Musical Era
Baroque
Ornamentation, basso continuo, and the birth of opera.
The Baroque era is where classical music starts to sound instantly recognizable to modern ears. It runs roughly from the first operas around 1600 to the death of Bach in 1750 - a century and a half in which most of the forms and instruments of the later orchestra took shape.
The name came later, and wasn't meant kindly: "baroque" originally described a misshapen pearl, and 18th-century critics used it to mock music and architecture they found overwrought. Today it's simply a label for one of the richest periods in music history.
The world it came from
Baroque musicians mostly worked for the church, for royal and aristocratic courts, or for the new public opera houses. Bach spent much of his career as a church musician in Leipzig, producing music for every Sunday; Handel ran opera companies and staged oratorios for paying London audiences; Vivaldi taught at a Venetian orphanage whose girls' orchestra was famous across Europe. Louis XIV's court at Versailles set fashions in music, as in everything else.
What it sounds like
Two technical developments define the era. First, basso continuo: a bass line, usually played by a cello or bassoon alongside a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or organ) filling in the harmony, running underneath almost everything. Second, a taste for ornamentation - trills, turns, and elaborate decoration layered onto melodies, often improvised by the performer.
Structurally, Baroque music tends to explore one musical idea thoroughly within a movement, rather than juxtaposing contrasting themes the way later Classical-era music would. Composers often aimed to capture a single emotion, or affect, per movement - joy, grief, rage - and sustain it. That gives Baroque music its strong, steady sense of motion: a constant rhythmic drive, a bass line that keeps walking, and a texture that rarely stops.
Harmony also settled into the major and minor keys that still underpin Western music, and tuning systems developed that let keyboard players move freely between keys - the point of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which works through all 24.
The main forms
This is the era that invents opera: fully staged musical drama, combining solo singing, orchestra, and theater. Around it grew its sacred cousins, the oratorio and the cantata. Alongside them, the concerto takes shape as a form built on contrast - a soloist or small group set against a larger ensemble, trading musical ideas back and forth. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is the most famous example of exactly this idea.
The fugue - a form built by layering the same melodic subject in overlapping voices - is the era's signature intellectual achievement, perfected by Bach. Other favorites were the dance suite (an allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue, and more), the trio sonata, and the toccata and prelude for keyboard.
Instruments
The violin family took over from the older viols, and the great violin makers of Cremona were at work. Keyboards meant the harpsichord and the organ; wind players used recorders, flutes, oboes, and bassoons, and trumpets and horns had no valves yet. The orchestra itself was usually a string band built around the continuo, with other instruments added for color or ceremony.
Composers to know
Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi are the era's towering figures - between them they cover sacred choral music, opera and oratorio, and the concerto. Around them were many others worth knowing:
- Claudio Monteverdi (1567 – 1643) - opened the era with L'Orfeo (1607), the earliest opera still regularly staged.
- Barbara Strozzi (1619 – 1677) - a Venetian singer and composer who published eight volumes of her own vocal music.
- Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687) - the dominant composer at Louis XIV's court.
- Henry Purcell (1659 – 1695) - England's greatest composer of the age; his opera Dido and Aeneas includes the heartbreaking "Dido's Lament."
- Arcangelo Corelli (1653 – 1713) - his violin sonatas and concerti grossi set the model for a generation.
- Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 – 1767) - astonishingly prolific, and more famous than Bach in their own lifetimes.
- Domenico Scarlatti (1685 – 1757) - born the same year as Bach and Handel, and the author of 555 inventive keyboard sonatas.
Into the Classical era
By the 1730s and 1740s, younger composers were already turning away from dense counterpoint toward lighter, more tuneful music with simple accompaniment - the galant style. Bach's own sons, especially Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, were among the leaders of the change, and by the time their father died the Classical style was well on its way.
Where to start listening: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is the most accessible entry point; Bach's Brandenburg Concertos reward a second and third listen once the era's sound feels familiar. For Baroque vocal music, try the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah or "Dido's Lament" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.