Here Comes Treble: A Touch Of Musical History - Part Two
...Music became complex and highly decorated – rather like the cathedrals in which much of it was performed. In cathedrals are rows of soaring archways, statues, gargoyles, carvings, curlicues and magnificent stained-glass windows. In Baroque music, trills, runs, little repeated motifs weave in and out of each other, melodies run from one instrument to the next, one voice to another....
Isabel Bradley, blending prose and poetry into a sinfonietta in words, continues her engaging history of music.
To read more of Isabel's columns please click on Here Comes Treble in the menu on this page.
Baroque and Classical Music
Along with the general Renaissance came the Baroque era in music; by now, rules on the playing and notation of music had been laid down.
During the Baroque era, most music was composed within existing conventions. Polyphony, the interweaving of two or more voices each with its own melody, was widely used. Music became complex and highly decorated – rather like the cathedrals in which much of it was performed. In cathedrals are rows of soaring archways, statues, gargoyles, carvings, curlicues and magnificent stained-glass windows. In Baroque music, trills, runs, little repeated motifs weave in and out of each other, melodies run from one instrument to the next, one voice to another. ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ by George Frederick Handel is a delightful example of the best of Baroque. (It is suggested that, where specific pieces of music are mentioned, listening to them will provide added pleasure.)
There were many composers in the Baroque era:
Of Antonio Vivaldi, the priest from Italy, it was said “he either wrote four hundred works once – or one work four hundred times”, so similar do many of his concerti sound to each other.
Johann Sebastian Bach of Germany is perhaps one of the best known and loved of the Baroque composers; several of his twenty surviving children followed in his footsteps.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who wrote mostly religious works, wrote a beautiful Flute Concerto in G Major, which is well worth listening to.
One of Bach’s sons, Carl Philip Emmanuel, disagreed with his father about what he perceived to be the Baroque period’s rigid structures and over-ornamentation. He, with friends such as Franz Joseph Haydn, began composing more cleanly. Elegance and simplicity were the chief characteristics of their music. While continuing to interweave melodies in polyphonic style, they increasingly used harmony, a method of composing in which simple chords accompanied melodies. The composers of the 18th Century aimed to compose music that was “formal, strict in proportion and moderate in expression”; music which avoided emotionalism, seeking clear, elegant sounds. Under the genius of Haydn and his contemporaries, such as Johann Stamitz, the concept of the orchestra was formalised and the symphony became a standard form of writing for orchestras. The last movement of Haydn’s 104th Symphony, his last, rings with the sounds of London’s bells:
Sound and the Silence
Misery-hunched birds,
Bedraggled;
Slick-wet cobbles,
Grey-shrouded square.
Monuments,
acid-green-old-grey-stone.
Hush.
Nothing.
Not a footstep
to waken the world.
Stifled World...
Bells.
Bells,
urgent,
enrapture the silence -
Bells filling the world
with sounding light,
Echoing on and endlessly
'till even the pigeons
arise in gilded flight.
The best known of the Classical composers is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though he only lived to thirty-six, he left a huge amount of music for us to enjoy. His instrumental writing was masterful, including those instruments which, it was rumoured, he did not enjoy – such as the flute. Although one of his best-known operas is entitled “The Magic Flute”, it has little to do with that instrument. When Mozart was around, the flute had a fuzzy sound, was fiendishly difficult to play and was usually out of tune with the instruments around it. In spite of his alleged dislike of the instrument, Mozart wrote several lovely flute quartets, two concertos for flute and the famous Flute and Harp Concerto. He is said to have truly enjoyed the sounds of the newly-invented clarinet, hence the glorious Clarinet Concerto.
Another classical composer, of forty-five operas among other works, was Christoph Willibald Glück. Much of his work was performed in Paris. As part of his Opera, ‘Orfeo and Euridyce’, he composed the famous ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’. The ‘blessed spirits’, if the mood of the music is to be believed, seem to be delightfully placid!
There we shall leave our miniature musical history for this week.
Until next time... “Here comes Treble!”
To Be Continued
