# Lets talk about early baroque music!



## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

Recently I have become aware of a hole in my music listening...It's only Monteverdi (and Schütz) that I know pretty well of the early baroque composers. So now there is Frescobaldi, Carissimi, Cavalli, Strozzi, Sweelinck and probably some more. Is the early baroque from 1600-1650? If so, who would be the last of the early baroque? I guess Monteverdi is the first, or maybe Sweelinck. 
LETS TALK EARLY BAROQUE


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

I recently finished L'Orfeo. It's a marvelous opera, although I do still prefer the operas of Handel as far as Baroque goes.

But as one of the first operas it surely exceeded expectations.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> Recently I have become aware of a hole in my music listening...It's only Monteverdi (and Schütz) that I know pretty well of the early baroque composers. So now there is Frescobaldi, Carissimi, Cavalli, Strozzi, Sweelinck and probably some more. Is the early baroque from 1600-1650? If so, who would be the last of the early baroque? I guess Monteverdi is the first, or maybe Sweelinck.
> LETS TALK EARLY BAROQUE


I see Sweelinck as a borderline figure, with the people who studied with him being more clearly baroque style - people like Scheidemann and Scheidt.

Frescobaldi's keyboard music seems to me as baroque as can be, you may want to think about earlier Italian composers like Trabaci though.

The end of early baroque came with Lully and Corelli IMO. That's when the music began to dumb down. I blame Louis XIV myself.


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## classical yorkist (Jun 29, 2017)

Giovanni Gabrieli! Venetian composer and organist of St Marks. A key figure in the transition from late Renaissance to Baroque. An essential listen.


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## classical yorkist (Jun 29, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> I see Sweelinck as a borderline figure, with the people who studied with him being more clearly baroque style - people like Scheidemann and Scheidt.
> 
> Frescobaldi's keyboard music seems to me as baroque as can be, you may want to think about earlier Italian composers like Trabaci though.
> 
> The end of early baroque came with Lully and Corelli IMO. That's when the music began to dumb down. I blame Louis XIV myself.


I always view Sweelinck's _Fantasia Chromatica_ as a key early baroque work.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

classical yorkist said:


> I always view Sweelinck's _Fantasia Chromatica_ as a key early baroque work.


Here's something that Bernard Foccroulle wrote about Sweelinck and his influence, which I think is worth thinking about, his idea is that the key concept which marks out the renaissance from the baroque is a intense expressiveness and a rhetorical form.



> The essential quality that Sweelinck seemed to have passed on to his pupils was the ability to vary the weight and density of their polyphony, to make their music breathe and to highlight a solo line on a separate keyboard, to colour the music with chromaticism and to create passages with diminutions that had been inspired in particular by John Bull in England and by the Venetian school in general.
> 
> Bearing all of these influences in mind, we can only be struck by the arrival and development of a new style of art that dared to go far beyond its earlier models. The pedalboard was used to a much greater extent by the above German composers than by Sweelinck or Bull; they gave the pedals a much more definite role, whilst their experiments in sonic perspective and spatialisation went far beyond the echo techniques in Sweelinck's fantasias. Sweelinck's reserve - or propriety - gave way to a growing need for expressivity. This new expressive intensity can be heard throughout the entire range of the keyboards in Praetorius' fantasia on Durch Adams Fall and in the glittering virtuosity that concludes the second verse of Schildt's Magnificat: this is no longer the sound world of the Renaissance, but rather the early stages of the Baroque aesthetic, a style of composition that aimed at moving the listener and at expressing the most contrasting affects. This expressive and rhetorical dimension became more and more profound and reached its greatest profundity in the works of Buxtehude, Reincken, Lübeck and Bruhns. Although the works of Praetorius, Schildt and Scheidemann offer occasional moments of contemplation, this was not their primary aim: they have left us important and admirable works that arouse not only a listener's emotions but are also a source of delight.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Another composer who seems to me to be kind of on the cusp of renaissance and baroque is Anthony Holborne -- sometimes I hear renaissance simple balanced lyricism, other times I hear baroque emotional convoluted expressiveness. Nicholas Reusner may also be like this, I'm not sure.






But of course this wasn't the question the question was about what marks the difference between early and late baroque, the difference between Louis Couperin and Francois Couperin, and I have already proposed an answer to that -- simplification, less seriousness.


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## Ras (Oct 6, 2017)

I heard a wonderful recording of some of *Tobias Hume's music* by Jordi Savall and his friends from the eighties (on DHM) yesterday. 
It was so good I had to hear it twice on the same day!


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Ras said:


> I heard a wonderful recording of some of *Tobias Hume's music* by Jordi Savall and his friends from the eighties (on DHM) yesterday.
> It was so good I had to hear it twice on the same day!
> 
> View attachment 126209


Yes outstanding, Tobias Hume is a fabulous composer.

This is Savall's second recording I think, I prefer it to his earlier one


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## Ras (Oct 6, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Yes outstanding, Tobias Hume is a fabulous composer.
> 
> This is Savall's second recording I think, I prefer it to his earlier one


Can you recommend more by Tobias Hume?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Ras said:


> Can you recommend more by Tobias Hume?


Yes. Susanne Heinrich, Paolo Pandolfo, Kaori Ishikawa with Anthonello, Jonathan Dunford (a mixed composer recital disc.)

There's a series of recordings on Naxos by Les Voix Humaines, but they've never caught my imagination. However there is a recording which Les Voix Humaines made with Suzie Leblanc which I like very much.


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