The Early Baroque Period

In the years around 1600, music underwent rapid changes at the sophisticated courts and churches of northern Italy. Composers began to write motets, madrigals, and other pieces more directly for effect — with less artifice of imitative polyphony and also with the use of exciting new performing forces. A new style, the style of the early Baroque period, took hold all over Italy and, soon, in most of the rest of Europe.