Baroque and the nationalistic streams in music

What is nationalism in music? Simply put, when composers use their own country's folklore in music, it is national. However, there is much more to nationalism than that. How did all this evolve? As you remember, the early music in Europe's history was based around latin language and was mainly written for the religious ceremonies. Of course, the folklore music also existed but it wasn't that big composers were involved in it - their job was to please the Church. The things started to change first during the Renaissance era, and now, in the Baroque the different spirit of music was born. No more latin texts, let's start writing music in our own language, said the composers. And so they did. Naturally, the different languages open up new possibilities as well as restrictions on how the music could be set to words.

A funny paradox arises at once here. In Italian peninsula (at this time it was a vast collection of independent states that didn't like each other), the country in which latin was once spoken and from which Italian language evolved, people already were familiarized with the sound of latin. But of course things had to be changed for achieving the goal of creating nationalistic music. Italian music is famous for its simplicity and striking melodies that 'cover up' the polyphonic complexity. The music is straight to the point, and no big fuss is made of polyphony, as compared to the Germans.

So what did Germans like to compose? First of all, let's remember that Germans disliked the Italians, partially because of the influence of Catholic church, the corrupted clergymen, etc. As we know, protestantism had a strong grip on Germany, and so the people there wanted to turn away from the big brother. This was not only reflected in society but also in music. And naturally, the Catholic Church didn't come to like the German music, as it boasted with its vast polyphonic complexity. So, both sides were stubborn and disliked each other's ideas, but this also created some kind of interesting musical competition for us to enjoy. After all, we have fine examples of both Italian and German music, and we clearly hear how different they both are. We can easily hear the polyphonic complexity of J.S.Bach, and the contrasting catchy melodic simplicity of A.Vivaldi.

The very important idea in development of baroque music was the use of national languages, and the stance away from the latin ritualistic music. German language was now used in Church songs! This was unthinkable just a few decades before the baroque. The German church songs were called corals, and they made good use of the natural accents and flow of the vernacular - not so much melisma now, but sort of one syllable per musical note was common.

Another important news in baroque was the abstract music, the way to convey the feelings and ideas through just music, without any words. This was also unheard of during Renaissance. Especially the Italian music became very entertaining in its spirit, as you surely can hear from their baroque compositions. On the other hand, German baroque music is more abstract and metaphoric, trying to paint feelings and states of soul like courage, wonder, happiness, sadness, and other.