ABSTRACT
Instrumental music thrived in homes, palaces, courts, and churches during the early Baroque period. Instruments supplied music for dancing, domestic recreation, court festivities and entertainment, and religious worship. The function the music was intended to serve was a significant factor in a composer’s choice of instruments, in addition to timbre and volume, extra-musical associations, and the size of instrumental groupings. Ideal for domestic settings were consorts (groups of from three to six musicians), solo lute, clavichord or virginal. Religious settings had their own sound world. Small churches might employ only a single organist and a handful of singers, while large centers, such as Venice, had the performing resources for much more opulent instrumentation. The polychoral works of Giovanni Gabrieli not only had multiple groups of singers and instruments, but multiple organs as well. Instrumental music at courts was diverse and dependent upon the patron’s taste and wealth. Michael Praetorius’s beautifully illustrated treatise De Organographia (On Musical Instruments, 1618) sheds light on how these instruments might have looked. Produced by a court printer, De Organographia featured scaled drawings, lavishly engraved, of brass, woodwind, keyboard, and percussion instruments, as well as some novel instruments. It was the most authoritative and thorough account of instruments to date, and ends with an elaborate “Theater of Instruments” comprised of forty-two woodcuts illustrating the families of instruments.
