Baroque Period Terms Flashcards
Period of music history from about 1600 to about 1750, overlapping the late Renaissance and early Classic periods.
Baroque
Objectified or archetypal emotions or states of mind, such as sadness, joy, fear, or wonder; one goal of much Baroque music was to arouse the affections.
Affections
(Italian, “first lady”); Claudio Monteverdi’s term for the style and practice of sixteenth-century polyphony, in contradistinction to the seconda pratica.
First practice (prima practice)
Monteverdi’s term for a practice of counterpoint and composition that allows the rules of sixteenth-century counterpoint (the prima practica) to be broken in order to express the feelings of text. Also called stile moderno.
Second practice (seconda practica)
(Italian, “continuous bass”); (1) system of notation and performance practice, used in the Baroque period, in which an instrumental bass line is written out and one or more players of keyboard, lute, or similar instruments fill in the harmony with appropriate chords or improvised melodic lines. (2) The bass line itself.
Basso continuo
A form of basso continuo in which the bass line is supplied with numbers or flat or sharp signs to indicate the appropriate chords to be played.
Figured bass
Performing (or creating a performable edition of) music whose notation is incomplete, as in playing a basso continuo or completing a piece left unfinished by its composer.
Realization
A temperament in which the octave is divided into twelve equal semitones. This is the most commonly used tuning for Western music today.
Equal temperament
The addition of embellishments to a given melody, either during performance or as part of the act of composition.
Ornamentation
(Italian, “cadence”); Highly embellished passage, often improvised, at an important cadence, usually occurring just before the end of a piece or section.
Cadenza
(Italian, “work”); Drama with continuous or nearly continuous music, staged with scenery, costumes, and action.
Opera
(Italian, “little book”); literary text for an opera or other musical stage work.
Libretto
(1) An accompanied solo song. (2) The musical texture of solo singing accompanied by one or more instruments.
Monody
(Italian, “air”); (1) In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, any section of an Italian strophic poem for a solo singer. (2) Lyrical monologue in an opera or other vocal work such as cantata and oratorio.
Aria
A passage or section in an opera, oratoria, cantata, or other vocal work in recitative style.
Recitative
(1) Generic term used throughout the seventeenth century for an abstract ensemble piece, especially one that serves as an introduction to a vocal work. (2) Italian opera overture in the early eighteenth century. (3) Early symphony.
Sinfonia
(Italian, “refrain”); (1) In a fourteenth century madrigal, the closing section, in a different meter form the preceding verses. (2) In sixteenth and seventeenth century vocal music, instrumental introduction or interlude between sung stanzas. (3) In an aria or similar piece, an instrumental passage that recurs several times, like a refrain. Typically, it is played at the beginning, as interludes (often in modified form), and again at the end, and it states the main theme. (4) In a fast movement of a concerto, the recurring thematic material played at the beginning by the full orchestra and repeated, usually in varied form, throughout the movement and at the end.
Ritornello
(Italian, “excited style”); Style devised by Claudio Monteverdi to portray anger and warlike actions, characterized by rapid reiteration of a single note, whether on quickly spoken syllables or in a measured sting tremolo.
Stile Concitato
(1) recitativo arioso. (2) Short, aria-like passage. (3) Style of vocal writing that approaches the lyricism of an aria but is freer in form.
Arioso
Male singers who were castrated before puberty to preserve their high vocal range, prominent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in opera.
Castrato
A Florentine scholar who edited several Greek dramas. He concluded that Greek music consisted of a single melody, sung by a soloist or chorus, with or without accompaniment. This melody could evoke powerful emotional effects in the listener through the natural expressiveness of vocal registers, rising and falling pitch, and changing rhythms and tempo.
Girolamo Mei
(Italian, “circle” or “association”); Circle of intellectuals and amateurs of the arts that met in Florence, Italy, in the 1570s and 1580s.
Florentine Camerata
A colleague of Girolamo Mei. Hosted an academy where scholars discussed literature, science, and the arts and musicians performed new music.
Count Bardi
The first public opera house. Opened in 1637 in Venice, Italy.
Teatro San Cassiano
(Italian, “persistent bass”); or ground bass. A pattern in the bass that repeats while the melody above it changes.
Basso ostinato
(Italian, “to be sung”); (1) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a vocal chamber work with continuo, usually for solo voice, consisting of several sections or movements that include recitatives and arias and setting a lyrical or quasi-dramatic text. (2) Form of Lutheran church music in the eighteenth century, combining poetic texts with texts drawn from chorales or the Bible, and including recitatives, arias, chorale settings, and usually one or more choruses. (3) In later eras, a work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra in several movements but smaller than an oratorio.
Cantata
Genre of dramatic music that originated in the seventeenth century, combining narrative, dialogue, and commentary through arias, recitatives, ensembles, choruses, and instrumental music, like an unstaged opera. Usually on a religious or biblical subject.
Oratorio
In Lutheran music of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a musical setting based on a biblical narrative.
Historia
A musical setting of one of the biblical account of Jesus’ crucifixion, the most common type of historia.
Passion
(Italian, “to seek out” or “to attempt”); (1) In the early to mid-sixteenth century, a prelude in the style of an improvisation. (2) From the late sixteenth century on, an instrumental piece that treats one or more subjects in imitation.
Ricercare
