Music from the period of around 1600 to 1750 is usually referred to as “Baroque,” a term borrowed from art history. Art historians themselves borrowed the term from seventeenth-century jewelers, who applied it to large pearls of irregular shape. At one time, then, Baroque art was considered imperfect, bizarre, or at least erratic. With changing taste over the centuries, however, what was originally a negative implication has turned positive.

And over the last seventy-five years or so, with the help of recordings, Baroque music has grown more and more popular. Instruments of the period have been revived to play it, among them the harpsichord, the recorder, and a special high-pitched trumpet without valves. (Some of these instruments were discussed on pages 13–21.) Most of the Baroque music heard today dates from the eighteenth century — from about 1700 to 1750, a subperiod sometimes classified as “late Baroque.” Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel were the greatest composers of this period, and among their most important contemporaries were Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Vivaldi in Italy, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau in France, Domenico Scarlatti (the son of Alessandro) in Spain, and Georg Philipp Telemann in Germany.