DISCOVERING MUSIC

Stephen Johnson gets to grips with classical music’s technical terms

GRANDEUR, INTRICACY, delight in ornament, a sense of theatre, but also reassuring, solid formality – that, judging from examples I’ve seen in print recently, is how people view the notion of the ‘Baroque’, especially in music. Baroque style, said to range from around 1600 to the mid-18th century, is the manner of the courtly opera house and ballroom, and of the church. Think of the gardens of Versailles, of the cathedrallike Les Invalides in Paris. There’s plenty to astonish and entrance the eye, but underpinning it is a sense of order.

Play the Kyrie from Bach’s Mass in B minor (1724-49) and Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass (1798). The first suggests magnificent order, however painfully intense the emotions; the second conveys turmoil, doubt. The Bach speaks of an age when people received their certainties readywrapped from the pulpit or the royal throne; the Haydn is a product of the Enlightenment, with its restless drive to question.

But then play Tallis’s glorious Tudor motet Spem in Alium (1570) and follow it with ‘Winter’ from Vivaldi’s impeccably ‘Baroque’ Four Seasons: result – reverse culture shock! While the Tallis seems to float serenely, the Vivaldi is full of weird gestures and effects, disturbing dislocations. Suddenly the etymology of the word ‘Baroque’, from the Portuguese ‘barroco’, meaning a deformed pearl, makes sense. Its earliest use was often unflattering, signifying harshness and incoherence. Nineteenth-century critics tended to view it not as an era in itself, but as the final collapse into decadence of Renaissance art.

So are there general statements to be made about Baroque music – features that unite Monteverdi, Purcell, Vivaldi, Handel and JS Bach? Well, contrast is important, however formalised it might seem in the late Baroque concerto. So too is elaborate decoration, often applied to long, emotionally charged melodic lines. And expressive dissonance acquires new kind of emphasis – think of the great choral shout of ‘Barabbam!’ (‘Barabbas’) in Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

But perhaps the great discovery of Baroque music is the role of the bass line, no longer one voice amongst many, as in Renaissance church music, but the foundation and controller of the harmonic movement. The notion of ‘melody and bass’ comes into focus in the Baroque period. It’s clearly central in Monteverdi and Bach, however rich the inner parts, and it just as clearly isn’t in Tallis. A change in fashion, or a shift in human values? That needs more than a column to unravel.