The Baroque music style and the new fundamentals of music

As we mentioned in the previous article, baroque art is about complexity built of individual not necessarily complex elements. Baroque era in itself is an era where expression of the human possibilities is in the frontier of progress. Music itself was now supposed to even express ideas and feelings without any need for supporting text. The instrumental music became an absolute medium for conveying something that a composer wanted to say. This is one major moment in the history of music, as it didn't really exist before the 17th century. The absolute music became an art of projecting feelings without spoken language. It built up its own language, and so we have to understand it first to be able to analyze it.

Music is essentially a flow of sound within time, within a certain rhythm. Sound is made of pitches, to which we asign letters a, b, c, d, e, f, g, with some modifying characters as necessary. The pitches can be arranged into a melody. Well, nothing strange there for any musician out there, so let's continue. Another element of music is timbre, the special characteristic sound that a certain instrument generates. In short, timbre is made of overtones that collectively create a characteristic aura of a particular instrument. So, piano has this mellow timbre, while a trumpet has a soaring timbre. Even if they play the same pitches, the timbre created by these two, or any other, instruments is completely unique. And blending all timbres together in a larger composition will create a special blend of voices. The special blend of voices is called the texture of music.

Textures can be monophonic, polyphonic, and homophonic. Monophonic textures have single melodic lines and that's it. Songs from Gregorian chant are one good example for monophonic textures. Polyphonic texture is one where you have at least two melodies playing at the same time, each melody being equally important. Then is the most known texture of monophony, where a melodic dominant line is accompanied by chords that are not as dominant or melodies that are simply not perceived as melodically interesting as the top one. So, homophony is just like a pop song, but of course this texture also is present in many classical works. In all these textures then - whether homophonic, polyphonic, or monophonic - the melodies are important for the total spirit and feeling of music.

How are the melodies made? They are built out of motives. A motive or a motif is a succession of pitches, fairly brief, and from many motives you can create a melody. Motives can be very short indeed, for example the da-da-da-daaaa of Beethoven's 5th symphony that everyone recognizes. Then this motive is transformed and variated throughout the entire first movement of the symphony, and many melodies are formed. So what has that to do with Baroque style? Motives are the fundamental elements of music. They can be used to build up themes within sections of music, and they then can be varied. In some music, motives are obvious for the listener, in some other music the motives are not so obvious. Some works have many motives, other works are built upon a few motives that are varied in many many ways.

What has all these, apparently basic features of music, to do with baroque and haven't they've been in use before? To some degree they have. However, in the baroque music, the real attempt and discovery of tonality paved the way for development of more intelligent textures in polyphony and monophony. The art of contrapunct had a lot to do with it, and J.S. Bach is one of the main figures that perfected it. That's why he is seen as the best composer ever. His influence on further development of music is enormous. Further new features of baroque music included the usage of minor and major scales, basso continuo, and the idea of abstract and expressive music.

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