Baroque Period Of Music

Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music between approximately 1600-1750. Baroque music is associated with composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach. During the Baroque period, composers used more elaborate musical ornamentation. Baroque music expanded the size, range and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre. Popular instruments of this time were harpsichord, clavichord, lute, violin and trumpet. Types of music during the Baroque period were opera, cantata, sonata, concerto, and suite.

Nice. Ever read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson? A little long and wandering for my taste, but kind of interesting. I particularly lked the first book, "Quicksilver", that talked about the early Isaac Newton, Boyle, Hooks, etc.

I will have to say that it was very lightweight on the musical impact of that period.

Now the Grantville Gazette stories are much more interesting in that regard. That one is a series of "alternate history" stories in a shared world universe that is based on a 20th centry town being hurled back to 1632 Germany. The Gazettes are basically fan fiction (but high, high quality) where different people can spin out the interactions for their favorite subject matter. One of those, of course, is music!!!

"The Sound of Music", (Gazette III) by David Carrico begins a set of stand-alone sequential stories (known as the "Franz and Marla stories" that may be considered as a serial) continued as "Heavy Metal Music" or alternatively, "Revolution in Three Flats" in the anthology Grantville Gazette IV. It features a down and out German musician, Franz Scylwester, who'd been a maestro violinist whose left hand had been deliberately mutilated by a rival, land who had lost his position with the orchestra of the Archbishopric of Mainz.

The crippled former maestro violinist Franz Scylwester makes his way eking out an existence writing correspondence letters for the illiterate and gradually wends his way gradually across western Germany to Grantville, where he is exposed to modern Rock and Roll (which appalls him), but also to modern musical knowledge from "Master Herr Professor Wendell" (the high school music teacher), where he learns about the breadth and depth of modern musical instruments and the systematized musical theory available from these strange people from the future.

He is befriended by a sympathetic female singer, Marla Linder and uses the two in a succession of stories told from Scylwester's viewpoint, and uses the character to explore interactions between the 1630's musical world and the intriguing blended American-German ("Ami-Deutsch") culture coming into existence in central Europe. Continuation occurs in "Suite For Four Hands" in Grantville Gazette V.

You also get interesting non-fiction essays on how technology worked, (or could be made to work) in the 17th century. Example: "The Mechanical Reproduction Of Sound: Developing A Recorded Music Distribution Industry"
by Chris Penycate and Rick Boatright in volume VII.

Only some of these are out in paperback . . . mostly this is an e-zine.

See http://www.grantvillegazette.com/ if you're interested.

Khal

No I haven't read them, but looks and sounds interesting, thanks for sharing that .