this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
35 points (94.9% liked)
Brisbane
971 readers
10 users here now
Home of the bin chicken. Visit our friends:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sounds a little medieval fair cosplay for me, but I can appreciate it a lot more than the squawking of primary school recorder lessons.
Taking front stage and swinging the whistle around like the lead guitarist in a rock band is certainly something new though.
I don't even know what half of those words mean. I am quite uncultured. Sometimes I hear tinkling pianos and slidey violins on the radio and it sounds nice. That's about the limits of my musical involvement.
Actually I played bassoon back in the day so I'm kinda hamming it up a whisker, but I was no JS Mozart Beethoven.
At least in music (I don't know about architecture and other artforms), the Baroque era comes after the Renaissance, so it's quite a long way removed from mediaeval—about 150–200 years removed, to be precise.
The precise starts and ends of musical periods are obviously fuzzy and any attempt to definitively say that this is where it is is inevitably going to be wrong.
That said, I still find it a fun conversation to have for its own sake. People naturally like to find ways to put things into discrete boxes. And as a rule of thumb, I've always used Monteverdi's L'Orfeo as the start of the Baroque, but I don't really have a marker for the start of the Renaissance. (For completeness, my usual marker for where Baroque music ends is the death of Bach, and the Romantic period starts with Beethoven's 3rd symphony—that last is the only one I feel particularly strongly about as more than just a convenient marker.)
But if we say 100 years, I don't agree that it's a short time. The entire common practice period lasted about 3 centuries, so a 1 century gap is pretty significant when you think about how much music evolved over that time. Obviously there are some notable similarities—particularly in timbre—between mediaeval and Baroque music. However—and maybe this is just my bias as someone whose study mostly focused on the common practice period and 20th century, and whose personal interest is mostly in the Romantic and 20th century—I think that the differences between the Baroque and mediaeval are pretty stark, with the Baroque having more in common with Classical and even Romantic eras.