't have a piano handy here, but um—uh, maybe maybe it's strings or high piano notes, and it's kind of repeated and distant, like we might think something bad's going to happen; it sounds kind of like stabbing noises; there's probably a knife missing from the knife rack, you know; there's this kind of cues that the composer of the film score is giving to the audience, and the audience knows how to respond. We see this all over the place uh, especially in movie music, right? Well, the movies uh, is really uh uh descended from opera; opera was what people had before the movies, right? We think of opera today as sort of like something that only very high-class cultured people uh enjoy, but back then it was mass entertainment, just like the movies. So anyway, I'm going off on a number of different topics, but over time composers developed this kind of system where certain musical patterns, like certain types of scales or rhythms or chords, came to be understood to have something like a particular meaning or to signal a certain emotion. I'll give one example of one that we will see in a couple of different pieces actually, and that is in the Baroque era and there afterwards, really. When a composer would would write a slow descending chromatic scale, especially in the bassline, like when the audience heard that, they're like, "Ooh, death." This this represents death, sort of like sinking into death or maybe even sinking into the grave, and so many composers did this that it was just kind of understood like, "Oh, there's the descending chromatic scale; somebody's going to die or somebody is dying." So the doctrine of affections, the idea that certain specific musical patterns or figures or structures could correspond to kind of like more or less definite meanings or emotions. All right, moving on. I'm going to go a little quicker through the rest of these.

Rhythm, it says here: "Unity of mood in Baroque music is conveyed or communicated first of all by continuity of rhythm." So if we're going to have unity of mood, what's the best way to achieve this? Well, by having unity of rhythm. So whatever rhythmic pattern we have established at the beginning of the piece, whether it's kind of slow or fast or busy or more relaxed, we're going to maintain that same rhythmic pattern throughout the entire movement or throughout the entire piece if it's a one-movement piece. And this is the primary way of achieving this unity of mood, and we'll see this over and over again in Baroque music. Melody, it says here: "Baroque melody also creates a feeling of continuity." So we can see there's a lot of effort at making things sort of continuous and integrated to project one basic mood. An opening melody will be heard again and again in the course of a Baroque piece, and even when a melody is presented in varied form, its character tends to remain constant. There is a continuous expanding, unfolding, and unwinding of melody. Now what they're talking about here is that, especially the farther on we go into the late Baroque, when especially we see more and more instrumental music, and remember the instruments that are most important are the keyboard instruments and the bowed stringed instruments, we see a lot more sort of like continuous melody, melodies that are not broken up into phrases as much, but are more like run-on sentences that just go on and on and on. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that we are transitioning from more vocal music to more instrumental music. Uh, in vocal music you need to breathe; human beings cannot sing if they don't breathe, and that's part of the reason why melodies tend to be broken up into phrases with cadences at the end of those phrases because we need a place to breathe uh, before we move on to the next phrase. But with instrumental music we don't necessarily need that; we might need it if it's a wind instrument, but we don't need it for keyboard instruments; we don't need it for bowed stringed instruments. Now obviously a keyboard player needs to breathe or will turn blue and faint and fall over and then the music will stop, but you don't need to breathe in order to make the sounds happen on the keyboard. Same thing with the violin; breathing doesn't really have anything to do with it in a direct mechanical sense, you know. So as composers write more and more music for stringed instruments and for keyboard instruments, it affects the way that they conceive of music; they start thinking in a more instrumental way rather than in a more vocal way. And what happens is late Baroque composers, for example, in composers like Handel and Bach, even when they are writing for the voice, they tend to write more instrumentally; they write things that are more natural for keyboard instruments or for stringed instruments but are kind of...

Unnatural and very difficult for the voice, right? So this is an interesting contrast with Renaissance music. Remember, I said that most Renaissance melodies are easy to sing, just like Gregorian chant is easy to sing. Why? Well, in part because it was written for singers in the first place. It was written in such a way as to be easy to sing, so that the people singing it would not have to strain and maybe get out of tune, maybe run out of breath, make ugly sounds, whatever, right? So, since it's written for singers, it tends to be easy to sing.

Baroque music, even if it is written for singers, it's written by people who tend to think in a more instrumental way—people who are instrumentalists themselves. Like J.S. Bach was primarily a keyboard player; Vivaldi was primarily a violin player. So, even when they're writing for voices, they tend to write stuff that is difficult to sing. Here's an example, which I'm going to sing very badly myself. You might be familiar with Handel's Messiah, which is an oratorio. You hear it a lot at Christmas, and one of the most famous sections or movements from the oratorio is written for choir and orchestra, and it's the setting of the text "For unto us a child is born." It goes like this: "A child is born unto us, a son is given." Okay, not—not too bad so far. But then he gets into this stuff: "For unto us a child is born"—lots and lots of notes—very difficult to sing, easy to play on a keyboard actually, or on a violin, because you're just wiggling your fingers—no big deal—but difficult to sing, right? And difficult for a big choir to sing and stay together. So when you hear people singing that, and they do it well, that's really a serious accomplishment. And that melody tends to go on and on and on, and it hardly stops for breath. Baroque era vocal lines are difficult to sing, unlike those of the Renaissance.

Okay, moving on. Uh, dynamics. Okay, so this is—this is kind of an important topic. Dynamics, remember, refers to degrees of loudness or softness. What we see in the Baroque era is the use of what we call terraced dynamics, meaning, uh, dynamic changes—let's say from loud to soft or from soft back to loud—tend to happen suddenly and abruptly, which gives us kind of a terrace effect. A terrace is sort of like a staircase, maybe one that's been sort of drawn out so that you have different discrete levels, right? In fact, you see in some countries that are very, very hilly, they practice terraced agriculture, where, you know, it's very difficult to farm on the side of the hill. You plant your seeds, and the rain comes and kind of washes everything downhill. So what you need to do is cut flat areas into the side of the hill. This is terraced agriculture. So terraced dynamics refers to sudden changes from loud to soft and back again. The reason we see this in Baroque music is because the keyboard instruments of the time—the main keyboard instruments being the harpsichord and the organ—were only capable of sudden changes of dynamic. They are non-touch-sensitive instruments. Remember, this is the time before the piano was invented. In fact, the piano was invented later on, really in the late Baroque era, but it didn't really catch on until the Baroque era was basically over. The piano is invented specifically to address this problem—to create a touch-sensitive instrument so that you could make crescendos and decrescendos—gradual increases and decreases in volume—but we didn't have that in the keyboard instruments of the Baroque. And since the Baroque keyboard instruments could not make these gradual changes of dynamic, they could only make sudden changes—like by pulling on a knob, basically, which would engage more pipes or more strings on your organ or your harpsichord. That's where we get the expression, by the way, "pulling out all the stops." If you're playing an organ and you pull out all the stops, you're basically turning the thing up full blast, but you're making all of the notes louder all of a sudden, or softer if you push those stops back in. You cannot control the dynamic level of an individual note by pressing harder with your fingers the way that you can on a piano. So since the keyboard instruments were not capable of gradual changes in dynamic, the—there's no point having the other instruments do that because they can't match with the keyboard instruments. So terraced dynamics tended to be the norm in the Baroque era. Now, they do mention that there was another keyboard instrument called the clavichord, which is touch-sensitive. Problem with the clavichord is, though, it has such a very soft dynamic range, meaning it really couldn't play anything above mezzo piano. It was such a soft instrument; it didn't produce a lot of volume that it was not suitable for use in public performances. Clavichord is like an instrument that you would have in your home, and you could play for yourself or a few friends, but bring it into a big concert hall, and you—you just can't hear the thing, or play with other instruments, and you can't hear it. So the clavichord is not considered a major keyboard instrument. The major keyboard instruments of the Baroque are only the organ and the harpsichord.

Okay, uh, texture. I already talked about texture in the Baroque era. Early Baroque music tends to be homophonic in texture, but the later we go in the Baroque, we tend to see additional melodic lines kind of creep back in, so that by the time we get to the late Baroque era, we tend to be back in polyphonic texture. Thing is, though, even though we have polyphonic texture in the late Baroque era, and we had polyphonic texture in the Renaissance, late Baroque music does not sound like Renaissance music, right? Uh, here's some differences. First of all, music of the Renaissance tends to be purely vocal—a cappella music. In the Baroque period, it's either purely instrumental or its instruments and voices combined. The a cappella thing is no longer fashionable in the Baroque era; most serious composers don't bother writing very much a cappella vocal music. Here's another difference: Music of the Baroque era tends to be much more rhythmically energetic. You are made aware of the beat much more than you would be in the Renaissance. Now, that's not to say that necessarily that someone is pounding out the beat on percussion instruments. We still don't see a lot of percussion instruments being used on a regular basis in the Baroque era, right? But you don't need percussion instruments in order to emphasize the rhythm. In fact, let's go back to this section on rhythm here, uh, this little paragraph on rhythm toward the top of page 105, where it talks about unity of a continuity of rhythm, uh, reinforcing unity of mood. Um, it says here the—the rhythmic continuity of Baroque music provides a compelling drive and energy. The forward motion is rarely interrupted. The beat, for example, is emphasized far more in Baroque music than in most Renaissance music. So this is a characteristic that is different, uh, from the Baroque compared to the Renaissance.

Okay, now, uh, this next thing: chords and the basso continuo. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to a little bit, um, depart slightly from—well, actually, I'm going to present the same material that the book does, but maybe in a—a different way. There are three terms that we're going to learn, all of which have something to do with bass or basso, which is just the Italian word for bass. These three terms could be potentially confusing, like when you see them on the test and it's a multiple-choice question. Well, wait a minute, these three terms are kind of similar—which one means which? So I'm going to teach the three of them kind of side by side because they are related to each other, but they're not exactly the same thing. So I want to make sure that I get each of these three very clear, and so for that reason, just to kind of minimize confusion, I'm going to present them all at once. And if you're taking notes, uh, write these three words with some space in between them, and then we'll fill in. Okay, so the first of them is basso continuo. All right, so write basso continuo, and then the next one: figured bass—figured bass—and then the final one: basso ostinato—o s t i n a t o—basso ostinato. Okay, so those are the three terms that I'm going to explain here. First one: basso continuo. The way to think of basso continuo, the way the book describes it, it's like the rhythm section of the Baroque era. Think of if you were to go—go to a concert by one of your favorite bands or groups or whatever, or if you were to go to, let's say, almost any kind of genre of popular music—let's say jazz, blues, rock, country, whatever—if you go hear a live band playing, they will probably have a rhythm section. Who's in the rhythm section? The drummer, the bass player providing the bass line, and also maybe a rhythm guitarist whose job is not to play melodies or solos but to play chords; he's part of the accompaniment, right? Or you might have a keyboard player that is playing chords who isn't there necessarily to show off or play solos but to provide accompaniment, to provide harmonic support and background, right? We have the same kind of thing in the Baroque. We don't call it the rhythm section; we call it the basso continuo. It's the same thing. The only difference is there are no drums. Remember, I said the percussion instruments are not a big deal yet in the Baroque, but we do have somebody playing the bass line and somebody playing the chords, and they are usually two different people. So the basso continuo is like a rhythm section consisting of usually two different people. One of them is going to be playing the bass line, most likely on a cello, which is the low-pitched bowed stringed instrument that you hold between your knees, and then the other one is going to be a—usually a keyboard player—either harpsichord or organ—and they are just going to be playing the chords. Now, they might just be playing the chords themselves, or they might be playing the chords with one hand—that's my right hand—and the bass notes with their left hand. Now, those bass notes that they're playing with their left hand are the same bass notes that the cellist is going to be playing, but that's okay; we can reinforce that a little bit so that everyone hears that bass line clearly. Now it's—it's also possible if you are playing the organ, you can play the bass line with your feet and the chords with your hands. So there are different possibilities, but in most situations, the basso continuo is like a section within a group consisting of two people, one of them supplying the bass line, the other one's supplying the chords, and this was considered kind of a necessity in any Baroque ensemble. In other words, if we have a bunch of people playing music together, whether we're talking about opera or an oratorio or an orchestral piece or a piece for a small group—what we call chamber music—anytime we have a group of people playing together, we have to have that rhythm section—the basso continuo. Um, now they—they talk about chords. Uh, we—we had chords before; there were chords in the—in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, but the chords were kind of a byproduct—were an aftereffect of the polyphonic texture, right? So that as different melodic lines coincided at a given point, you could take those notes and identify what chord it is. What's different in the Baroque era? Composers start to conceive of chords separately, kind of like on their own, as separate entities that don't necessarily have to be created as a byproduct of polyphonic texture. Remember, polyphonic texture kind of goes out of fashion at the beginning of the Baroque era, but we still have chords. Those chords are in the accompaniment, in the basso continuo, in the keyboard player's hands. All right, so chords that kind of have a take on their own separate identity to a much greater extent during the Baroque era.

Okay, so now let's talk about what figured bass is. Figured bass is a way of writing music; it's a notation system, right? And it's called figured bass because what you do is you take a bass note, right, that's written down, and you use a figure of some kind, and figure usually means a number. It's an old-fashioned word for a number. You know, if you've ever heard someone say, "Well, I'm not so good with figures," meaning they're not good at math, right? Figure means a number; it can also mean some—some other kind of a symbol. If you combine a certain bass note with a certain number or symbol, if you are trained in this system of notation, then you know what kind of chord to build, right? And all you need is that bass note and that number or symbol; you don't need to actually write out all the notes of the chord on the staff. If you have a keyboard player, and it was really the keyboard players who had to deal with this system of notation called figured bass, if you had been trained in figured bass, which all keyboard players were back then, you just had to—in order to do your job—then you didn't need to have all the notes written out for you; all you needed was the bass note and those figures or symbols. Um, so this has to do with basso continuo because the keyboard player within the basso continuo section is looking at figured bass. All he's got written out for him are the bass notes and these symbols—numbers—figures—and based on that he is coming up with the chords. We actually have something kind of similar in practice; it's not actually—it doesn't look the same; it doesn't work the exact same way—but we have something called lead sheet notation that all jazz players have to be trained in, um, and any kind of pop musicians actually—usually they can—they might not be able to read music actually, but they can read lead sheet notation, uh, where maybe just the melody will be written out, and there will be little symbols underneath—that's like C7 or Fsus or G major 7 sharp 9 or whatever—there will be little symbols and figures to tell you what chord to play instead of writing out all the notes of the chord. It's a simplified notation system, and what it does is it saves time, it saves ink and paper, right? And we can see an example, actually—there's—this is kind of not a very good example of what figured bass looks like—it's on page 106. I wish they had chosen a better example, but here on page 106 they show—up above we have three different lines of music; the upper one is a figured bass part, and then the lower one is how that figured bass part might be realized—that is, how it might be performed by a keyboard player. Now notice that most of these bass notes don't have any numbers. Well, the lack of a number actually means something in figured bass; it means that you play a root position chord. If you see a six there, then you play a first inversion chord. What's a first inversion? It doesn't matter; you don't need to know unless you plan on becoming a keyboard player 400 years ago. Here's a better example, actually—a figured bass—there's a better example a little bit later in the book when they talk about Corelli in the—uh, section—oh, I guess that we're over here on page 128. They show a little bit of the music from a trio sonata by Corelli, and down here you can see the basso continuo part, and you'll see there are some notes there. Now there's no chords written in, but there are symbols and numbers below some of the notes to tell the keyboard player what kind of chord to construct above that given bass note. So that's a basso continuo part, by the way. Since the basso continuo part—it's written out as one part, but it requires two people to perform it. Remember, one of them is playing just the bass line—bass notes—on a cello, and the other person is playing the chords as well on a keyboard instrument. A trio sonata actually requires four people to play it because what you've got is a trio made up of two melodic instruments plus rhythm section—basso continuo—but that rhythm section requires two people in order to execute. So a trio sonata of the Baroque era requires four performers because of the fact that basso continuo, although one part written into the music, requires two people to perform it. All right, so that's figured bass. It's a notation system—a simplified notation system—that only keyboard players had to worry about. Thing is, of course, you have keyboard players in every Baroque ensemble, right? Remember, every Baroque ensemble had to have that crucial rhythm section. It would be like going to a concert today and there's no drummer and no bass player. I mean, that would just be kind of weird. So back then it would just be weird if there were no basso continuo—there was no keyboard and probably cello to play that uh, bass line and chords.

All right, last thing I'm going to talk about in this uh, little section on these three things having to do with the bass: basso ostinato. Basso ostinato is the Italian word for obstinate. What does obstinate mean? Stubborn. So basso ostinato means stubborn bass, and this is when we have a—a pattern or a melody in the bass line which repeats over and over stubbornly. Now don't confuse this with basso continuo. Continuo is the rhythm section of the Baroque era; basso ostinato is a technique within a composition which a composer may choose to employ. Actually, uh, ostinato is a technique that we find all over the place in music history, right up to the current day. Uh, these days you might call it a hook or a riff or a groove or something like that, right? Uh, every Led Zeppelin song has some kind of ostinato pattern that repeats over and over again the whole song. Uh, now I'm choosing Led Zeppelin because that's how old I am, but you can think of other examples. That's all that it is; it's repeating obstinately or stubbornly. Remember, it helps to remember what these words mean. Don't think of ostinato as some foreign word that begins with an O; it's just the word obstinate; they just spell it differently and say it a little differently in Italian, right? So grab on to the whole word; don't just look at the letter O. Ostinato means obstinate. Bottom of page 106: The last thing they talk about here: words and music. Nothing new here, really. They're talking about text painting—that is, composers in the Baroque, just like their counterparts in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, whenever they had vocal music—music with words—they would try as much as possible to find places where they could highlight the meaning of the words musically, right? And we find lots of examples of this. Um, I will point up some of these examples as if we encounter them, but this is really something that is not new and something that uh, is not different from uh, the Renaissance or the—or the Middle Ages. Composers have always tried to match the meaning of the words with what they are doing with the notes whenever there's—whenever it's possible to do so—to try and highlight the meaning of the words.

Okay, uh, I see that I am running out of time, so I'm just gonna mention one other thing. Over here on page 107, they talk about the Baroque orchestra. This is the first time we've ever talked about really the orchestra, at least—and we talked about the orchestra back in the elements chapter, right, the first chapter—but historically we haven't talked about the medieval orchestra or the Renaissance orchestra because there really wasn't one. There was instrumental music, but there was no kind of like standard uh, arrangement or like team with certain positions uh, or certain standard instruments that was understood to be like the orchestra. It was more like just whatever instruments you've got—just bring them, and we'll figure it out and make it up as we go along. No, in the Baroque era, there was kind of a standard—a standard format came to be—and we call it the orchestra. Now the Baroque orchestra is not the same, however, as the modern orchestra. The orchestra evolves over time. This is something we're going to see from the Baroque era to our next unit—the Classical era—to the Romantic era which follows. The orchestra evolves and changes and pretty much adds more instruments. The Baroque orchestra is—this is sort of the core of the modern orchestra—and it consists of just the bowed stringed instruments plus a keyboard. We need to have a keyboard, remember, for the rhythm section—the basso continuo—but otherwise it's all basically different members of the violin family: violin, viola, cello, and bass. No woodwinds, no brass, no percussion yet—at least not standard. Composers might add those instruments on a sort of an à la carte basis. A composer might say, "This one needs a little something; maybe I'll add a trumpet," but it wasn't a standard part of the orchestra. That means that the Baroque orchestra had kind of a one-dimensional sound; it only had that bowed string sound plus a little bit of harpsichord in the background providing the chords for the basso continuo, and it was a small orchestra. A typical orchestra of J.S. Bach's day would be maybe a dozen people—like 20 people—that would be a pretty big orchestra uh, by late Baroque standards, right?

Okay, so uh, next time we'll start to talk about Baroque forms and also Baroque—really Baroque genres. So when they talk about Baroque forms here, what they're really talking about is genres, and genre and form are not exactly the same thing, but uh, I will leave that for next time. Maybe I'll start the lecture with that next time: genre versus form. We're going to learn about lots of different genres; we're also going to learn about different forms which may be found within those genres. So we're going to look—start looking at specific different types of pieces; that's what we mean by genre—different pieces with different titles, for example, maybe for different purposes, but then also different forms—that is, the way these pieces are actually constructed, right? So you can think of, for example, genre versus form—it's sort of like—you can have a building that is built in a certain way; it has, you know, a steel frame and it has, you know, gables or whatever—has certain structural units—but the genre is like—is this building a house? Is it a post office? Is it, you know, a grocery store or whatever? That's kind of like the genre, which is distinct from the form. Okay, so uh, next time we will begin to talk about different forms uh, and genres. Uh, I might talk a little bit about this section of music and Baroque society, but actually I've already talked about this quite a bit in our background historical discussion, so I might not get into this too much. This is more like stuff that you could probably read and understand on your own; this is more like social studies than musical technical stuff. I think what we need to do is get into the musical technical stuff, so I'll talk about different genres and forms, and especially I will start with opera. So start reading the section on opera if you haven't already, and I'll see you next time.