How does the music in the baroque period associate with art??

Question

How does the music in the baroque period associate with art??

Answer 1

Both the art and the music of that period were very formal and highly ornamented.  They both focused on pure music or pure art, in the sense that the art and music weren't intended to convey specific human emotions or experiences, but instead were created just for the sheer beauty of the art or the music itself.

Answer 2

I've got a mental image of a sonata hanging out with a statue in a cafe somewhere...

OK, seriously now.  The protestant reformation and the catholic counter-reformation were the cultural forces that cast a long shadow over all of the Baroque artscape.  So the biggest thing about all of the arts was their association with religion.

Michelangelo Caravaggio's dramatic, emotionally charged paintings of Christian themes were seen as a way to make believers more fervent, and so his style was adopted by the many other painters who passed through Rome--El Greco, Poussin, and some early Dutch masters.

The Florentine Camarata's style of composing quickly became the dominant style, and while its first application was for pure entertainment (i.e., opera), it quickly spread to sacred music.  J.S. Bach's contributions to the establishment of the Lutheran church, for example, can't be measured precisely--but having a powerful musical liturgy would have been a factor.

Now, the other factors would include a certain mechanistic quality in both painting and composition.  Painters in the Baroque were not highly individualistic--works by different artists, especially those who shared a nationality, look quite similar: Rembrandt-Steen-Vermeer etc., Caravaggio-Tintoretto etc.  El Greco is the most unique among them, and even he stuck to the same basic principles of perspective, brushwork, and naturalism.  Composers adopted tempered tunings and chose from polyphonic and homophonic textures, but they obeyed common rules of harmony, and when they modulated a figure they did so diatonically (in the same key) rather than chromatically.

The "highly ornamented" tag is not fair for all works of this period--Bernini's "David", Caravaggio's "St. John with Ram", Rembrandt's self-portraits, none of them are particularly frilly.  The ornamentation was optional, and occasionally indulged to excess (Bernini's "St. Teresa"--and what glorious excess!--or his less-successful Baldochinno in St. Peter's).  Musicians, in performance, were free to add ornaments to the melodic line of a sonata, for example, but they were urged to do so with taste and balance--too many trills, mordents, shakes, passing-tones, etc. would be seen as overdoing it.