Arts & Culture | Entertainment | Late Baroque | Classical

Musicians have always enjoyed a significant role as providers of social entertainment. In the early eighteenth century, this aspect of music-making gained greater importance, as the middle classes in European towns and cities cultivated the art of courtly dancing in such forms as the minuet, the bourée and the gavotte. Most of the era’s major composers, including J. S. Bach, Handel and Telemann, featured the rhythms and styles of popular dance music in their works. Dancing also took place at some of the London pleasure gardens, whose bands provided concerts with varied programmes made up of popular operatic and orchestral items. The growing popularity of public concerts enouraged traditions of musical amateurism in several countries. Non-professional performers assembled as orchestras or small chamber groups, and some of the era’s most distinguished figures in areas other than music were noted for their prowess as instrumental performers. Prussia’s Frederick the Great, for example, was a gifted flautist, employing composers such as Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773), as well as writing his own music for the instrument.

Introduction | Late Baroque | Classical
Arts & Culture | Musical Theory | Late Baroque | Classical

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