Baroque music

I always love my posts in my mind, but unfortunately, they rarely make it to paper. This week was going to be about Baroque music, thanks to Justin and Kilian who posted about it on Facebook.
Now, I know of the concept of Classical music, but until today I did not realize it was one period of music before the 20th century. Baroque was right before that and right before Mozart.
It was going to be fun to look up the major players of the 150 year span of Baroque and describe, in brief, what the gist was, but let me tell you, there is no ‘in brief’ when talking about a span of 150 years, or major music styles.
I’ve even set my station to the Classical station here in Austin and caught them talking about how many of the composers were rogues and how women swooned and fainted over Handel, I believe it was.
So, I’m sorry Kilian to again talk about the top artists of the day, or a past day.

I find it interesting that, according to one guy, artists wanted to align themselves with the best of the culture, and culture was defined, by definition, the aristocracy. Artie’s theory is that we had it better when one group decided the direction of music because otherwise its by popular vote and maybe that’s not the best way.

This other guy, however, has a bunch to say. (And I do find it funny that though I don’t know who he is, though he does sound very interesting, I’ll quote him but never wikipedia.) And I’ll end this post with this long excerpt from his webpage:

“… it is essential to realize that culture is, by its very nature, an aristocratic process. During each phase of its development, a particular class or type of human being stands for what is “best” (aristos) for the fulfillment of what the phase requires. The true aristocrat is not an individual but a representative, an agent, of the culture. The best at one time may refer to physical strength, endurance, and a blend of physical power and conniving mind; at another time, to an intellectual and organizational ability to establish and maintain stabilizing religious and sociocultural institutions. At still other times, a superior trading instinct coupled with a craving for material possessions and sociopolitical power mark “the best” people of society, the bourgeoisie of wealth and the capitalist.
“The function of the creative artist — the composer in music — is to glorify and affiliate himself or herself with whatever social class at the time is the best, the aristocracy. A time comes, however, when this aristocracy can no longer operate significantly as a group of representatives or agents of the culture. The cohesive power of the symbols, myths, and institutions that had given the society its cultural structure and solidity is no longer functionally operative. The integral collective psychism of the culture becomes fragmented. A process of individualization is at work. At first it operates within the aristocracy, without robbing the individualizing person of his or her function as an organic unit within the social group. Sooner or later, individuals free themselves not only from binding attachment to the tradition of the group but from the feeling of being representative of the culture and agents for its perpetuation, even in a modified, modernized form.
“This is the process of deculturalization, and in the case of individuals of the Western world, dis-Europeanization or dis-Westernization. Eventually, it reaches a stage at which individuals feel the need to be and act not merely in freedom from the cultural foundation and the collective psychism of the society or class but against them. Marxist proletarians or intellectuals of the American New Left may take a definitely “anti-Art” attitude and deny any validity to what they condemn as a manifestation or glorification of the bourgeois mentality. Other artists — painters, novelists, dramatists, composers — on the other hand, use art to give voice to the aspirations, suffering, and needs of “the people,” serving the masses as earlier artists had served the church, the nobility, or the wealthy bourgeois and capitalists. Thus at least some academically trained composers devote their energy and talent to composing proletarian music, music to arouse the; people to political action, or at least to develop in them a new collective psychism — the feeling of belonging to a global community of workers.
“The more individualistic — or spiritually-inclined — artists, however, usually consider themselves unaffiliated with any social class and essentially unrelated to collective patterns. Such artists today usually seek to express their own psychological experiences or states. The basic motives for self-expression through music nevertheless vary with the temperament, conditions of birth, and early experiences of the would be composers; with the educational institutions they were able or willing to attend; and with their opportunities to participate in group-experiences, travel to Asia, and hear their musical works performed, to test the actual results of their intuitions or intellectual theories.
“Three categories of music may be singled out of a great diversity of trends in present-day music. The most prolific and most performed is popular music, which can be subdivided into folk music — a music associated with living in small, perhaps remote communities close to the land — and a wide spectrum of “city music,” whose most well known and typical forms are jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and songs of social protest. The latter have been extraordinary effective in arousing the rebellious youths of many countries and giving them a feeling of collective unity and participation in a world wide process of social and psychological transformation. In the past popular music has strongly influenced certain aspects of the second category of music.
“This second category is the so-called “mainstream music” of the Western world, concert-hall music — even though concert performances before live audiences may be replaced by performances in recording studios, in order to reach an audience more scattered, less class conscious, less fashion oriented, and less wealthy than the audience that attends expensive concerts. This music is heavily weighted in favor of “the repertoire” — the works of “great masters” of the distant or recent past.. But it also is being profoundly transformed by composers reacting to the pressure of sociocultural and psychic changes, moved either by their personal desire to exhibit originality or technical skill or by superpersonal forces for collective renewal.
“The third category is avant-garde music …”
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