# Baroque Music



## owildwestwind

How do you understand the Italian and French style in baroque music? 
What makes e.g. Couperin different from, say, Albinoni?
Except for trills and other ormamentations, is there a difference in 
what they try to express?


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## tahnak

owildwestwind said:


> How do you understand the Italian and French style in baroque music?
> What makes e.g. Couperin different from, say, Albinoni?
> Except for trills and other ormamentations, is there a difference in
> what they try to express?


The King of Baroque is of course the German Johann Sebastian Bach. However, you are asking about Italian and French styles.. The pioneer in Italian Baroque style is Arcangelo Corelli whose style of playing the violin became the basis of the violin technique in the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth centuries.
We will get to the styles later. You want to dwell on Albinoni vs. Couperin.
Albinoni was particularly fond of the oboe and he is the first Italian to compose concerti for the oboe. Do you know that his most famous piece was not discovered until 1945 when Remo Giazotto, a Milanese musicologist travelled to Dresden to complete the biography of Albinoni and discovered fragments of a manuscript with only the bass line and six bars of melody surviving from the slow movement of a Sonata da Chiesa. You hear it as the famous Adagio nowadays as arranged by Giazotto.
While Albinoni was fluent with the violin and the oboe, Francois Couperin was at home with the harpsichord and pipe organ. France never had an individual Baroque style because they were influenced by an Italian settling down in France (Jean Baptiste Lully) and Couperin was also influenced by the Italian style of composing particularly in his motets and vocal music.
Your answer may be found in Couperin's L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin in 1716 where he talks about elucidating the fingering, his standardization of notations, his use of ornaments, dotted rhythms, notes inegales and a manuscript treatise, Regle Pour L' Accompagnement where he offered rules for realising figured bass and the treatment of dissonance. Through his publications, he offered a wide variety of ways in which the Italian and French styles might be united.
To answer your question, no; there are not any major differences between the Italian styles of Baroque writing and the French because the French adapted the Italian vein through the infiltration of Lully (baptised Lulli).


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## StlukesguildOhio

I'm not certain that we can discern a huge stylistic difference between music of composers from the same period based solely upon their nation of origin... not without having listened to a great deal... and even then. The Italians were certainly the most influential... going back to the Renaissance and the invention of many "modern" musical forms... including opera. Bach and Biber and Handel were all influenced by Italian music as much as any French composer (Handel worked in Italy for some years and composed a great oeuvre of cantatas and operas in Italian). The same holds true of Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Charpentier, Mondonville, etc... With time, however, you do notice certain differences. There is a seemingly greater complexity to the Germans... Bach, Biber, Buxtehude, etc... where the Italians seem more open and song-like. With the French there is always the importance of dance... and a certain sound tied to the French language... just as Handel takes on a decidedly English sound with his oratorios. But as to specifics that one can put one's finger on...? I think these differ from individual to individual.


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## HarpsichordConcerto

I don't think I can agree with either responses above, which wrote that there were not "huge/major differences". The French Baroque musicians were extremely "nationalistic" in the sense that they desperately wanted their own distinctive style compared with the Italians. Anyone familiar with Baroque music should be able to instantly recognise French Baroque music versus Italian. This is sufficient enough to warrant that French and Italian Baroque music sounded quite different. (Structurally, they both continued to use the basso continuo). Go listen to Bach's _Orchestral Suite no.1_, which was very French, versus any his _Brandenburg Concertos _ or a Corelli concerto grosso.

Jean Baptiste Lully developed a unique French style of music that was suited for the dance. His employer was a fanatical dancer, and even danced with Lully on reported occasions. Lively quick rhythms featured much of French instrumental and orchestral music. In the opera, French Baroque opera was very different to the Italian style. They used spoken dialogue and very little to none Italian style recitatives. French Baroque arias did not cultivate the Italian _da capo_ style. Go listen to a Lully or a Rameau opera versus a Handel or a Vivaldi opera. Differences are light and day.

French harpsichord music was more subtle and eloquent, whereas Italian haprsichord music (later perfected by the Germans) was much more technically virtuosic. Go listen to Bach's _French Suites_ for harpsichord versus his _Italian Concerto_ for solo harpsichord.

That's just a short summary. You can find books on this topic. Just remember broadly that the French were competing with the Italians on all matters artistic (as Italy was the artistic capital of the world back then), and indeed they wanted to outdo the Italian on music, too.


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## StlukesguildOhio

HC... remember that you have a professed love of... and experience with Baroque music. I can't imagine confusing Schumann for Schubert or Mahler for Brahms... and virtually scoff when my studio mate confuses Bach for Boccherini and Schubert for Wagner!... but this is only because I have listened a good deal to these and many other Romantic-era composers to the point that I can discern what once was all but indiscernible. 

I am a Bach fanatic... and have a good-sized collection of Baroque music by Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Handel, Scarlatti, Buxtehude, Zelenka, Biber, and a number of others. Over the past year I have made a concerted effort to begin to explore Baroque (and earlier) music in the same degree of depth as I have the Romantic and early Modernist eras... but this is still a work in progress. I am able to discern certain elements unique to individuals and to national schools... but I might easily confuse Alessandro Scarlatti for Handel... or even a French composer. Of course the accusation that all Baroque music sounds alike is no more nor less true than it is of the music of any style. But it takes experience... as I noted. Where Corelli and Rameau may be as different as night or day to you, I doubt that it is as easy for someone without the experience to pick up on these differences from the start.

Besides.. when it comes to the French vs the Italians... the Germans win.


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