Month: October 2022

Baroque Style For its time, Baroque was crazy and uninhibited. The music of this period is emotional and filled with little frills and decorations that shocked and amazed its listeners. Baroque was often fast paced with great and quick use of scales and violent changes in volume and melody. Today you might not think of it as an exciting type of music, but if you compare it to the Classical style you can tell immediately that baroque did have more action in its pieces. Some say the greatest composer of all time wrote in this period: Johann Bach.

Classical Style We wish we could have found this on our own, but a book we researched with (Classical Music for Everybody) had the perfect quote to explain what music of the Classical style was like, and we’d like to reprint that here:

Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. The rich interchange of ideas in Europe, as well as political, economic, and religious events in the period 1400–1600 led to major changes in styles of composing, methods of disseminating music, new musical genres, and the development of musical instruments. The most important music of the early Renaissance was composed for use by the church—polyphonic (made up of several simultaneous melodies) masses and motets in Latin for important churches and court chapels. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, patronage had broadened to include the Catholic Church, Protestant churches and courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all were sources of income for composers.

The early fifteenth century was dominated initially by English and then Northern European composers. The Burgundian court was especially influential, and it attracted composers and musicians from all over Europe. The most important of these was Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), whose varied musical offerings included motets and masses for church and chapel services, many of whose large musical structures were based on existing Gregorian chant. His many small settings of French poetry display a sweet melodic lyricism unknown until his era. With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers.

The following essay relates the history of music in the Western European tradition to the evolution of consciousness as described by Rudolf Steiner and makes no claim to be more than a sketch of certain aspects.

Music history as taught in my younger days (the 1940’s) concerned itself largely with composers from Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, sparingly and somewhat grudgingly, England. England got in because Henry Purcell decided to incarnate there and Hӓndel changed his name to Handel. Books like Percy Coles’s The Growth of Music would have been altered very little if Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the whole of Scandinavia had been left off the map, and the standard texts would have been only a few pages shorter if they had started in the middle of the sixteenth century and ended in 1914.