Concerto (Steve Liu) In German to this day, the word for concert and concerto is the same: Konzert. The concept of “concerto” originated as a vocal genre with instruments at the turn of the seventeenth century. Concerted music at that time was simply music with instruments. Concertos were just instrumental pieces for larger ensembles than consorts. In time, a concerto came to be understood as a piece where one or more solo instruments are juxtaposed to a larger ensemble. It usually had a three-movement structure, with a slow movement in between two fast movements. Throughout the Baroque period, “concerto” continued to be a term that could also refer to works for voices and instruments, exemplified by Bach’s usage of the title “concerto” for his works which we now know as cantatas. Concertos differed from other polyphonic music in that the instruments in a concerto had independent parts, whereas late Renaissance and early seventeenth-century music instruments accompanying voices typically only doubled voice parts, a practice known as colla parte. In the later seventeenth century, purely instrumental concertos emerged, exemplified in the concerti grossi by Archangelo Corelli. Handel wrote a number of concerti grossi that achieved considerable popularity once they were published. The Op. 6 collection, published in 1739, included such wonderful examples of the genre as Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 1 in G major and Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 5 in D major. In a concerto grosso, there is a solo ensemble, the concertino, alternating material with the full orchestra, the ripieno, which tends to act as a recurring refrain. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are clever upsets of this scheme, where sometimes it is the ripieno group that gets new material, while the concertino acts as a recurring refrain. In other cases, such as Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, BWV 1049, it isn’t always clear which instruments are the soloists, because the function of the instruments keeps changing, with at one point even the bass line playing a virtuoso passage as though a soloist. Throughout the Baroque period, the concerto for solo instrument and orchestra was mainly for virtuoso violin, oboe, or bassoon. Concertos for Orchestra and solo keyboard were rare, though Handel wrote organ concertos and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 is close to being a keyboard concerto with orchestra, although it is more accurately called a concerto grosso. Christoph Wolff, in his book Bach’s Musical Universe, p. 169, makes the point that Bach differentiated the essential Italian style in his Concerto in the Italian Taste in F major, BWV 971, for solo keyboard, in which he “counterposes its Italianate three-movement form (fast-slow-fast, with the middle movement in a different key) with the French-style multiple-movement structure (prelude and sequence of short dances, all in the same key, with major/minor variants possible) of the Ouverture in the French Manner in B minor, BWV 831, also for solo keyboard. He further emphasizes the difference in style by casting them a tritone apart: F major to B minor. In its opening movement, “the French Overture forcefully projects a typically French musical atmosphere…with its slow, sharply pointed, and pervasive dotted rhythms and intermittent short runs.” Both of these works are in Bach’s Clavier-Übung II of 1735. In the classical era, the fortepiano became a major instrument for solo concerto performances. During this period, the concerto concept was championed by Mozart, who wrote five violin concertos and 27 piano concertos. In the 19th century, the concerto continued to develop, becoming increasingly complex and long. Brahms’s two piano concertos, for example, sound essentially like enormous piano-orchestra symphonies. In the early twentieth century, composers like Debussy and Prokofiev wrote concertos using more modality, exploring non-western scales, and adopting a more dissonant harmonic vocabulary. These innovations also led to a redefinition of concerto as they somehow altered the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra in a concerto. (This final point needs explanation.)