This month we are talking about the Baroque period of classical music, which started around 1600 and ended with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750.

This was a time of great changes in the western world: the spread of the Protestant Reformation (which started with Martin Luther around 1517 and continued into the mid-1600s), the publication of the King James Bible, the colonization of the New World (the settlement of Jamestown, the arrival of the pilgrims in Plymouth, the foundation of Boston), the English Civil War and temporary fall of the monarchy, the rise of Absolutism (exemplified to perfection by King Louis XIV of France), the shift from religious thinking to scientific thinking (Galileo, Newton, Kepler), the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church, Benjamin Franklin’s publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack, and the invention of opera.

Music became very important to life in the Baroque period… the aristocracy wanted music for their courts, the churches needed music for their masses and services, the opera houses had shows to put on, and the cities required music for festivals. Music was in great demand!

Musicians at this time were considered servants and did not enjoy the rock-star status of later composers and our modern-day pop stars. They were paid poorly and many just barely made enough to survive. And, on top of that, if a better job opportunity came their way, they were not allowed to leave their current positions without the permission of their employers… and if they tried to leave without permission, they were thrown in jail (just ask J.S. Bach!).

At this time there were two ways to become a musician: either your father was a musician or you became the apprentice of a musician. In the latter case, the young apprentice would live with the musician and his family and would perform odd-jobs around the house in exchange for music lessons. As he improved, he would accompany the musician to performances and start to perform on his own.

If you had the good fortune of being born into a family of musicians (or misfortune if what you really wanted to be was a painter, a mason, or a clergyman), you learned the family business from your relatives. For example, the Bach family had such a monopoly on the music scene of their region in Germany, that when a musician died, employers wouldn’t ask for another musician, they would say, “Get me a Bach!”

Music prior to the Baroque period relied heavily on vocals, but now instrumental music was taking over. And the music these instruments were producing was far more complex than anything seen before. Listen to the 1st movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2:

There is so much Baroque music available to us today because the composers of the time were prolific, they were constantly composing new pieces. The most famous composers of the Baroque period are Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, Claudio Monteverdi, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Francois Couperin, Henry Purcell, and Johann Pachelbel. Their music is still very much alive and used today. You can hear Pachelbel’s Canon in D major at most weddings!

In art and architecture, everything was heavily decorated with intricate details in every available square inch (check out the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles!). Fashion in the late Baroque period reflected art, with people decorating themselves with make-up, beauty marks (often used to hide scars leftover from smallpox), wigs, and beautiful outfits… and we’re not talking about just women, but men too! The wig was the biggest fashion statement of the time. The bigger and more elaborate the wig, the higher the status of its owner. It was a way for people to show off how rich they were. There were even specific wigs for different professions. Take a look at what it was like to get dressed in the 1700s:

Music followed suit… Baroque music is full of drama and ornaments, and, for the first time, music was being used to express emotions and feelings. Music became polyphonic (meaning, literally, many voices or sounds), where each voice in a piece had equal importance. This style of music is known as Counterpoint which means multiple melodies are played and harmonized together. An easy way to understand counterpoint is by listening to a round, like “Row Row Row your Boat” performed in the video below. Each singer sings a melody and each singer is equally important!

Musicians of the Baroque period like Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti were master improvisers, meaning that when they were given a small piece of music or a series of chords, they could invent melodies and accompaniments right off the top of their heads! And they would oftentimes show off their abilities in musical duels. This video shows a clip from a movie about George Frideric Handel in which the young Handel (in the brown suit) is competing against his friend Domenico Scarlatti (gray suit). Handel presents Scarlatti with a a piece of music and Scarlatti imitates and further embellishes what Handel plays. Scarlatti won the harpsichord competition (despite what Handel says in the clip) but later loses to Handel at the organ. Listen carefully to the hear the changes Scarlatti makes to Handel’s music!

You may have noticed that the “piano” in the clip looked and sounded very different than our modern-day piano. The truth is, it isn’t a piano, but a harpsichord. There were three keyboard instruments during the Baroque period: the clavichord, the harpsichord, and the pipe organ. The piano was invented around 1700 in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori but only became popular during the Classical period. So all the Baroque music we play on the piano nowadays was not even written for the piano!

Let’s take a quick look at each one! The clavichord is the oldest known stringed keyboard instrument, dating back to the Middle Ages, and was so small that it could be lifted and placed on a table (much like our electric keyboards). It is a very quiet instrument and was used as a practice instrument for harpsichordists and organists who preferred to practice at home instead of at (an often very cold) church. Just like the piano, the strings are struck by hammers, but unlike the piano, multiple keys can share the same set of strings (in the case of fretted clavichords), which means those keys could not be played at the same time. Here you can see the clavichord in action playing an Italian piece by an unknown composer.

The harpsichord was one of the most important instruments of the Baroque period. You can hear it everywhere in Baroque music! It was invented in the late 1400s and eventually fell out of fashion around the 1790s when the piano’s popularity sky-rocketed. Although the harpsichord looks very much like a piano, it sounds very different and has a much more limited dynamic range. On the piano, sound is created when a key is depressed and a hammer inside the piano strikes a string. The sound lasts as long as the key is held down and slowly fades away. Depending on the amount of force you apply to the key, the louder or softer the sound will be. On the harpsichord, sound is created when a key is depressed and a jack lifts inside the harpsichord and a plectrum plucks a string (just like plucking the strings of a harp). The sound fades quickly, so in order to sustain the longer sounds of quarter notes and half notes, harpsichordists used ornamentation to create the illusion of longer sounds. Unlike the piano, the harpsichord cannot create louder or softer sounds by simply controlling the force applied to the keys.

The harpsichord can have up to two keyboards, called manuals. Each manual has its own distinct sound and the sounds could be further altered by changing the distance at which the strings are plucked inside the harpsichord. All this allowed the harpsichordist to create expressive music within the limited dynamic range of the instrument.

The pipe organ was dubbed the King of Instruments by Mozart! And it is a mighty instrument indeed. Some of the largest pipe organs can play sounds so low, they can make walls shake! The largest pipe organ in the world is in the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium in Atlantic City, NJ. It was built between 1929 and 1932 and has 33,114 pipes, 7 manuals, 449 ranks, and 337 registers!

The pipe organ was invented around the year 300 BC by a Greek engineer named Ktesibius (tuh-SI-bee-us). The instrument he invented was called a Hydraulis and it used water instead of air to make music. Over the centuries the organ evolved and by the time the Baroque period came along, the pipe organ was the most precise and complicated machine that mankind had ever built.

But isn’t the clavichord the oldest keyboard instrument? How can that be if the organ is a thousand years older?! Well, the truth is that the pipe organ isn’t really a keyboard instrument like the piano, clavichord, and harpsichord, which all use strings to make music. The pipe organ is essentially a giant box of whistles. When a key is pressed on the manual, air is pushed through a pipe, creating sound, just like a whistle or a flute. Each pipe can only play one note, so for each key on the manual you need one pipe. So if an organ has 61 keys on a manual, there would have to be 61 pipes.

The pipes of the organ can be made from many different materials, like lead, copper, wood, and even bamboo. The material used to build the pipe and the size and shape of the pipe determine the kind of sound the pipe makes. Pipe organs have many groups of pipes, called ranks. Each rank creates a different kind of sound. The organist can pick which group of pipes he wants to use by pulling out the buttons called stops located on the console (the expression Pull out all the stops! comes from the organ).

Playing the organ in the Baroque period was, at the very least, a two person job. The organist had to have an assistant to pump air into the organ in order to be able to play it. This was no easy job! In the video below you can see a young man using a hand pump to fill the bellows (the fan shaped air bag underneath the pump) of a small pipe organ. Watch as the bellows inflate when the assistant lowers the pump. As the organist plays, the bellows deflate and the assistant must pump in more air. Imagine doing this on a large pipe organ for hours at a time!

So that was a brief summary of the Baroque period! To finish up, here is what happens when Baroque music meets 1970s Motown (Jackson 5’s “I Want you Back”):

 

References and further information:

• Baroque Music: A Beginner’s Guide by Classic FM
• The History of Music
• Harpsichord at Encyclopedia Britannica
• Pipe Organ at KidsSearch
• The King of Instruments: History, Science and Music of the Pipe Organ