Evolution of the Principle Forms of Instrumental Music in the 17th Century

In the renaissance, building from the previous generations, music continued in paths to give each of the parts of music a more individualistic personality. That is to say, each part of the four parts in the range of the vocal resulted in polyphony that contrasted to the more homophonic texture of the baroque.

From Monteverdi's 8 books of madrigals we see a change from stile antico to stile moderno, which gave more emphasis to the text than to the music. This gave way to the idea that text was king from which sprung the ideas of single affect, which so pervaded the compositions of the 17th century that baroque music is easily distinguished. Pieces such as, Marais' painful look at a gall bladder operation, and certain Scarlatti works all demonstrate how music could be used to describe words, feelings, emotions. Emotions of the 17th century were known as affects.

Instrumental music of the 17th century was heavily influenced by vocal music. Froberger took lute music and transcribed it for harpsichord at a time when stile brise was popular and the fashionable 'in' music thing of the day was to play the harpsichord like a lute.

The echo effect found in Biagio Marini's echo tunes from Willaert, Monteverdi, and Gabrielli's use of St. Mark's Cathedral the idea of choir against choirs or in other terms what we can call the echo effect, influenced much of the instrumental music of the 17th century.

Dancing is also, and has been since the foundation of human recreations, being an inseparable part of music gave way to comparisons in the suite style found so often in music of this period. The ouverture or opening being stately and pompous, with the lilted dotted eighths connected to a 16th note was followed by fugal imitative sections born from the ricecare of the old style. The musical form of the sonata developed from the divisive sections of the canzona becoming a cantata to be sounded. The concerto in the same vein, was born out of a desire to bring diverse factors together, a tutti.