Baroque music is a style of European classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1750. This era began after the Renaissance and was followed by the Classical era. The Baroque period of music is associated with composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Baptiste Lully, George Frideric Handel, Arcangelo Corelli, Claudio Monteverdi, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Henry Purcell. The baroque period saw the development of functional tonality (also called diatonic tonality, common practice tonality, or functional tonality). During this period, composers and performers used more elaborate musical ornamentation, started making changes in musical notation, and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre. Many of the musical terms and concepts from this era are still in use today.


Baroque music shares with Renaissance music a heavy use of polyphony and counterpoint. However, its use of these techniques differs from Renaissance music. These stylistic differences mark the transition from the ricercars, fantasias, and canzonas of the Renaissance to the fugue, a defining baroque form. There are other, more general differences between baroque and Renaissance style. Baroque music was more often written for virtuoso singers and instrumentalists and is characteristically harder to perform than Renaissance music, although idiomatic instrumental writing was one of the most important innovations of the period. Baroque music employs a great deal of ornamentation, which was often improvised by the performer. Instruments came to play a greater part in baroque music, and a cappella vocal music receded in importance.


Different genres of the Baroque Music period include:
Vocal:
• Opera
Zarzuela
Opera seria
Opera comique
Opera-ballet
• Masque
• Oratorio
• Passion (music)
• Cantata
• Mass (music)
• Anthem
• Monody
• Chorale
Instrumental
• Concerto grosso
• Fugue
• Suite
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Gigue
Gavotte
Minuet
• Sonata
Sonata da camera
Sonata da chiesa
Trio sonata
• Partita
• Canzona
• Sinfonia
• Fantasia
• Ricercar
• Toccata
• Prelude
• Chaconne
• Passacaglia
• Chorale prelude
• Stylus fantasticus

Musically, the adoption of the figured bass represents a larger change in musical thinking namely that harmony. "Taking all of the parts together" was as important as the linear part of polyphony. Increasingly, polyphony and harmony were seen as two sides of the same idea, with harmonic progressions entering the notion of composing, as well as the use of the tritone as a dissonance.
Harmonic thinking had existed among particular composers in the previous era, notably Carlo Gesualdo; however the Renaissance is felt to give way to the Baroque at the point where it becomes the common vocabulary. Some historians of music point to the introduction of the seventh chord without preparation as being the key break with the past. This created the idea that chords, rather than notes, created the sense of closure, which is one of the fundamental ideas of what came to be known as tonality.
The middle Baroque, in music theory, is identified by the increasingly harmonic focus of musical practice and the creation of formal systems of teaching. Music was an art, and it came to be seen as one that should be taught in an orderly manner. This culminated in the later work of Johann Fux in systematizing counterpoint.
The forms which had begun to be established in the previous era flourished and were given wider range of diversity; concerto, suite, sonata, concerto grosso, oratorio, opera and ballet all saw a proliferation of national styles and structures. The overall form of pieces was generally simple, with repeated binary forms (AABB), simple three part forms (ABC), and rondeau forms being common. These schematics in turn influenced later composers.

Baroque Music Playlist

Renaissance Inventions

There are many things that we take for granted that were invented in the Renaissance era. Many of these inventions we use without thinking who created it and how it came about. Some of these inventions include the clock, gunpowder and artillery, eye glasses and spectacles, the printing press, the flush toilet, the microscope, the telescope, and the match.
In the beginning of the Renaissance time period, we can see the first portable clocks developed in Florenece, Italy, in 1410 by Filippo Brunelleschi, a famous architect. Before this time, mechanical clocks were large, fixed devices. The spring- driven clock made it possible to carry the time around with you.
Gunpowder was invented around 1040. Although hard to believe, rockets were launched as fireworks and weapons in China in the early 1230's. This led the way to William Congreve developing rockets to use during wars. Launching tubes were developed by this engineer to improve their accuracy. Also coming from the invention of gunpowder was the gun and other projectile-firing artillery. These new inventions greatly affected how war was fought. War used to be hand-to-hand combat with specific implied rules of chivalry. With these new, more powerful weapons, there were a higher number of casualties and more serious wounds. In turn this also affected the world of medicine.
Another important advance in science was the invention of convex and concave lenses. This led to the invention of bifocals which could correct people's eyesight. Also, lenses led to the inventions of telescopes and microscopes, which led to hundreds upon thousands of advances in multiple fields of science.
A big development in writing and literature was the invention of the printing press. Invented in 1436 by a 39 year old German man named Johann Gutenberg, the printing press was a great improvement over hand-copying. Before the development of this time-saving and economical machine, monks had to hand copy everything. This time-consuming process made books and scripts extremely hard to come by, and astronomically expensive. Gutenberg used his printing press to put ink on hundreds of individual letters that could be combined in numerous ways to create an entire page of text. After this stage was completed, as many copies as desired could be made. However, to print a different page, the individual letters had to be completely rearranged. This great invention helped Gutenberg reach his greatest achievement of the first mass-production of the Bible, which he published in 1456 in Mainz, Germany.
An important invention used by all, was the flush toilet. It was invented by Sir John Harington. Harington invented a valve that when pulled would release water from a water closet. Sir John recommended flushing the toilet once or twice a day, although with our modern technology, we know that is probably not sufficient. (Robin Hood didn’t name the toilet either.)
Fire was difficult to create until Robert Boyle invented the match in 1680. Although fire could be made by rubbing sticks together or by striking flint to steel, this was a time consuming process. Boyle discovered that when phosphorus and sulfur were rubbed together, they would burst into flame. Boyle knew that this was not because of friction, but because of chemical nature of these two substances. Boyle's matches were not safe because sometimes they accidentally went up in flames while in a pocket. With some improvements and a little fine tuning, this invention led to your modern safety match many years later.