My wife: We're so lucky to be alive at the same time as #JohnWilliams. We could have been stuck with #Bach.

🤣

#music #classicalmusic #classical #baroque

#Oxford #music ppl: come along and #PlayForFun with #Cowley #orchestra #tomorrow! No auditions, no performances, no commitment required. https://cowleyorchestra.weebly.com/dates.html All #OrchestralInstruments welcome. #violin #viola #cello #DoubleBass #flute #clarinet #oboe #bassoon #trumpet #cornet #horn #trombone #tuba why not try #conducting taking turns with others? Also, feel free to suggest a piece from our vast #MusicLibrary (>350 sets). #JoinIn #PlaySomeMusic #ClassicalMusic #Baroque thru to #FilmMusic

#mastobada "voler" #baroque sans roll

Louis-Nicolas Clérambault : "Simphonie. Air - Vole, vole, dit-elle avec amour", in "Cantates Livre II" - "Cantate No. 4 C. 10 "Pyrame & Tisbé" (Les Arts florissants, William Christie).

D'après un poème de Marie de Louvencourt.

Beautiful venue for tonight’s #baroque #concert! (St. Andrew’s Church, Pasadena CA)

Sorry, I can't resist showing you one more.
"One night in Bangkok but it's a 16th century chanson"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3jHv0GZB9U
Note, performed by one single man, Jonas Wolf, he did all the voices.
#Music #Baroque #YouTube

This is a masterpiece.
"When you play billy Joel like it's 1700"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRRLAQjKPxE
#Music #Baroque #YouTube
alt: Some clever guys and girls from Germany took four songs by Billy Joel and made it into a genuine Baroque concerto for two recorders and basso continuo.
In spite of what we're living through as humanity, we are blessed to live in such times. Imagine this before YouTube!

#Bach Goldbergs on two guitars, quite spectacular!

#baroque #music.#classicalmusic

https://youtu.be/mxqNzYPBn6s

Deze bruine Paisley cw dropt binnenkort.
Check voor release informatie.

👟 Nike Air Force 1 Low Suède - Paisley Baroque Brown (IU2363-200)

#paisley #kotd #baroque #brown
https://www.sneakeragenda.com/agenda/nike-air-force-1-low-suede-paisley-baroque-brown-iu2363-200/?feed_id=3902&_unique_id=695f5b18bf485

Random shot from the #travel archive.

This is the National Pantheon in Lisbon, Portugal. Formerly a church, designed in the baroque architectural style, and begun in the 17th century, the impressive 80-metre high dome was only completed in the 20th century. The building holds the tombs of people including the footballer Eusébio and maritime figures Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator.

#Photography #Architecture #Lisbon #Portugal #Baroque #Church

#Oxford #music ppl: come along and #PlayForFun with #Cowley #orchestra #tomorrow! No auditions, no performances, no commitment required. https://cowleyorchestra.weebly.com/dates.html All #OrchestralInstruments welcome. #violin #viola #cello #DoubleBass #flute #clarinet #oboe #bassoon #trumpet #cornet #horn #trombone #tuba why not try #conducting taking turns with others? Also, feel free to suggest a piece from our vast #MusicLibrary (>350 sets). #JoinIn #PlaySomeMusic #ClassicalMusic #Baroque thru to #FilmMusic

“[Handel] is the only person I would wish to see before I die, and the only person I would wish to be, were I not Bach.”*…

An essay from Charles King, adapted from his recent book, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times that Made Handel’s Messiah…

… In the summer of 1717, as Handel ran through the movements of his Water Music, floating alongside George I’s royal barge on the Thames, he could only have marveled at his own meteoric rise. Yet he would also have been aware of the precariousness of the regime that now sustained him. An outsider dependent on staying on the right side of the powerful, Handel understood the many divisions that snaked through his adopted society. His income, as well as his art, rested on the favor of people who could also easily withdraw it. A generous supporter or advance ticket sales might cover some of the cost of a production, but opening night then hung on the goodwill of a patron or a public violently sensitive to prices. A change in ticket price could spark a riot, with theatergoers storming the stage and tearing apart sets and chandeliers. When shows ran at a loss, the typical course was for a producer simply “to banish himself from the kingdom” and outrun the creditors, an early historian reported, as one of the King’s Theater managers had chosen to do.

Amid the continuing craze for Italian music, in early 1719, a circle of opera enthusiasts proposed a different model. Their concept was to create a new production outfit structured as a joint-stock company. Supporters would be investors rather than donors, expecting a return on their outlay but also bearing the risk should things fail. A who’s who of Handel’s landlords and acquaintances signed on, among them Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, who owned the Piccadilly home where Handel had lived for a time, and James Brydges, later Duke of Chandos, under whose patronage Handel had begun his first serious attempt at setting English texts. Their hope was to gain a royal charter—the official imprimatur of the king, which could then be used to pull in further partners and paying audiences. By that summer, they had persuaded King George to grant the charter for what would become the Royal Academy of Music and provide a thousand pounds annually as capital. Other investors added perhaps nineteen thousand pounds in all. The Royal Academy’s board of directors named Handel as “Master of the Orchester with a Sallary” and empowered him to steal away Italian singers and musicians from their European engagements.

Over the previous century, Venetians, Florentines, Neapolitans, and others had together set in motion a revolution in sonic common sense: a profound change in the conventions of musical form, perceptions of beauty, and expectations about what counted as obvious or wrongheaded art.

Living in the artistic realm that Italians had created meant accepting the existing order of the world while also undermining it. You started by imagining a normalcy different from the one outside your window. A woman might sing a man’s part as a travesty—en travesti, meaning literally a change of clothes—a term that would only later come to mean abnormal or an affront. A man could sing from the edges of his vocal cords and leap into a high falsetto, his false voice. He could do so with even greater range as a castrato, someone whose testes had been removed before his voice had hardened in puberty, a procedure practiced in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere for centuries. Onstage he might play a steel-clad knight, soaring above the battlefield with the voice of an angel. Castrati superstars—Nicolini, Pasqualini, Paoluccio, Momo, Farinelli, Senesino, Guadagni—were paid gargantuan fees for a season’s performances. In public they could be swarmed by adoring admirers, both male and female. “Some of them had got it into their Heads, that truly the Ladies were in Love with them,” a lengthy French treatise on Italian castrati reported in 1718, “and fondly flattered themselves with mighty Conquests.”

In a theater, the powerful could sound like women. Ancient gods could walk among men. Wars could end not in gore and death but in communal song. Doing all of this well required intellect and discernment, knowledge of musical form and its effects, and, most important, a sense of sociability. Players and singers were guided by instructions written on a staff, but the notes were suggestions rather than edicts. In a soundscape that allowed uncertainty and impromptu change, musicians had to be both self-aware and neighborly, a skill also necessitated by the technology of the time. A quiet harpsichord could speak comfortably alongside a human voice or a few violins, but not more. A lute-like theorbo, with its gentle strings and absurdly long neck, could manage a coiled horn as a partner, but only if its bell were turned discreetly away from the listener. Even a trumpet could cooperate peaceably with other instruments when played in its upper register, where the physics of its metal tubing gave the player more notes to choose from, its timbre more like a warbling bird than a blaring call to arms. 

No one had yet given music of this type a label. When they did, the one they chose was also a slur, like punk or grunge. It was the French baroque, used in English for the first time in 1765 and perhaps derived from a Portuguese term for a rough pearl or a mouthful of irregular teeth. To its enthusiasts, that was precisely the point. An orchestra of the period was also an intentional community, often assembled for a specific occasion, smaller than in later centuries, and with no need for a conductor—a role covered by the keyboard player or lead violinist and preserved in the modern term concertmaster. The music they made was solicitous and scrappy, risky and intimate. It soared and swerved, thrilling and dangerous, at odds with everything that had come before, and, to the artists who came after, the perfect example of wildness and excess. But to those who lived it, at the core of their work lay the belief that human creativity could best be used to make an intense, weird, and complicated conversation, sloughing off old conventions while manufacturing bold new ones. “We have freed ourselves from the narrow limits of ancient music,” Handel once said…

Baroque music’s glorious revolution: “The Famous Mr. Hendel” from @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

* Johann Sebastian Bach (Upon hearing the above statement, Mozart is said to have exclaimed: “Truly, I would say the same myself if I were permitted to put in a word.”)

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As we conjure creation from chaos, we might send beautiful birthday greetings to Giuseppe Sammartini; he was born on this date in 1695. One of the finest oboe (and flute and recorder) players in London, he was a member of Handel’s orchestra— and a noted composer in his own right. Indeed, his recorder concerto is often performed and recorded in tandem with Handel’s (e.g., here).

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