Baroque music describes a period or style of European classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1750. This era is said to begin in music after the Renaissance and was followed by the Classical music era. The word "baroque" came from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning "misshapen pearl", a strikingly fitting characterization of the architecture of this period; later, the name came to be applied also to its music.

Baroque music forms a major portion of the classical music canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to. It is associated with composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Baptiste Lully, George Frideric Handel, Arcangelo Corelli, Claudio Monteverdi, and Tomaso Albinoni. The baroque period saw the development of functional tonality.

During the period, composers and performers used more elaborate musical ornamentation; made changes in musical notation, and developed new instrumental playing techniques. Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre. Many musical terms and concepts from this era are still in use today.

Music described as Baroque is a broad range of styles from a wide geographic region, mostly in Europe, composed during a period of approximately 160 years. The systematic application of the term "baroque", which literally means "irregularly shaped pearl", to music of this period is a relatively recent development. It was in 1919 that Curt Sachs was the first to attempt to apply the five characteristics of Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory of the Baroque systematically to music.

In English the term only acquired currency in the 1940s, in the writings of Lang and Bukofzer. Indeed, as late as 1960 there was still considerable dispute in academic circles, particularly in France and Britain, whether it was meaningful to lump together music as diverse as that of Jacopo Peri, Domenico Scarlatti and J.S. Bach with a single term; yet the term has become widely used and accepted for this broad range of music. It may be helpful to distinguish it from both the preceding (Renaissance) and following (Classical) periods of musical history.

The transition from Renaissance to Baroque was dramatic.[citation needed] Composers associated with the Florentine Camerata like Jacopo Peri, Caccini and Claudio Monteverdi, sought to depict human affects in a direct manner expressed by a solo voice, so very different from the previous polyphonic music.[citation needed] The historic debate between Monteverdi and Artusi highlights this, and consequences for instrumental music were profound.[citation needed] Later, the way to view affects became codified, and a main treatise is Mattheson's Der vollkommene Kapellmeister from 1739. Seen from this theory the main affect should be sustained through an entire movement. Handel's well-known works yield good examples of this.

For example, "He was despised" and "The trumpet shall sound" from the first and last parts of the oratorio "Messiah" depict a soft feeling of pity and a heroic feeling, respectively.[citation needed]

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