The time between 1650 and 1750 heralded some great innovations. It gave rise to secular instrumental music, and welcomed in the modern orchestra. This was pioneered with the use of large groups of violins, and its auxiliary family members.
The overture also made its appearance, from which the symphony developed. It was Corelli who invented the Concerto Grosso – a big group vs. small group. Vivaldi then developed this concerto into a form where a solo instrument played against the backdrop of the rest of the instruments. This also popularised the virtuoso soloist, giving them ‘celebrity status’.
During the period the harmonic progression was developed. The progression in Purcell’s Evening Hymn proved popular, as did the ‘circle of fifth’s’, still widely used today. At the time most music was composed with a dozen or so popular progressions, and those progressions are still the most popular today, and used in a wide variety of genres.
The 1600’s were dominated by Italian composers. This then changed with Bach and Handel, themselves inspired by Vivaldi.
Bach’s vocal works were all religious, which a large part of his output being German Protestant Hymns – Chorales. In these words he would carefully craft the music to enhance the meaning of the words and cleverly disguised dissonance to create a desolate atmosphere to mournful text. His Passions were large scale works, incorporating all the refined techniques from the past hundred years.
His instrumental works were designed to dazzle the listener. He developed the fugue form (a type of canon), where he would take a central theme, and overlay it with the same theme starting on a different note, at different speeds, backwards and inverted. He was even able to improvise fugues like this at the keyboard.
Bach gave us equal temperament, where a piece is able to freely modulate between different keys.
Previously there had been 19 divisions of note (F sharp and G flat for example being different notes). This worked for instruments like the strings than can make minute adjustments to their pitch, but didn't work for fixed pitch instruments. It wouldn't work for example on a piano, trumpet or recorder. Equal temperament was a compromise where some notes were merged; giving the 12 note chromatic scale we have today. Bach composed ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ to prove the system worked.
Previous to the piano, all of the keyboard instruments available could only operate at a single volume. The piano changed that, with the action designed to strike a hammer on a string harder or softer depending on how hard to key was pressed. Bach advised on piano design and played some prototypes, but was said to be unimpressed with the new instrument. His son Johann Christian Bach would champion the piano 30 or so years later.
By the time of the earliest piano pieces, Bach’s music was becoming unfashionable, and would fall derelict for 100 years until interest was re-ignited by Mendelssohn. Church composers were rarely afforded as much fame as the celebrated opera composers of the day.
Around 1750, a paying public began to appear and music no longer depended on the whims of court princes and cardinals. Handel, more of an entrepreneurial type, aimed his sights towards the new commercial opportunities in London and took advantage of the short-lived boom in Italian Opera before turning to English language oratorios. These were based on old-testament text, but performed in theatres. They were squarely aimed at the commercial market, unlike Bach’s Passions. Handel brought together the musical and stylistic advantages of the last 50 years to create some real crowd-pleasers.
Handel’s magnificent patriotic chorus’s coincided with the height of Britain’s economic and militaristic world power, conveying God and King as more or less the same thing.
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