The Baroque Ear

The Raw Materials

Interval · consonance · dissonance · triad · chord

Before the quarrels of the theorists can mean anything, you need only three ideas — and all three are things you can hear, not things you must memorize. First: when two notes sound together, the distance between them is called an interval. Second: some intervals sound restful and stable — the ear could sit inside them forever — and these are called consonances. Others sound tense, itchy, in need of going somewhere; these are dissonances. Third, and crucially: a dissonance is not a wrong note. It is stored energy. The whole art of Western music, and the entire fight between the renaissance and the baroque, is about how that energy may be spent.

Stack two consonant intervals and you get the fundamental unit of harmony: the triad — three notes, a "chord" in the everyday sense. Nearly every chord in this companion, and in the operas you love, is a triad or a small decoration of one. One detail rewards attention: the middle note, the third, decides the chord's emotional temperature. Raise it and the chord is major — open, daylight. Lower it a semitone and it is minor — shadowed. Monteverdi's laments live in minor.

Two Ways of Weaving

Counterpoint · polyphony · homophony · monody · madrigal · a cappella

Imagine four excellent singers, each given a genuinely beautiful melody, all singing at once — and the miracle is that the melodies are engineered to fit. That is counterpoint ("point against point", note against note), and music woven of several simultaneous, equally important lines is called polyphony — "many voices". Each line is called a voice or part, even when played by instruments. In the renaissance this was music's highest achievement: masses, motets, and the secular madrigal were all woven this way, often for unaccompanied choir — a cappella. The lines typically enter one at a time with the same melodic idea, each imitating the last — listen for the theme passing from voice to voice like a candle flame.

Why did anyone object to something as glorious as polyphony? Because of the words. When four voices sing different syllables at different times, the poetry is shredded — the Florentines sneered that counterpoint was a laceramento della poesia, a "tearing to pieces of the poetry" (Bukofzer p. 5). Look at what happens to a single line of verse in each texture:

Speaking in Music

The Camerata · recitative · speech-song · the birth of opera

Around 1590, in the Florentine palace of Count Bardi, a circle of aristocrats, scholars and musicians — the Camerata: Bardi, Corsi, the theorist Galilei (father of the astronomer), the singer-composers Caccini and Peri — talked themselves into a revolution. Obsessed with how ancient Greek tragedy might have been sung, and disgusted by the word-shredding of counterpoint, they proposed something scandalous: throw the counterpoint away. Let a single voice declaim the poetry in free rhythm, following the natural rise and fall of impassioned speech, over a few sustained chords. Caccini called it "speaking in music"; Peri said he imitated "a speaking person in song" (Bukofzer p. 7). The result — half song, half speech — is the recitative.

The recitative was invented for a purpose: to resurrect Greek tragedy as a play sung from beginning to end. The first experiments (Peri's Dafne and Euridice, 1598–1600) led within a decade to the first opera that still holds the stage: Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607). Bukofzer is at pains to note (pp. 6–7) that opera was not the last flowering of the renaissance but "one of the foremost innovations of the baroque": only the baroque wanted to represent extreme feeling — and the recitative was its instrument, with the singer resorting to "grimaces, acting… crying and gasping". The renaissance found the whole thing amateurish; a composer of the old school thought writing recitative required no skill at all. Both were right about the other and wrong about themselves — Bukofzer's point is that the two sides argued past each other "on two levels that did not even touch".

Painting Words, Moving Passions

Word painting · musica reservata · the doctrine of affections · stile concitato

Renaissance and baroque composers agreed on one thing: music should serve the words. They disagreed violently about how. The renaissance way was pictorial and refined: paint each important word as it passes. "Heaven" gets high notes; "wave" gets a wavy line; "to flee" gets running notes; a "sigh" is broken by actual silences. This craft of word painting (or madrigalism) reached its peak in the Italian madrigal and in the refined art the theorists called musica reservata (Bukofzer p. 5). The Camerata mocked it as pedantry — why paint the word "wave" when the speaker's whole soul is drowning? — but in practice the baroque kept every one of these devices and turned up their voltage.

The baroque then went a step further than single words: it wanted to seize a whole state of soul — and it believed these states could be catalogued. This is the doctrine of affections: feelings (affections) were "classified and stereotyped" mental states — grief, rage, joy, love — each representable in music by a known set of figures (Bukofzer p. 5). A baroque aria typically commits to one affection and burns through it; the modern listener's sense that a Handel or Vivaldi aria is "one mood, magnificently sustained" is exactly right. And where the renaissance kept to "the affections of restraint and noble simplicity", the baroque demanded the extreme ones — "ranging from violent pain to exuberant joy". For rage Monteverdi even invented a technique: the stile concitato, the "agitated style", hammering one note in rapid repetition — the sound of war entering music.

The Touchstone: Dissonance

Suspension · preparation · resolution · passing tone · prepared vs. free dissonance

Here is the heart of Bukofzer's stylistic comparison — the place where "changes in harmony and counterpoint manifest themselves most conspicuously" (p. 9). Renaissance music loved dissonance as much as any music, but it handled the stuff like nitroglycerine, under strict law. A dissonance could slip by unaccented between two chords (a passing tone, on the weak beat), or it could be savoured openly — but only through a precise three-step ritual called the suspension: first the note sounds as a consonance (preparation); then the other voices move and leave it hanging as a dissonance on the strong beat; then it yields, stepping down to consonance (resolution). Tension built, held, released — the renaissance's entire emotional engineering in slow motion:

The baroque kept the suspension but broke its monopoly. In the freer style a seventh chord could simply be struck — no preparation, no apology — because the dissonance now belonged to the chord itself, not to an unlucky collision of melodic lines. More dissonances per bar, chromatic colourings, resolutions upward as well as downward: what had been nitroglycerine became everyday fuel. Hear the two grammars side by side:

The Age of Thoroughbass

Basso continuo · figured bass · realization · the polarity of bass and soprano

If one invention names the whole era, it is this. Baroque scores carry, at the bottom, a single unbroken bass line — the basso continuo, "continuous bass", in English the thoroughbass (thorough = through: it runs through the piece). Under its notes sit small numerals — figures — a shorthand telling the keyboard player which chords to build above each bass note. The player improvises, or realizes, the actual chords on the spot: the composer specifies the skeleton, the performer supplies the flesh. So central was this device that the German musicologist Riemann named the entire period the Generalbass-Zeitalter — the age of thoroughbass. Bukofzer: "the baroque era begins and ends almost exactly with the thorough-bass era" (p. 11).

Feel what has happened to the renaissance's four equal voices: the texture has collapsed into two poles — a commanding melody above, a driving bass below, and in between a zone of improvised harmony that the composer did not even bother to write out. Melody no longer merely coexists with other melodies; it stands on a harmonic floor. That dependence of melody on harmonic support, says Bukofzer, "is the essence of the monodic style".

Grief on Four Notes

Ostinato · ground bass · the lamento tetrachord · chaconne & passacaglia

Once the bass had become the foundation of everything, a wonderful possibility opened: let it repeat. A short bass phrase cycling implacably underneath while the upper music unfolds freely is called an ostinato ("obstinate") or ground bass — the music above is literally built on a ground. Dance-derived grounds in triple time became whole genres, the chaconne and passacaglia. And one ground above all became the badge of sorrow: four notes, stepping down — the lamento tetrachord. A tolling, a sinking, a fate that will not be argued with; over it the voice grieves, and every clash between the free voice above and the implacable bass below becomes a stab of feeling.

From Modes to Keys

Modality · tonality · tonal centre · dominant · leading tone · functional harmony

Renaissance melody lived in the church modes — scale-worlds (dorian, phrygian, lydian…) inherited from plainchant, each with its own colour but none with a strong engine of direction. Chords followed one another by neighbourly smoothness, "dictated not by a tonal or harmonic principle, but by the melodic rules of the modes" (Bukofzer p. 12): a music that drifts beautifully, and settles rather than arrives. The baroque, by experiment — and Bukofzer insists the early baroque was wildly experimental, even "pre-tonal" chaos — forged something new: tonality. One pitch becomes the tonal centre, and every chord takes on a function — a role in a field of forces pointing home. Bukofzer's metaphor is exact: "tonality may be defined as a system of chordal relations based on the gravitation of chords to a tonal center" (p. 12). Gravity. You can feel it pull.

Functional harmony — the mature system where chord progressions are "concentrated on the regulation" of these gravitational pulls — was the baroque's long project, completed only late, "which led finally to the crowning monuments… in Bach's works" (pp. 9, 12). When your book speaks of modality versus tonality, or of harmony becoming functional, this pull-toward-home is the whole subject.

The Dethroned Tactus

Tactus · beat & measure · syncopation · senza battuta

Renaissance time was a calm, even heartbeat: the tactus, the choirmaster's steadily rising and falling hand, "an even flow of beats" with proportions between note-values worked out "by a mathematical system" (Bukofzer p. 12). No bar-lines hammering accents, no speeding or slowing for passion's sake: accents came from the words and lines themselves, floating over the pulse. The baroque shattered this single time-world into two extremes: on one side the mechanically driving beat of dance music — accents by stress, strong-weak patterns, real syncopation kicking against them; on the other, the recitative's free declamation, senza battuta — "without the beat" — where, as Bukofzer says of Monteverdi, "the words governed the musical rhythm" so radically that at times the beat was "discarded… completely" (pp. 12–13).

The Two Practices

Prima & seconda pratica · stile antico & moderno · idiomatic writing · the whole map

In 1600 the theorist Artusi published an attack on the "imperfections of modern music", exhibiting — without naming him — the unprepared dissonances of Monteverdi's Cruda Amarilli. Monteverdi's reply (delivered partly by his brother) named the stakes for everyone: there is a prima pratica, the "first practice" of renaissance counterpoint, where music rules the words and Zarlino's laws hold; and there is a seconda pratica, the "second practice", where the words are "the mistress of the harmony" and may command any dissonance expression requires. Crucially, the baroque kept both. Church composers went on writing strict counterpoint as the stile antico — the old style, preserved "only in the domain of church music" like a protected language (Bukofzer p. 10) — while opera and madrigal blazed ahead in the stile moderno. For the first time in history, Bukofzer notes, composers were style-conscious: they chose their language per occasion, sacred or secular, and even chose per instrument — the era discovered idiomatic writing, music conceived for the voice, or for the violin, and no longer interchangeable ("to be played or sung" disappears from title pages; p. 13).

Here is the chapter's whole argument in one table — each row is a contrast you have now heard:

Keep this map beside the book. When Bukofzer writes that the baroque found "the age of harmony pure and simple" impossible to call — because counterpoint survived inside the new harmony, "contrapuntal and harmonic strands… fused in a new interpenetration" that peaks in Bach — you now have ears for what fused with what. And when he calls dissonance treatment the touchstone, you can run your own assay: put on any track from L'Orfeo and ask — is that clash prepared, or struck? Is the bass a floor or a partner? Is the rhythm a hand, a dance, or a voice speaking? That is all "understanding music theory" ever is: knowing what to listen for.