Music And The Effect Of The Baroque Era Of Music

Musical instruments have been around for hundreds of years. Not only have the human voices been used as instruments, but there have been manufactured items that have been made to produce sound. Throughout many eras of music, these instruments have been changed many times, mostly to improve the sound or quality of the sound. There is one particular instrument that has been around for a very long time that has been changed many times. This instrument is the organ. Organs can be very large instruments that are designed into the architecture of building in order to be able to house the instrument. The Baroque era of music is a particularly well known era for the use of the organ. This paper focuses on the origins of the organ and how it changed over time. In addition, how these changes effected the musical periods discussed thus far in class and how these changes effected …show more content…
This era of music ranged from about 1450-1600. Just like the Medieval era, there was some overlap from the Medieval era into the Renaissance and from the Renaissance into the Baroque, therefore allowing some flexibility in the range of years to classify each era. The Renaissance era of music had many of the same features of the Medieval era. One of the main similarities was the use of a cappella music. Again, music of this period had primarily no instrumental accompaniment. However, organs by this point had stops. These stops allowed for the player to be able to control which pipes were receiving air, allowing for control of tone and dynamic. This change to the organ allowed for more than one melodic line to be played at a time. This type of texture is known as polyphony. This texture started to take shape in the late Renaissance era, and the organ, with its continual development, became an instrument that was starting to emerge on the scene in the late Renaissance era. The organ, with its advancements in stops, started to shape the next era of