Style Features of Baroque-era Music

Overview

This lecture seeks to build listening skills and a descriptive vocabulary, and it will discuss some essential features of Baroque-era musical style. Music can be defined as “sound in time” or “time defined by sound.” We will acquire a vocabulary for addressing musical sound, defining and discussing discrete sound, frequency, pitch, melody, motive, theme, and tune. We review the musical textures of monophony, polyphony⎯imitative and non-imitative⎯and homophony. The explosion of instrumental technology and design during the Baroque Era gave rise to instrumental music for its own sake, which in turn, resulted in a systematized and codified tuning system, based on 12 different pitches. Thus, both functional harmony and the notation of meter were standardized during the Baroque Era.