In music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 Barococo is a term coined by musicologist H.C. Robbins-Landon which refers to a certain type of easy listening music that originated in the Baroque

Baroque music

Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...

 and pre-Classic periods. Specifically, Barococo music has been described as "crisp, impersonal, concertante

Concerto

A concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...

 music" (Fink 2005, p.172).

A portmanteau of the words Baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

 and Rococo

Rococo

Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...

, the term was originally used as a criticism of the characteristic ease with which the average listener could enjoy this style of music at the height of Baroque revival in the first half of the 20th century. The emergence of long playing records

Gramophone record

A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...

 made it possible for recordings of Baroque music to be played in repetition over a long period of time, leading individuals like Robbins-Landon to label it as repetitive

Repetitive music

Repetitive music is music that features a relatively high degree of repetition in its creation or reception. Examples includes minimalist music, krautrock, disco , some techno, some of Igor Stravinsky's compositions, barococo, and the Suzuki method...

. Critics viewed the lack of distinction between individual pieces and the uninterrupted play of these records to encourage a mode of listening that required neither attention nor comprehension of structure, and thereby started referring to the music pejoratively as Barococo

See also: Seymour DeKoven

Seymour DeKoven

Seymour DeKoven , generally known simply as DeKoven, was a United States classical music radio personality of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s...

, Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

.

Source

• Fink, Robert (2005). Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. ISBN 0-520-24550-4.