The Baroque Era: Style, Genre, and Expression in European Music, 1600–1750 (MIND MAPS IN MUSIC HISTORY: A Visual Study-Guide Series)

The Baroque Era covers the most dramatic stylistic transformation in the history of Western music: the invention of opera and the recitative, the development of the basso continuo and the stile concertato, the codification of the music-rhetoric tradition, and the emergence of the great Baroque genres — opera, oratorio, church cantata, Passion, concerto grosso, solo concerto, dance suite, and fugue — that remain among the most frequently performed and most deeply loved bodies of music in the entire Western tradition. The volume traces this transformation through seven chapters organized to provide, in sequence, the historical framework, the theoretical vocabulary, and the genre-by-genre analytical engagement that a complete understanding of the Baroque requires. It concludes with Domenico Scarlatti's galant keyboard style, pointing forward to the Classical era that Volume IV will address. Read more