Baroque Terms

General Form Terms  Chorale – Movement for choir with slow steady tempo – often moves in crotchets.  Pasacaglia – slow stately dance which uses ground bass idea.  Chaconne – is a type of musical form it is similar to the pasacaglia. Similar to what we hear in Movt one as there is a ground bass throughout. The ground bass is a variation on repeated short harmonic ideas.

General Form Terms  Cantata – vocal work with orchestra featuring Soloists  Aria – Song for solo singer accompanied by instruments with a highly elaborate and ornamented melody.  Da Capo Aria – Aria in ABA form where A is sung again.  Recitative – Musical narrative or story telling where voice is imitates natural inflections of speech

Musical Ideas  Episode – Music between each playing of the ritornello theme  Ritornello – A musical idea which returns several times throughout a piece of music.  Ground Bass/Ostinato bass – A constantly recurring musical idea found in the bass line. Found in Movt 1 lasts four bars and continues throughout the work.

Musical Ideas  Figured Ideas – Numbers written under the bass line for organist/harpsichord player to indicate the arrangement of chords.  Bass Continuo – One or two instruments used to continuously play chords or bass line in the background of baroque music. They played off the figured bass idea. The keyboard instrument was the harpsichord and the bass instrument was the cello.

Textures  Polyphonic/Contrapuntal – two or more contrasting melodies sung simultaneously.

Compositional Techniques  Imitation – where one voice/part copies another  Word Painting – also melodic feature – where the meaning of important words in the text are portrayed using music ‘grab’ (grave) in Movt 5 very wide downward leap to illustrate word.  Melismatic Singing – singing several notes to one syllable  Circle of fifths – bach changes chord in sequence – eg Mot 1 bars he starts on Bb, F, Cm before ending on Gm – proceeding up 5 each time.  Baroque key Signatures – Sometimes Bach omits a sharp or flat from the key signature and puts it directly into the msuic as an accidental eg Movt 6 key is Cm with 2 flats instead of 3.

Melodic Features  Melismatic Singing – singing several notes to one syllable  Mono syllabic – one note to each syllable as in recitatives  Baroque Ornamentation – used widely in baroque music and usually left to the discretion of the performer.  Sequences – seen throughout the piece.  Scale Movement – rising and descending scale passages often moving quickly through the use of quavers and semi-quavers.  Ornamentation

Orchestration  Chamber Orchestra – small orchestra ranging from 2-4 instruments to instruments.  Terraced dynamics – baroque instruments no as powerful as instruments today so dynamics tended to be sudden rather than gradual.

Word Painting and Melismatic Examples  Movet 2 – Eilen – to hurry (melismatic and word painting with use of semi-quavers)  Use of Jesu and Meister on antiphonal dialogue  Movt 3 – Erzunet – angry (melismatic)  Movt 3 – Weit – far (word painting leap of 10 th )  Movt 4 – Beherzt – brave (upward leap) Word Painting  Movt 4 – Streite – to attack - octave leaps and melisma  Movt 6 – Rauben – to steal - melisma

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