baroque

The Baroque era encompasses some of the most enduring music in the Western canon, from Monteverdi's first operas through Bach's final fugues. The period saw the birth of opera, the concerto, the sonata, and the oratorio. Its music is characterised by continuous motion, elaborate ornamentation, terraced dynamics, and the basso continuo. The major Baroque composers include Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Purcell, Corelli, and Telemann. The era began with the revolutionary idea of setting drama to continuous music (opera) and ended with Bach's monumental synthesis of contrapuntal technique. The word baroque itself comes from a Portuguese term for an irregularly shaped pearl, originally used disparagingly.