Piano4t Baroque
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All Students preparing for Grade exams are recommended to use the Hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. 

At higher grades  you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.  My own  web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!

 

 

 

 

 

Baroque 1600 - 1760

Baroque music uses and perfects the art of  counterpoint.  In the Renaissance, harmony happened as a side effect of polyphony.  In early Baroque music we start to hear chord progressions, a bass line, and more of a sense of "roles and responsibilities" for each voice. 

Baroque style

Baroque music uses more sustained themes  and stronger rhythms.

Baroque form

Instead of the ricercar, fantasia and canzona of the Renaissance it is the fugue that defines Baroque form.

Baroque music has more emotional intensity than Renaissance music, and a Baroque piece often depicts a single emotion or affect (such as joy, grief, or piety...).

This period also sees a growing amount of music written for virtuoso singers and instrumentalists, so is harder to perform than Renaissance music.  There is more ornamentation, often improvised.

Baroque instruments

Instrumental pieces became more important than a capella vocal music.  The harpsichord and the organ were the important keyboard instruments of the time.

A Baroque English organ is played here:

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A harpsichord is heard in this clip:

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Thomas Beecham is alleged to have said that the sound of the harpsichord resembled "Two skeletons copulating in a dustbin".   In this clip, a Domenico Scarlatti sonata is heard using all the tone colour of the piano:

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Vladimir Horowitz played Scarlatti's Sonata in E K532

Try to play a piece from one of these Baroque composers:

    (late) Monteverdi

    Bach

    Buxtehude

    Telemann

    Purcell

    Scarlatti

    Couperin