Baroque Music 101

The baroque era began around 1600 and lasted until 1750. The movement was centered in Europe, but actually spread across the globe - in fact, Kangxi Emperor, one of China's longest-reigning and most influential emperors, was known for his interest in Western culture, including harpsichords!

Baroque music is based on easy to recognize patterns and recurring beats that are often rooted in dance. The music is also exceptionally conversational. Listen for the back and forth between two instruments, or from one side of the room to the other! Can you pick out subtle changes and elaborations called ornaments, similar to those in Jazz?

Tempesta di Mare is named after a concerto by Antonio Vivaldi, one of the most important and famous composers of the baroque. Translated to mean “storm at sea,” we chose this name as it reflects baroque composers’ view of instrumental music as a vivid, rhetorical craft, capable of conveying emotional drama to its listeners. Our performances seek to resemble these conversations of emotional drama!

Even though the music is 250+ years old, its themes—love, nature and natural disasters, financial crashes, heroes, villains, dancing, joy, pain, and wit—are fundamentally human and contemporary.

All our concerts are curated along a common theme or story, often creating a throughline to our contemporary experiences today.

Yes you have! The chorus of Handel’s Messiah - in which the vocalists triumphantly proclaim “Hallelujah!” - and pieces by Vivaldi have been used in blockbuster movies of all genres. In fact, Vivaldi alone has over 500 movie credits!

On Oct 20 2009, the final Jeopardy question was:

“In the early 18th c. Sylvius Leopold Weiss wrote works for these 2 instruments whose names rhyme”. Audio was from Tempesta di Mare’s CHANDOS CD of the Weiss Lute Concerti!

A baroque orchestra is an ensemble for mixed instruments that performs music from the baroque period. Baroque orchestras often perform unconducted, which means that the musicians are not led by a conductor. Instead, the ensemble members work out the interpretation during rehearsals and then take cues from one another in performance. Often, the concertmaster, who plays principal violin, or the harpsichordist indicate tempos and changes to the ensemble from their instruments.

Some of the instruments often used in baroque music may be familiar to you, such as the violin, cello, or flute and recorder. However, there are other instruments that may not be as common in modern music, such as the harpsichord and the lute.

All instruments use similar and different materials to modern instruments. For instance, flutes are made from wood. And violins are strung with gut (not metal).

Click through our Instrumentarium below to find out more!

[image gallery of instruments that can be licked on to expose pop-up info tile]

Some of the most famous baroque-era composers are George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Tempesta di Mare has performed many pieces by these prolific composers, such as Handel’s Messiah and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

However, there are far more baroque composers than just these three. In particular, two other baroque composers have been associated with Tempesta di Mare: Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Friedrich Fasch. Read more about Tempesta’s history of Telemann and Fasch here!