Italian Opera Seria and the Concerto Style (1 gen 1650 anni – 1 gen 1750 anni)

Descrizione:

The international status of Italian music at this time is reflected to this day in musicians' vocabulary for speed, dynamics, and so forth, which remains an international dialect based largely on the terminology the Italians brought with them wherever they went.

The south of Italy was ruled by Spain for some 200 years, which was an economic disaster. These same conditions, however, helped create a musical golden age in Naples. One consequence of urban poverty was the establishment of orphanages and foundling homes. The houses where homeless boys were harbored were called a conservatorio, from which we get the word conservatory. These were self-maintaining organizations partly funded by putting the youths to work. An obvious way to employ orphans was to make them choirboys, so their training became a major preoccupation of the conservatories. As the need arose, the training eventually expanded to include secular and instrumental music. The need was greatly stimulated by the importing of opera.---"Venice-style music" as it was called-beginning around 1650. The first NAples opera house opened in 1654, and gradually a local Neapolitan repertory emerged as a major international force.



Circle of fifths + melodic sequences (esp. in sus chain) would become the standard by which all tonal progresssions would be measured. They became in effect, the basis of what is often called "Common Practice Era" and put instrumental music on a path of ascendancy that would ultimately challenge the preeminent status of vocal genres.

In instrumental music of the early eighteenth century, the listener's interest is engaged by abstract processes of conditioned response as if in compensation for the absence of words on which the mind could focus and be guided. New procesdures like Corelli's brought about a virtual revolution in listening, in which the listener's conscious mind was much more actively engaged than previously in the processes of expectation and delayed fulfillment, and in which the form may even be said to arise out of the play of these cognitive processes.

When it was new, such abstract yet intensely engaging instrumental music seemed to some listeners to be very aggressive, both in what it demanded from them in the way of active attention and in its effects on them in the way of intense passive experience. "Sonata, what do you want from me?"

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