Developmt of Music

The history of music
The Baroque Age The Baroque was a time of a great intensification of past forms in all the arts: painting saw the works of Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt, and El Greco -- in literature it was the time of Molière, Cervantes, Milton, and Racine -- modern science came into its own during this period with the work of Galileo and Newton. In music, the age began with the trail-blazing works of Claudio Monteverdi, continued with the phenomenally popular music of Antonio Vivaldi and the keyboard works of such composers as Fran&cced;ois Couperin and Domenico Scarlatti, and came to a close with the masterworks of two of the veritable giants of music history, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.

The beginnings of Opera In the last years of the sixteenth century, a group of musicians and literati in Florence, Italy experimented with a new method of composing dramatic vocal music, modeling their ideas after the precepts of ancient Greek theater. Their intent was that this new music should prove more direct and communicative to an audience, as the complex polyphony of the Renaissance could very often obscure the text being sung. They instead set a single melodic line against a basic chordal accompaniment, and with this notion of homophony, a new era of music began. The Florentine Camerata called this new form of musical-dramatic entertainment opera. The first operas were private affairs, composed for the Italian courts. But when in 1637 the first public opera house opened in Venice, Italy, opera became a commercial industry, and the genre in which many composers throughout history first tried out new ideas and new techniques of composition.

Claudio Monteverdi Born: Cremona, (baptized May 15, 1567) Died: Venice, November 29, 1643 The son of a doctor, Monteverdi studied music at the town cathedral in Cremona, and attained his first position as composer and instrumentalist at the court of the Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua in 1591. In...