What is Baroque Music?
Since almost everyone these days grows up listening to pop music, classical music can be truly foreign and intimidating, classical music from 400 years ago especially so. Looking back, so much of the culture of the 17th and 18th centuries has been tossed aside (anyone care to bring back corsets or powdered wigs or streets full of horses or absolute monarchies?), so why hold on to music of that era?
First and foremost, Baroque music is about outstanding musicianship. In early 2006, a video of an electric guitar wizard caused a sensation on YouTube, spawning hundreds of imitators around the world to prove themselves on the same licks. Did this guitar god play something by Hendrix or Clapton or Slash? No, he played Bach! Baroque music stretches the talents of even the best of the best. In our own times, the virtuosity of Baroque music is perhaps best compared with jazz. Just like in jazz, familiar tunes are often recycled, and the focus is on outstanding playing. The setups reflect this focus. A typical jazz combo is a solo musician or two (maybe a sax, maybe a singer), accompanied by a "rhythm section" of a piano, bass and drums. Many Baroque pieces have the same line up: a solo musician (maybe a violinist, maybe a recorder), accompanied by a "continuo" of a harpsichord, lute and cello. This is not to say that composers play a secondary role in the music (where would jazz be without Cole Porter?), but Baroque composers often wrote with outstanding musicians in mind.
Some of the foreignness and intimidation of the music comes from the inherited terminology. Seattle Baroque's first concert of 2006 opened with Albicastro's Concerto V in G minor, with its movements Spirituoso, Grave, Da Capella, Adagio, and Allegro. What a mouthful! What does it all mean? First of all, it's in Italian. At the end of the Renaissance, Italy was the center of musical universe. Both musical inventions (the violin) and musical forms (opera) came to life in Italy and later spread to the rest of Europe. So, it's not surprising that Italian was the language of musical terminology and, for classical music, remains so today.
How about the first word concerto? Starting in the Baroque era, there were two major types of musical pieces designed to highlight musicians in a concert setting. A sonata is a concert piece for one or a few highlighted musicians, accompanied by a "continuo", which is sometimes just a harpsichord, but sometimes also includes some combination of cello, bass, or lute. A concerto is a concert piece for solo musicians, accompanied by an orchestra, which in the Baroque period was typically just strings, namely violins, violas, cellos, basses, harpsichord. (During the Baroque, woodwind and brass instruments serve mostly as solo instruments and percussion instruments like tympanis appear only in the grandest works like Handel's Messiah.) So, this piece is for solo instruments and orchestra.
The V (Roman numeral 5) reflects the fact that musicians typically learned music from one another rather than sheet music in the Baroque era. Music publishing didn't become very sophisticated until after the Baroque. A Baroque composer's works were typically bundled up, sometimes as a hodgepodge, and sent off to the publisher, often many years after the pieces were written. So, apparently, this is the fifth concerto in a bundle of Albicastro's works. The phrase in G minor tells us the "key" of the piece, which is the palette of notes Albicastro drew from when composing. A full explanation of keys is a huge undertaking, but the most basic understanding is that there are two grouping of keys, major and minor. As a stereotype, the major keys sounds joyful or majestic; the minor keys sound exotic (like Middle Eastern music) or melancholy. But, just as a painter can use the same color palette to produce paintings of many different subjects and moods, a composer can use the same key for many purposes. In the end, for non-musicians, these numbers and keys are really just a way to distinguish one musical piece from another (which Albicastro concerto did they play? Number 5 in G minor? I love that one!).
Finally, the labels of the movements are little notes the composer left to tell the musicians something about the tempo and perhaps the mood he intended for each part of the music. Often these terms are simple Italian adjectives about speed, like adagio (slow), andante (walking), allegro (fast), or presto (very fast). Other times, the adjectives are somewhat more abstract, which captures a mood and implies a speed, like spirituoso (spiritual), grave (serious), mysterioso (mysterious), or da capella (from the chapel). Obviously, with such simple descriptions, the musician carries a large responsibility for the final tempo and mood choices, relying both on scholarship about the composer and his or her era and on personal experience and instincts.
Over time, we will grow the "Behind the Music" section to include more information the audience wonders about. Have you ever wanted to ask a musician a question about the music? Do drop us an email and we'll add the topic to our site!