Chamber music and instrumental music
While many of the instrumental styles and dances from the late 16th century continued to be popular with composers during the 17th and early 18th centuries, new forms emerged and other dances became more popular as time progressed.
The dance suite
In the Baroque period the suite was a group of different styles of dances performed one after another and continuing a tradition from the Renaissance period when two dances, the pavan and galliard, were usually performed together. These two dances fell out of favour in the Baroque period but, to remind you of this sound, listen to a pavan, in binary form, played on early instruments: sackbuts, early trombones, and cornetti.
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Sometimes a suite would start with an introductory piece, a prelude, before the dances started. Listen to this very famous example from a Bach partita for solo cello. A partita was a name often used, particularly by J S Bach, as an alternative name for a suite. Listen to this example and notice how the music grows out of a series of arpeggios over a repeated bass note, a pedal.
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The dances of the Baroque suite were usually:
1 a German allemande in a moderate 4/4 time. Listen to this example played by a solo violin from J S Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor. Notice how this is quite freely played without accompaniment, with the excerpt ending on an imperfect cadence.
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2 a French courante in a quite fast 3/2 or 6/4 time or a slightly faster Italian corrente in 3/4 or 3/8 time. Listen to this short example for solo violin and notice the use of double stopping at the beginning of the excerpt.
3 a Spanish sarabande in slow triple time. Listen to this example for solo cello and notice the speed, double stopping and ornaments used.
4 a lively gigue (jig) usually in compound time which is very noticeable in this example by Handel from his ‘Water Music’. Listen for the very clear binary form in this music.
5 Sometimes after the gigue composers introduced other dances such as gavotte, boureé, minuet or passepied. The minuet in particular was important as, unlike most of these other dances, it survived well into the Classical period. Listen to another excerpt from the Water Music with the binary form cued in by a voice.
Other styles and instruments
Toccata This continued its popularity with notable keyboard works, particularly by J S Bach. Perhaps the most famous is the toccata from his ‘Toccata and Fugue’ in D minor. Listen to this excerpt of the whole of the toccata from this work and notice the octaves, mordents, diminished chords, suspensions and pedal, and that's just in the first few bars.
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Fugue This style, developed in the choral fugues of Palestrina’s masses of the Renaissance period, was a popular form in the Baroque period and was fully developed by J S Bach. Listen to the exposition from his Fugue in C Major for Organ and notice that it is a fugue in four parts or voices with the bass part entering last.
Chorale prelude: A popular style of organ piece based, as you might expect from the title, on a chorale or German hymn tune. J S Bach was a master of this style of composition and it is said that the congregations in churches complained that he embellished or ornamented the works so much that the original melody became unrecognisable. Listen to a famous example of this style, ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and notice the arpeggios in the accompaniment and the long sustained and legato notes of the chorale theme.
Trio sonata
The term sonata comes from the Italian ‘sonare’, to sound, just as cantata has the Italian equivalent ‘cantare’ to sing. The Baroque sonata was usually written for two violins and continuo and while often called a trio sonata it took this name from the number of musical lines and not the number of instruments. The two violins played the upper two parts while the bass part appeared as a figured bass which was played by a harpsichord, improvising and using the bass part and figures as a guide to the harmonisation, accompanied by a cello playing and reinforcing the actual bass line notes. There were two types of sonata. ‘Sonata da camera’ was a chamber sonata for performance in a room of a house which would often include dance movements and was very similar to a suite, while a ‘Sonata da chiesa’ was an instrumental piece for performance in a church with the music generally of a more serious style and often including fugal style sections. In this case it is possible that the continuo would be played by an organ, doing a similar job to the harpsichord, and a bassoon taking the place of the cello.
In both styles of sonata many of the usual four movements or sections were in binary form with the whole sonata taking the shape of: slow; fast; slow; fast.
Listen to this excerpt from the first movement of a trio sonata by Handel and you can clearly hear the solo violin enter over a continuo while the second violin enters later, imitating the first instrument. Notice that the movement ends on an imperfect cadence to allow the music to move freely on to the next movement.
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The most important composers of this style were Purcell, Corelli, Couperin, Bach and Handel and as in all things in music there are no definite lines drawn and there were always different versions of all styles. It was quite possible that the two violins might be replaced with woodwind instruments, for instance two flutes or flute and oboe, or that the composer might write the sonata for just one instrument and continuo.
| Corelli | Henry Purcell | Couperin |
|---|---|---|
 |  |  |
Sonata
As this development of the trio sonata above took place, an Italian composer, Domenico Scarlatti, developed sonatas for keyboard instruments and in particular wrote a very large number of single movement sonatas for harpsichord. Notice the difficulty of this music, with many very fast runs, sequences, imitation and ornaments. Listen to this entire short sonata in D major for harpsichord.
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The term sonata was to become all important in the Classical period as the four-movement shape was developed by Mozart and Haydn after 1750 and was used for many styles of music up to 1900.