Music in the Baroque Era

by Manfred F. Bukofzer

Book Overview

An analysis of the Baroque style of music and its inventive forms of expression, such as the opera, from 1600 to 1750.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393097455
• ISBN13: 9780393097450
• Release Date: November 1947
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Superb book on music from Monteverdi through Bach and Handel

Although written in 1947, this book remains a very fine text on what we call the Baroque era of music. This is roughly the transition caused by the aesthetics of the Florentine Camerata at the end of the 16th century through the culmination of the late Baroque in Bach and Handel. Bach's sons and their contemporaries were the transition towards the Classic period (Gallant and Rococo). The writing is clear with lots of helpful musical examples and illustrations. More than just a chronology or lists of dates and names, there is a great deal of focus on style that helps us understand what the people of those years said they were trying to achieve with their music and art. Bukofzer is also excellent in pointing out the differences in the aesthetics of various countries. It was not like our time where everything is broadcast at once by the media or produced in vast quantities by huge manufacturing concerns. Ideas traveled more slowly from court to court and at varying rates. Sometimes the changes happened more quickly than others. And, as always, there are differences between what the people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries thought was valuable and what we value two or three hundred years later. The extensive bibliography is still valuable even if it doesn't include the huge number of valuable publications on this subject that have been published in the last fifty years. It is not that this book is outdated. What it discusses it discusses very well. However, a great deal of research and thinking about the Baroque has been done in the past twenty or thirty years and your reading and listening will have to become informed by this later work as well. Just don't miss out on this wonderful book, especially since used copies can be had so inexpensively!

A compelling discussion of Baroque musical style

More than 50 years after its publication, Professor Bukofzer's book remains as an examplar of how to discuss musical style. His revelatory insights into the origins and details of Baroque style have set standards respected and imitated by generations of scholars. Another beauty of the book is the clarity and accessibility of his ideas. Performers, amateurs, and scholars will all find many interesting ideas in this book. Some details of chronology and attribution of music have since been corrected in more recent scholarly books, but the real value of this book is in the excellent discussions of the origin of style, and Bokofzer's gift is timeless. Anyone who reads music and has an interest in Baroque music will find this book to be well-written and of immense value.