Baroque Music for Instrumental Ensembles

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Baroque Music for Instrumental Ensembles

Development of the Orchestra.

The Baroque era saw the survival of older ideas about the constitution of ensembles alongside newer departures. In France and Italy, the groups of players commonly used to accompany court dances at the beginning of the seventeenth century were string bands; that is, they were composed of groups of violins and viols at different pitches. This notion of a consort, inherited from the Renaissance, continued to be popular throughout much of Europe well into the eighteenth century, but it co-existed alongside newer kinds of ensembles, ensembles that, like the modern orchestra, were composed of families of several different kinds of instruments. In France, the number of performers in the Violins du Roi ("Violins of the King"), a court ensemble used to accompany dances and ballets, was fixed at 24 by 1618; this string band continued to perform at royal events until it was abolished in 1761. In the later seventeenth century the French composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, relied on these professionals to provide accompaniment when his operas and ballets were performed at court. When he required a particularly large sound to produce dramatic effects, such as in his overtures, Lully augmented the 24 members of the Violins du Roi with the eighteen members of the king's Petite Bande, another string consort in the royal household. The result produced a 42-member orchestra, an extraordinarily large ensemble by seventeenth-century standards. The sonority of Lully's experiments with a large string consort, as well as the discipline and uniform performance practices of his players, were much admired by visitors to Paris, and helped to popularize the growth of larger string ensembles in other parts of Europe. Nowhere, though, did such string bands grow to more than about two-dozen members during the later seventeenth century. In the German courts of Central Europe, the much smaller resources of the region's principalities meant that courtly string ensembles often had only four to six members. Rarely were more than twelve string players employed in the largest aristocratic households of the region. Vivaldi's instrumental ensembles in early eighteenth-century Venice might number between 20 to 24 strings, and included a harpsichord charged with playing the continuo, that is the chords and harmonies that underlay and supported the melodies and other lines played by the strings. While Vivaldi's ensemble was fairly typical of that used in many early Baroque "orchestras," other sounds were tempting composers to add new families of instruments to their performance ensembles. In this way, many late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century performing ensembles were beginning to acquire more of the features of a modern orchestra. Already in the 1660s, the French composer Lully was sometimes augmenting the large string ensemble used to accompany his operas and court spectacles with other kinds of instruments, including wood-winds, brass, and even timpani players recruited from the king's cavalry. At first, Lully employed these players using the rationale of Renaissance consort playing. Woodwinds and horns, in other words, were integrated into court productions, but they played their parts separately at times different from when the strings played. By 1674, though, the composer had begun to integrate these instrumental voices more thoroughly into the overtures and other incidental music of his operas. Still, in deference to his singers, Lully continued to use only string accompaniment during the action of the opera, so as not to overpower the performers, and these players usually plucked their instruments rather than bowing them. Visitors to Paris were impressed by the sounds that Lully's larger orchestra produced, and in the years following his experiments, larger and more varied ensembles began to appear in many cities throughout Europe.

Early Eighteenth-Century Developments.

By the mid-eighteenth century the development of mixed ensembles, ensembles that a modern ear would recognize as being similar to an orchestra, had already become popular in many places throughout Europe. At this time the growth of large ensemble playing was most advanced in Italy and France, although the custom of combining numerous families of contrasting instruments was quickly becoming popular in German-speaking Europe as well as in England. These new ensembles included strings, but also flutes, recorders, oboes, horns, and bassoons, and a new novelty, the "double bass;" although the latter was initially used primarily as a curiosity; it has since gained an essential place in the musical literature of the orchestra since the eighteenth century. The rise of these new small orchestras soon came to have many implications, both in performance practice and repertory. Unlike the older Renaissance system of using consorts of similar instruments that performed separately, the new orchestras were integrated organizations in which the individual families of instruments sat together and each had their own leader. To balance the sound produced in the halls in which they performed, violins were usually divided and stationed on both sides of the group, with violas, cellos, and basses taking their seats in their respective sections. Two oboe players were common in most of these ensembles, and since the oboes did not usually play simultaneously with the flutes, many orchestras included players who were proficient in both instruments and could thus take on double roles. Bassoon, horns, and a harpsichordist who played the continuo were also obligatory features of the new Baroque orchestras; timpani and trumpets were also used, although not as frequently. This orchestral makeup was particularly popular by the mid-eighteenth century in the presentation of operas written in Italian, and it became increasingly common for composers to orchestrate instrumental music with it in mind. The development of such a large and diverse group of players also heightened the importance of the conductor, and a new emphasis on discipline and high performance standards emerged in these ensembles. The range of sound that these groups were capable of producing also inspired a flood of compositions that took advantage of the possibilities of sound and volume that such large groups offered. For inspiration for these works, composers turned both to older forms of suites and overtures and to newer genres of concertos and sonatas. Thus during the period in which the modern orchestra was experiencing its long gestation, a creative ferment was also occurring as composers and conductors experimented with ways to make best use of the new sound possibilities their enlarged ensembles offered.

French Overture and Italian Sinfonia.

The origins of the French overture, a popular Baroque orchestral form, lay in the ballets and operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and other French composers active in the mid-seventeenth century. Lully had largely fixed the canons of this form by 1660, having adapted older kinds of entrance music to serve as a prologue for several of his ballets and operas. In these works he first set out a stately theme with tempos that were slow, even grave. Contemporaries described this aspect of the overtures as "majestic" or "heroic." Another feature of the first section included the use of dotted rhythms, that is, rhythms in which longer "dotted" notes are set against a much shorter note or a succession of short notes. A fast section, reminiscent of a fugue, followed this stately first part. Usually, these themes were introduced quickly, and sometimes the composer abandoned the fugue to return in the second section to music that was more homophonic, that is, in which the ensemble's various melodies more or less move at the same pace and to the same effect. Often a brief restatement of the first part's theme was recurred in a cadence at the very end of the overture as a way of drawing the entire piece to conclusion. In the years following 1660, the style was widely adopted in France by most composers as the obligatory form for fashioning a musical prologue to ballets and operas. It quickly spread throughout Europe, becoming particularly fashionable in Germany. George Frideric Handel often made use of it in his operas, as did Bach who used it as the form for overtures for many of his orchestral suites. In the early eighteenth century, a new Italian form of overture, the sinfonia, was increasingly competing against the popularity of the French overture. In a sinfonia, a fast section was followed by a slow one before another rapid section concluded the overture. This form of prologue became particularly popular in eighteenth-century Italian operas, and gradually eclipsed the once-widespread popularity of the French overture. By the 1740s far fewer French overtures were being written than sinfonias, although late eighteenth-century composers sometimes revived its use. As late as 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the overture to his famous opera Die Zauberflöte using the form of the French overture.

The Suite.

Many Baroque composers wrote works in several genres that were made up of multiple sections, each one like a separate composition, that were intended to be performed together at one sitting, one after the next. One example can be seen in the many dance suites that were often constructed out of individual movements, each of which made use of the rhythms and characteristics of the ballroom dances popular at the time. During the Baroque period, hundreds of such dance suites were written for solo instruments such as the lute or harpsichord, for smaller ensembles, and for the larger orchestral groups that were becoming popular. The form and length of each dance, or movement, in a suite depended on the steps of the original dance itself. Suites such as these had already begun to appear during the late Renaissance, and had often followed a specific order. By the middle and later Baroque era, a dance suite often contained a standard set of dances: allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. An allemande is duple, and moderate in pace, while a minuet is in three. A courante uses triple time and is livelier. Sarabandes are slower and more sensual, allowing for more development of a melodic line. A gigue is lively. Also common in dance suites was the rondeau; a rondeau has a basic tune to which it returns several times after an intervening passage, rather like the chorus to a song. Gavottes, chaconnes, minuets, and branles were also dances that often figured in the suites. Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks are two still-famous compositions that make use of the dance suite form. The Water Music was written for a royal barge trip up the Thames River in the summer of 1717, and was first performed on the water by fifty musicians traveling in a barge alongside the king. By contrast, the Music for the Royal Fireworks represents a late Baroque elaboration of the original idea of the dance suite, and it includes one of the most brilliant French overtures of the Baroque repertory. In this piece, Handel elaborated upon the earlier form to include a kind of battling duet between the ensemble's trumpets. The premiere version of Handel's Fireworks music was originally scored for a woodwind band and was later revised to downplay wind instruments and include a role for strings. Even the revised form in which the music is heard today is noteworthy for the many brilliant, high passages that it includes for trumpets.

The Sonata.

Both the sonata and the concerto are forms whose importance lasted far beyond the Baroque era. They were both Italian forms introduced into both secular and religious music in the early seventeenth century. Originally, both terms were used as simple names for instrumental music, but eventually they developed into very specific forms. Early Baroque sonatas and concertos were scored for a basso continuo (a harpsichord or another instrument that played the bass line) and one or more instruments. These early examples relied on any compositional form for the individual movements. Such descriptions are indeed vague, but the original meaning of the word "sonata" (from "sounded") referred simply to any piece of music that was written for instruments, rather than performed by singers. Thus early Baroque compositions given the name "sonata" might have nearly any form. Before long, however, composers also began to use the term to describe groups of pieces of varying tempos like the popular dance suites of the time. As the sonata became more popular, it gradually acquired a standard shape so that by the eighteenth century, it was a group of three pieces, or movements—two faster ones with a slower movement in the middle. All sonatas, though, continued to be written for instruments. An amazing variety of instrumental pairings flourished in the sonatas of the early eighteenth century. Particularly popular was the trio sonata, which included independent melodic lines for two high-voiced instruments like the violin set against the bass lines of a continuo, which might be played by a harpsichord or more than one lower pitched instrument. For most of the seventeenth century sonatas were written primarily by Italian composers, many of who became aware of the commercial possibilities that existed in their publication. Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) and Tomasso Albinoni (1671–1751) were two of the Italians composers that continued this tradition into the eighteenth century. By that time, however, the sonata had been avidly adopted and imitated by Austrian and German composers and the genre was also becoming increasingly popular in France, a region that had initially resisted it. Thousands of sonatas were now published or circulated in manuscript form, and the genre was one of the most common staples of the instrumental music of the period. In the classical period after 1750, the term "sonata form" also appeared to describe a specific movement, usually the first movement, within a symphony or concerto. At the same time instrumental sonatas for one or more instruments retained their popularity, surviving as an important form of chamber music into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Concerto.

A similar line of development can also be seen in the history of the Baroque concerto, a term that was initially used in a vague and indistinct way, but which eventually described a standardized musical genre. The phrase from the first referred to a concert of instruments together. Many Baroque concertos, especially later ones, consisted of three movements, like sonatas, although the concerto became a standard form only later during the classical and Romantic periods. In a given movement, passages featuring solo performers or groups of performers alternated with those scored for the ensemble. Concertos were often performed at courts, where large numbers of musicians could be kept on staff, and they became prominent during the later Baroque era. Antonio Vivaldi was perhaps the single greatest force in popularizing the concerto format in the early eighteenth century. He wrote more than 500 of them; they circulated throughout Europe, and their popularity helped to standardize many of the conventions of the genre in the eighteenth century. Like other Italian musical forms of the period, Vivaldi's concertos placed great emphasis on brilliant passagework that showed off a player's virtuosity. The composer also developed the already existing tendency of Italian composers to insert a ritornello—that is, a repeating refrain into his movements—so that the soloist and ensemble appear as if they are speaking back and forth to one another. Almost half of Vivaldi's enormous output of concertos was written for the violin; he wrote most of the others for the cello, flute, oboe, and bassoon. A number of these works were written as double concertos, that is, for two solo instruments with similar sounds. While Baroque concertos, like those of Vivaldi, increasingly highlighted the virtuosity and distinctive musical idiom of a particular instrument, another less popular form of concerto, the concerto grosso (meaning, "great concerto"), still remained popular. In these compositions the playing of a large group of instrumentalists was contrasted against passages of a small ensemble. Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) had developed this form in the seventeenth century, and both George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach made use of it in the eighteenth century. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721 in hopes of attaining a position in his court, are perhaps the greatest surviving example of the concerto grosso from the Baroque.