Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

GOODBYE, LOVE. HELLO, LUVVIES!

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es, OK, I know. It's not my fault. Don't blame me. Yes, we have opera. It's a big fat hit with virtually everyone who goes to see it. And you can see why - it was so starkly different to anything that had come before it. As beautiful as a four-part Mass is, especially when delivered in the glorious settings of a visually stunning cathedral, just think how ALIVE an opera must have seemed in comparison. It must have been a bit like when Special FX first started to take off in films. Audiences had, literally, seen nothing like it before. Well, opera must have been like that - different from anything they'd ever seen before.

But how did I know they'd go and invent opera long before they had proper sopranos? Amazing, really, when you think. But nevertheless, opera was here to stay, and, with opera, came egomaniac primadonnas. But, as we've said, not female ones. In fact, arguably, much worse: egomaniac primadonnas with a grudge. In fact, with a grudge and no balls. What an awful combination.

What's the most amazing thing about the revolution that was opera, though, is that, despite being the biggest thing in vocal music in years, centuries even, it, more than any other innovation, led to a dramatic improvement in another, seemingly completely different, area, namely instrumental music. Why? Well, because the accompanying orchestra in the pit was called on to play more and more dramatic music. Very often, this dramatic music would mean playing new things, new sounds which had never been tried before when instruments were simply for accompaniment. Now that ever new sounds and textures and effect were called for, composers needed ever better players who could pull off the more technically demanding music they were writing for their operas. This would eventually lead to the orchestra leaving the pit altogether, and going up on to the stage, on their own, much to the outrage of the Church.

The Church, you see, HATED instrumental music. And why? Well, because of the very fact that it was instrumental, and therefore NOT VOCAL. If there were no voices, there could be no words, and if there were no words, there could be no praising God. But, well, it's post-Reformation, now, and the Church's influence is very much on the wane. Even it could not stop something as fundamental as instrumental music from taking root. And so it would grow and grow. And we'll follow it as it does, but for now, let's to^ the court of Louis XIV.

I say, witch? Could you hold up both hands and tell me the time? What's that you say, 1656? Thank you!

Well, I've checked and the hands on my witch tell me it's 1656. Time for an update. 1656. Where are we? Well, it's thirty-six years since Miles Standish and the Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, which is an astonishing coincidence, when you think - all that way round the globe in a souped-up junk boat and they land somewhere with almost the same name as the place they left. Also, the English Less-Than-Civil War had been and gone, and Charles I had had his headache cured in rather dramatic fashion by the men with the Beatles haircuts, Cromwell and Co.