| The advent of the genre at the turn of the seventeenth century is often associated with the activities of a group of poets, musicians and scholars in Florence known today as the Florentine Camerata | Many of the forms associated with the baroque era come directly out of this new dramatic impulse, particularly opera, the oratorio and the cantata |
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| The baroque era in the modern age Although the baroque period ended over 250 years ago, vestiges of the era can be heard everywhere | Many of the musical genres still in use today, like the oratorio, concerto and opera, originated in the period |
Oratorio: an extended musical drama with a text based on religious subject matter, intended for performance without scenery, costume or action.
| By the middle of the eighteenth century, the baroque idea of music as a form of rhetoric was under attack | Operas typically alternate between recitative, speech-like song that advances the plot, and arias, songs in which characters express feelings at particular points in the action |
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| As part of the effort to imitate ancient music, composers started focusing less on the complicated polyphony that dominated the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and more on a single voice with a simplified accompaniment, or monody | Suite: Based on the traditional pairing of dances in the Renaissance, the suite was the first multi-movement work for instruments |
Outside of Italy, the expanding genre of the Lutheran began incorporating many elements of the Italian cantata, especially techniques of dramatic expression like recitative and aria.
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