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which instruments were the most important in baroque ensembles

by Dr. Noble Medhurst Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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In Baroque ensembles, which instruments were the most important? Violin, Baroque Guitar, Harpsichord, Mandolin, Violin (or Viola da gamba), Lute, Marine trumpet, and so on were some of the most well-known stringed instruments. In a Baroque orchestra

Venice Baroque Orchestra

A Baroque orchestra is a large ensemble for mixed instruments that existed during the Baroque era of Western Classical music, commonly identified as 1600–1750. Baroque orchestras are typically much smaller, in terms of the number of performers, than their Romantic-era counterparts. Baroque orches…

, how many instruments do you have?

The harpsichord was the primary keyboard instrument (and an important member of the continuo group), and instruments important in the 16th and 17th centuries like the lute and viol, still continued to be used. Variations in instruments still popular today also gave the baroque ensemble a different sound.

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What instruments were used in the Baroque period?

INSTRUMENTS OF THE BAROQUE PERIOD

  • HARPSICHORD
  • WIND ISTRUMENTS
  • PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS. During the Baroque era the principal woodwind instruments used were the bassoon, flute, and oboe. Older end-blown recorders were still in use during the late Baroque period.

What were the most dominant instruments in a Baroque Orchestra?

Instruments of baroque orchestras consisted of keyboards, strings, winds and percussion. Two types of keyboards were used in the baroque orchestra : the harpsichord and the clavichord. The harpsichord is the instrument most associated with baroque music, because of its distinctive timbre and brilliance. The harpsichord was used throughout Europe.

What instruments are used in Motown music?

The “Motown Sound”, also known by the company slogan “the sound of young America”, was comprised of musicians playing instruments common to American popular music: electric guitar, electric bass, drum set (or drum kit), piano, Hammond organ, horn sections with trumpet, baritone tenor and alto saxophones, and trombone.

Was the flute used in Baroque music?

The 1-keyed flute was used through the Baroque and Classicalperiods. This instrument, often called the Baroque flute, was made of wood and/or ivory. It could have 3 or 4 separate joints, or pieces, depending on the flute maker. The Problem of Pitch Modern musicians count on the fact that pitch is standard wherever they go.

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What are the main instruments of the Baroque period?

Baroque orchestra instruments usually included: strings - violins, violas, cellos and double basses. woodwind - recorders or wooden flutes, oboes and bassoon. brass - sometimes trumpets and/or horns (without valves)

What instruments or ensembles played Baroque suites?

Baroque concerts were typically accompanied by a basso continuo group (comprising chord-playing instrumentalists such as harpsichordists and lute players improvising chords from a figured bass part) while a group of bass instruments—viol, cello, double bass—played the bassline.

Which instrumental ensemble started in the Baroque period?

The most common and popular small ensemble during the Baroque period was the trio sonata. These trios feature two melody instruments (usually violins) accompanied by basso continuo (considered the third single member of the trio).

Which keyboard instrument was most popular in the Baroque period?

The harpsichordThe harpsichord is a keyboard instrument in which the strings are plucked, rather than hit with a hammer (which is the mechanism for the piano, a more recent development). The distinctive sound of the harpsichord creates an almost immediately association with the baroque era.

How many instruments are in a Baroque orchestra?

Some were as large as 150 instrumentalists; some were only about 20. This wasn't really standardized until later. However, what instruments were used was a bit more common. Generally, the Baroque orchestra had five sections of instruments: woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, and harpsichord.

What are 5 characteristics of baroque music?

What are the main characteristics of the Baroque era? The main characteristics of Baroque Era society were humanism and the increasing secularization of society. The music characteristics of the Baroque Era included fast movement, ornamentation, dramatic alterations in tempo and volume, and expressiveness.

Which is the most important instrumental genre of the baroque era quizlet?

The most important orchestral genres of the Baroque era were the concerto and the concerto grosso.

What is common feature of Baroque instrumental music?

Baroque music uses many types of texture: homophony, imitation, and contrapuntal combinations of contrasting rhythmic and melodic ideas. Even when the texture is imitative, however, there are usually distinct contrasts among voices. In some cases, an independent bass supports two or more melodies in imitation above it.

What modern instrument was created during the Baroque period?

the violinThe widely used modern musical instrument that was created during the Baroque period is the violin. This stringed instrument had its origin in the North of Italy at the beginning of the 16th century.

Which percussion instrument was used extensively in the Baroque era?

Timpani. Also known as Kettledrums, the Timpani started to become an orchestral staple during the Baroque period.

Was piano used in Baroque?

Emphasis on dynamics: During the Baroque era, the pianoforte (an early version of the piano) replaced the harpsichord as the primary keyboard instrument. The pianoforte (called a klavier in German) struck strings with felted hammers, whereas the harpsichord plucked the strings.

Why was the harpsichord important?

The harpsichord was widely used in Renaissance and Baroque music, both as an accompaniment instrument and as a soloing instrument. During the Baroque era, the harpsichord was a standard part of the continuo group. The basso continuo part acted as the foundation for many musical pieces in this era.

What are suites in Baroque music?

A Baroque Suite is a collection of baroque dances often preceded by a prelude. All pieces share the same key and are organized with contrasting tempo and time signatures. Other names for the suite are partita and sonata.

What was the Baroque dance suite?

The suite is a type of fashionable instrumental dance music that emerged during the Renaissance and was further developed during the Baroque period. It consists of several movements or short pieces in the same key and functions as dance or dinner music during social gatherings.

What is a Baroque orchestral suite?

The orchestral suite is a collection of dances. Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks are suites. Bach wrote four orchestral suites. The first movement of each is an overture and this is followed by a number of dances often including: courante - three beats in a bar, moderate speed.

What is part of the Baroque suite?

The Baroque suite consisted of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, in that order, and developed during the 17th century in France, the gigue appearing later than the others.

What instruments were used in the Baroque era?

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.

What is a concerto in music?

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.

What is a sonata concerto?

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.

What instrument is used to play the baroque?

usually played with a keyboard instrument and an instrument such as cello or bassoon, the keyboard player improvises chords following written numbers above the bass part, and the basso continuo has the effect of emphasizing the bass part. What does the baroque consisted mainly of. instruments of the violin family.

What were the influences of the Baroque style?

Both the middle class and scientists helped influence and develop baroque style, some of the influences are, churches included many theatrical qualities of the fine arts to appeal to the masses, scientific discoveries led to new inventions and industry, and the merchants commissioned art work.

What is the ritornello form?

in the ritornello form, an opening theme played by all the musicians (the tutti) is repeated like a refrain throughout the work. The ritornello is always played by the. tutti. In a baroque fugue, the subject is first presented in a single, unaccompanied voice.

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Development of The Orchestra.

Early Eighteenth-Century Developments.

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 ou…
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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 characteri…
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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 ...
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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 …
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Sources

  • Gerald Abraham, ed., Concert Music (1630–1750) (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1986). Nicholas Anderson, Baroque Music: From Monteverdi to Handel(London: Thames & Hudson, 1994). Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music.3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991). David Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque (New York; Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001). K. …
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17 hours ago Baroque orchestra instruments usually included: strings - violins, violas, cellos and double basses woodwind - recorders or wooden flutes, oboes and bassoon brass - sometimes trumpets and/or horns (without valves) timpani (kettledrums) continuo - harpsichord or organ

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