Baroque music

Baroque music is a style of music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era followed the Renaissance, and was followed in turn by the Classical era. The word "baroque" comes from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning misshapen pearl. The negative use of the word comes from a description by Charles de Brosses of the ornate and heavily ornamented architecture of the Pamphili Palace in Rome. Although the term was applied to architecture and art criticism in the 19th century, it wasn't until the 20th century that the term "baroque" was adopted from Heinrich Wölfflin's art-history vocabulary as a designator for a historical period.

Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to. Composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Arcangelo Corelli, Tomaso Albinoni, François Couperin, Denis Gaultier, Claudio Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Johann Pachelbel.