Who made music during the long historical period now called "the Baroque"? Who listened to it? How might music-making have articulated relations of power, both within the European cultures where Baroque aesthetics were born and in the American lands those cultures colonized? Why might we in the 21st century continue to find such old music's interesting and beautiful? Why might a greater understanding of the Baroque be useful today? This paper will address these questions in a preliminary way by situating Baroque music in relation to the emerging systems of representation, economic exchange, political power and artistic production that characterized European culture's long transition from the late16th-century's interlocking epistemological crises toward those crises resolution in the 18th-century's paradigms of Enlightenment modernity.
Baroque Music; relations of power in music; Baroque Music and colonization