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.

Medieval Music Blog

Medieval music encompasses European music was written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends in approximately the middle of the fifteenth century. Establishing the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance is difficult.

At the start of the era, the notated music is presumed to be monophonic and homorhythmic with what appears to be a unison sung text and no notated instrumental support. Earlier medieval notation had no way to specify rhythm, although neumatic notations gave clear phrasing ideas, and somewhat later notations indicated rhythmic modes.
The simplicity of chant, with unison voice and natural declamation, is most common. The notation of polyphony develops, and the assumption is that formalized polyphonic practices first arose in this period. Harmony, in consonant intervals of perfect fifths, unisons, octaves, (and later, perfect fourths) begins to be notated. Rhythmic notation allows for complex interactions between multiple vocal lines in a repeatable fashion.
Instruments used to perform medieval music still exist, though in different forms. The flute was once made of wood rather than silver or other metal, and could be made as a side-blown or end-blown instrument. The recorder, on the other hand, has more or less retained its past form. The gemshorn is similar to the recorder in having finger holes on its front, though it is really a member of the ocarina family. One of the flute's predecessors, the pan flute, was popular in medieval times, and is possibly of Hellenic origin. This instrument's pipes were made of wood, and were graduated in length to produce different pitches.

Medieval music uses many plucked string instruments, such as lute, mandora, gittern and psaltery. The dulcimers, similar in structure to the psaltery and zither, were originally plucked, but became struck in the 14th century, after the arrival of the new technology that made metal strings possible.
The bowed lyra of the Byzantine Empire was the first recorded European bowed string instrument. The Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih of the 9th century cited the Byzantine lyra, in his lexicographical discussion of instruments as a bowed instrument equivalent to the Arab rabab and typical instrument of the Byzantines along with the urghun (organ), shilyani (probably a type of harp or lyre) and the salandj (probably a bagpipe). The hurdy-gurdy was (and still is) a mechanical violin using a rosined wooden wheel attached to a crank to "bow" its strings. Instruments without sound boxes such as the Jew's harp were also popular in the time. Early versions of the organ, fiddle (or vielle), and trombone (called the sackbut) existed as well.
In this era, music was both sacred and secular, although almost no early secular music has survived, and since notation was a relatively late development, reconstruction of this music, especially before the 12th century, is currently a matter of conjecture.

Ancient Music Blog

Music has been around ever since the dawn of time. Different types/genres of music have been created to accompany different situations during time. One of the first instruments created was the ancient bone flute. The bone flute was used for ceremonial reasons. Archaeologists have found an ancient bone flute that is forty- thousand years old and was made out of a vulture bone. The ancient bone flute was discovered in southern Germany, according to the study, led by archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany. The bone flute has five finger holes and a V-shaped mouthpiece, its almost a complete bird-bone flute made from the naturally hollow wing bone of a griffon vulture is just 0.3 inch (8 millimeters) wide and was originally about 13 inches (34 centimeters) long.

The mammoth-ivory flutes would have been especially challenging to make the archaeologists said. Using only stone tools, the flute maker would have had to split a section of curved ivory along its natural grain. The two halves would then have been hollowed out, carved, and fitted together with an airtight seal. Music may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalis) cousins, according to the archaeologists. The ancient flutes are evidence for an early musical tradition that likely helped modern humans communicate and form tighter social bonds, the researchers argue.

The Hohle Fels flute is more complete and appears slightly older than bone and ivory fragments from seven other flutes recovered in southern German caves and documented by Conard and his colleagues in recent years. Another flute excavated in Austria is believed to be 19,000 years old, and a group of 22 flutes found in the French Pyrenees mountains has been dated at up to 30,000 years ago. Conard's team excavated the flute in September 2008, the same month they recovered six ivory fragments from the Hohle Fels cave that form a female figurine they believe is the oldest known sculpture of the human form.Together, the flute and the figure found in the same layer of sediment suggest that modern humans had established an advanced culture in Europe 35,000 years ago, said Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who didn't participate in Conard's study. Roebroeks said it's difficult to say how cognitively and socially advanced these people were. But the physical trappings of their lives including musical instruments, personal decorations and figurative art match the objects we associate with modern human behavior, Roebroeks said. In conclusion the ancient bone flute was the first musical instrument ever discovered. It was found in southern Germany and is the oldest instrument ever found.

Bone Flute Picture

Here is a picture of a bone flute that I found.

Bone Flute

Here is an article I found about a bone flute.

My 2nd Blog

Today is going to be a good day because I am going to a concert in Nashville, TN. I will be there for 3 days and it's going to be really cool.