who are the baroque composers on this forum?

[SimenN]

i just want to know who other composer then myself who is obseded with baroque, if would be nice to talk with other composer with the same passion for the baroque music :)

[Johnny Fawkes]

I suppose I qualify. :\

[echurchill]

Me too.

[Mark]

I don't compose only Baroque music, but a fairly high percentage of what I write as exercises are in a Baroque sort of style, so I suppose the rest of my music reflects that to some degree or another.

[SSC]

Hi.

[Alexander]

Does renaissance count? I like composing in that style, but I wouldn't say I am obsessed! :)

Alexandros

[J. Lee Graham]

I do it part time. I'm mainly a Classical-Revivalist.

Question: are you into authenticity, or just Baroque "flavoured" music?

[SimenN]

well its not "real" baroque, well i have to go for the flavoured music, i like to mix in some classical elements to it , the happy stuff. renaissance yes that counts

[Gavin Gorrick]

who is the baroquian composers on this forum?

Everything is wrong with this sentence.

[darkwonderer18]

who is the baroquian composers on this forum?

Everything is wrong with this sentence.

Dude, get a life. Seriously.

[J. Lee Graham]

He is right, though; but there are so many people here for whom English is a second language, I have personally loosened my expectations about grammatical perfection. I've long been profoundly impressed at how well so many people from non-English-speaking countries are able to express themselves in English. Fortunately, though it's a complicated language to speak fluently, it's also very forgiving of errors.

The best term I've heard used for a contemporary baroque composer is "Barocchist."

[Zetetic]

Music after 1750's one long, upsetting downhill slide.

[Ananth Balijepalli]

Please don't count me in your baroque list, but I am wondering why music after Bach is a downhill slide. I agree that after a certain point, music started to lose its original meaning, but good music doesn't end with Bach necessarily (or Beethoven for that matter). I'm just wondering why you think that music after 1750 is an upsetting downhill slide.

By the way, I used to try to write some pieces in baroque style. Not anymore.

[SimenN]

I agree with Zetetic, there has been a downslide, there are offcourse some good composers en all the musical styles, not just Baroque, Classical or Romantic, but in modern too.

But I think the realy good music started in the Baroque and ended with Mozart. That is my opinion. But still there is a lot of new music with much quality.

If you look at Magnificat score (by Bach), I dont understand how music like that is possible. Its so advanced I have never seen anything like it.

Composers who compose Baroquish music in 2008 are blacklisted by many other composers, and that is what troubles me the most. We should have the right to choose styles when they are known to us. And the Atonal music will not last, the lyrical tonal modern music will last im sure. We composers need to get back to tonality, so why not go to the beginning?

[SSC]

Composers who compose Baroquish music in 2008 are blacklisted by many other composers, and that is what troubles me the most. We should have the right to choose styles when they are known to us. And the Atonal music will not last, the lyrical tonal modern music will last im sure. We composers need to get back to tonality, so why not go to the beginning?

Not this again, jeesh. Blacklisted? By whom? Atonal music has been sorta "out" for, what, almost a hundred years now! It won't last? It'll last like any other composition form or technique.

Besides raping the corpse of every single style in history, post-modernism has this thing about switching meanings and contexts around. You want to "go back" to tonality? Go back how, since it never "ended". Sure, times have changed, but that's precisely what times do. Change.

Tonality is still super-dominant in cultures around the world. You go and try to get your atonal/experimental/? piece played, and you'll find strong resistance. All this junk about cultural context really prevents anything other than tonality from occupying anything but the central role. It suffocates anything that isn't like it.

I hope tonality eventually ends up in even grounds with any other type of composition technique, aesthetic, etc. Even if right now it seems difficult given how entrenched in people's heads it is. When culture and tradition stomp and trample on creativity, freedom and expression, then it's time to take measures against it (futurism manifesto comes to mind.)

What I really want to know is, if anyone saying this nonsense of "tonality" being better, ETC ETC, and that everyone should "go back" to it, ever found themselves in a position where they would want to write something different, what would they do?

That sort of gibberish opinion is wrong, it's damaging both to your possibilities and other's. Don't hate modern music, hate that you were brought up in a society where you are conditioned to hate it, fear it, or otherwise find it unpleasant. In between all the worship "the old warhorses" (as someone said) may get, time moves on.

You can excuse it all you want, saying things that "tonality is natural", or that it's the best system, as others have done, but in the end we are in one way or another all victims of our respective cultural programming and perception. As a composer (and artist altogether) I want to be freed from that scraggy, not endorse it, and I want to show others they too can get themselves rid of prejudice that has no foundation in anything other than conditioning and predisposed programming! Taste is influenced, opinions are swayed. It's easy to let others tell you what you'll like and what you won't, but in reality you'll only really find out once you unlearn all the nonsense that's force-fed by popular culture, opinions, etc.

Say you prefer tonality because it allows you to say what you want BETTER than, say, concrete music, atonality, ETC. Because really, anything else is just nonsense. Don't intend that because you like it, it means it's better or that anyone but yourself should be doing it.

So, yeah, it makes me want to type walls of text when I see stuff like this. Hah.

PS: Note that I LOVE Baroque music, Bach, etc. So, this isn't to do with my particular tastes at all. And, if you want to "go to the beginning", that's medieval/renaissance. Parallel motion-heaven~

[spherenine]

Music after 1750's one long, upsetting downhill slide.

So you think that Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Dokken, Bartok, Webern, Schoenberg, Paganini, Rick Astley, and Mozart are a downhill slide from some n00bs who didn't even write bitonal polyrhythmic symphonic suites?

[Pieter Smal]

Hey!

Baroque composer and recorder player here! Hiep hiep... Telemann!!!

Anyone into Fluyten Lusthoff?

[SSC]

... Rick Astley ...

Because when I think of RICK ASTLEY, I think of bitonal polyrhythmic symphonic suites!

hahaha ftw.

[spherenine]

Because when I think of RICK ASTLEY, I think of bitonal polyrhythmic symphonic suites!

hahaha ftw.

You've clearly never heard his Op. 376.

[Zetetic]

So you think that Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Dokken, Bartok, Webern, Schoenberg, Paganini, Rick Astley, and Mozart are a downhill slide from some n00bs who didn't even write bitonal polyrhythmic symphonic suites?

Pretty much. It's actually more like a cliff, with a few rolling hills at the bottom. Taste plays such an unimaginably important role in these discussions however that arguing is always to no avail. It's likely that any points I make in an attempt to explain why I consider some baroque music sublime will simply be used, unaltered, against me. The order, rigour and logic of baroque composition are precisely the elements that some despise, whilst the chaos and confusion of romanticism might repel one and attract another. Certainly, the best I can do in terms of objective comment is I can to claim that Bach's raw ability for counterpoint appears unrivalled, despite the fact that counterpoint has been integral to most Western Classical genres from the 1300s onwards. This however illustrates just how tricky it is to say anything objective in this context.

[Nirvana69]

Music after 1750's one long, upsetting downhill slide.

Debussy, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Stravinsky, Satie, Bartok, Berlioz, Ravel, Mahler, Wagner, Liszt, Verdi, Strauss, Tchaikovsky...

Try some of them. You may be surprised. :thumbsup:

[spherenine]

Pretty much. It's actually more like a cliff, with a few rolling hills at the bottom. Taste plays such an unimaginably important role in these discussions however that arguing is always to no avail. It's likely that any points I make in an attempt to explain why I consider some baroque music sublime will simply be used, unaltered, against me. The order, rigour and logic of baroque composition are precisely the elements that some despise, whilst the chaos and confusion of romanticism might repel one and attract another. Certainly, the best I can do in terms of objective comment is I can to claim that Bach's raw ability for counterpoint appears unrivalled, despite the fact that counterpoint has been integral to most Western Classical genres from the 1300s onwards. This however illustrates just how tricky it is to say anything objective in this context.

I completely appreciate that this is all a matter of taste, but I think that objectively, music was progressing, not regressing, from 1750 on. Shostakovich couldn't have predated Bach, even if you prefer Bach's more primitive (ignore the connotation, if you must) music.

[Zetetic]

I agree that we can never come to a conclusion, but I don't agree that music progressed objectively from 1750 onwards. Your argument relies partly on the semantic clumsiness of the word 'progress', which doesn't necessarily mean improvement, nor evolution to an end. It certainly doesn't imply advancement or complication, as is evidenced by the regression in musical complication between the High Baroque and Early Classical periods. Counterpoint was practically abandoned. Audiences were beginning to tire of ever more intricate music, and (more importantly) there simply weren't enough people who were actually able to write it. Progress just means change. The inevitable march forwards towards nothing in particular. The fall of Rome meant progress, but not one that many Romans appreciated. Likewise, the Renaissance heralded waves of artistic advancement, but practically knocked out science for a century.

The Palace of Versailles predates 1960s tower blocks, Da Vinci predates Pollock. More people listen to Mozart than Stravinsky, and even more to listen to whatever rubbish happens to be in the charts. That doesn't make one work less advanced, complex or appreciable in technique or conception than the other. Each must be assessed on its own merits.

[SSC]

I agree that we can never come to a conclusion, but I don't agree that music progressed objectively from 1750 onwards. Your argument relies partly on the semantic clumsiness of the word 'progress', which doesn't necessarily mean improvement, nor evolution to an end. It certainly doesn't imply advancement or complication, as is evidenced by the regression in musical complication between the High Baroque and Early Classical periods. Counterpoint was practically abandoned. Audiences were beginning to tire of ever more intricate music, and (more importantly) there simply weren't enough people who were actually able to write it. Progress just means change. The inevitable march forwards towards nothing in particular. The fall of Rome meant progress, but not one that many Romans appreciated. Likewise, the Renaissance heralded waves of artistic advancement, but practically knocked out science for a century.

The Palace of Versailles predates 1960s tower blocks, Da Vinci predates Pollock. More people listen to Mozart than Stravinsky, and even more to listen to whatever rubbish happens to be in the charts. That doesn't make one work less advanced, complex or appreciable in technique or conception than the other. Each must be assessed on its own merits.

Now you wait a second there, son. Music has PROGRESSED, as in, IMPROVED since Bach's time. This is evidenced by the fact I can write a concerto for doorknob and spoon and be taken seriously. That sort of freedom is only there because SINCE Bach people have done a lot of different things. You can still write LIKE Bach, but you also can write in any other form. The musical landscape today is equivalent to the modern knowledge of Astronomy compared to what people had 4000 years ago.

Saying counterpoint was "Abandoned" is nonsense. Any old idiot can write in counterpoint, and this is just as true now as it was true back then. Trends change, and Bach was really a sort of musical hermit in that he didn't "get on with the times" which I find rather charming. However, there are a rather amazing lot of people who could (and can) write in counterpoint just as well as he could.

The problem is, once you start to worship these composers, Bach or not, you start to lose perspective that they're just people limited by the time and knowledge they had. Bach, as much as I think his music is pretty and awesome, didn't have a FRACTION of the knowledge you or I have presently about music primarily because we have CENTURIES of references to look back on, where as he had, uh, almost nothing but whatever was local or brought from "Distant" Italy or France.

Objectively speaking, expecting Bach to write for Banjo and Trash compactor is impossible, and therefore since what we know now as a huge vast ocean of possibilities available to us isn't what people had at his time, it's only reasonable to expect him to write what he did write. He did the best he could with what he had, he's great because of it, but also you only have to imagine what would he do with all the knowledge we have about music today to see maybe he would've written in all sorts of styles, maybe he'd have preferred to write atonal music for all we know.

Back then, he didn't have the option.

So, yes, progress. It has nothing to do with music being "Better", because that's gibberish, but realizing that we have a much better starting point than he ever did, and thus we can produce things that maybe he himself would've wished he had but since he never even had the chance we'd never know.

PS: Renaissance heralded waves of artistic advancement, but practically knocked out science for a century? What the jesus? Because surely, inventing god-damn industrial design altogether, advancing the field of medicine, ETC, are all anti-scientific things!

[cygnusdei]

Musical options and resources may have expanded since historical times, but the present is not all-encompassing. I for one would like to hear music from the biblical times, but alas, no record is in existence. Does it mean that music regressed since then?

The fact that we even know baroque music at all should be cherished.