About Baroque Music

During the baroque period, European nations were in the process of establishing colonies in the New World, and battling political strife within their own nations. More notably, several very famous cultural icons existed, including William Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton. They became noteworthy for having, respectively, written many plays, pioneered modern physics and telescopic astronomy, and culminating the scientific revolution of the seventeenth-century.

Baroque music featured a single, important, high-pitched voice with an accompaniment supporting it, while the Renaissance ideal of music contained numerous voices all singing at once, with each voice having equally as important a part.

Nearly all the music of the baroque period can be characterized by the basso continuo, or figured bass. Since a large part of baroque style music was improvisation, basso continuo was a shorthand method of composing music by which, instead of writing out each note a musician was supposed to play, the composer would write out only the bass line and a few numbers indicating the intended harmony, while the musician was expected to improvise the rest of the piece.