Music History

Johann Sebastian Bach (Baroque Era)

Introduction

Johann Sebastian Bach was an organist, harpsichordist and composer of German music from the Baroque period. He was a member of one of the most extraordinary musical families in history, with over 35 famous composers and many outstanding performers. His reputation as an organist and harpsichordist was legendary throughout Europe. Besides the organ and harpsichord, he also played the violin and the viola da gamba, besides being the first great improviser of music in popularity.

His prolific work is considered the pinnacle of Baroque music. His works are considered among the most important and momentous of classical music and universal music. These include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, The Art of Fugue, The Musical Offering, the Goldberg Variations, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Cantatas sacral 80, 140 and 147, the Italian Concerto, French Overture, the Cello Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin and orchestra suites.

Works

His vast work has two main parts: one is the vocal music, including cantatas, passions, oratorios, choral, etc., and the other is instrumental music from concerts (many for a single solo and others with up to four soloists), sonatas, suites, overtures, preludes, fugues, fantasies, fees, ricer cares, variations, parades, etc., for a wide range of instruments (almost all of the orchestra) at the time (the first half of the eighteenth century), from the modern flute, even those who were at their zenith (lute, viola da gamba, harpsichord), with instruments that were curiosity and nothing more, as the harpsichord - lute, harpsichord and a hybrid lute.

In his music, whole tradition is synthesized of Western music precedent: the polyphony Perotin and Leonin who initiated the Ars Nova and Renaissance music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1524-1594), Girolamo Frescobaldi (1585-1645), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) and Antonio Vivaldi (1675-1741), who learned, copied and taken from his youth, as he did in Weimar (1708-1717), when, by grace of the Duke, could improve some of their works and adapt in their concerts BWV 592-597 and 972-987 (Christoph, 2000).

During the last years of his life, his work was considered old-fashioned, dry, hard, and very full of elaborate ornaments, even to his contemporaries. By then, the musical style had changed dramatically, new generations of musicians made up of very different Bach, was the so-called pre-classical style or gallant, in which the music was more homophonic, and just sticking the charged counterpoint Bach used. For this reason, in 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe (music critic of the new mentality Illustrated) harshly criticized the music of Bach, saying: "Wait instrumentalists and singers who do the same when he plays the harpsichord." Therefore, after his death, the music took a direction in which his work was not fit. He was the end point compared to a way of understanding music dating back to medieval times, when voices were more important than timbre, coding, etc.

On the other hand, Bach was also innovative and opened avenues for future ...