The Italian Style Of Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti's Works

As one of the three most prominent Baroque artists, the Italian composer Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti, 'with his advanced awareness of innovation, created a brand new road for the composers of later generations in the history of western keyboard music development.Different from Bach and Handel, his keyboard sonata interprets the variable sentiments of grief and joyance in the folk music with his unique way of composition. Seemingly concise in style, his music contains great wisdom which was different from the worldly one and indicates deep aesthetic purpose as well. In 1729, Scarlatti accompanied Princess Maria Barbara to Austria who married the Austrian crown prince, then moved to Spain and spent the last 28 years of his life in Madrid. The vagrant life in foreign countries and loneliness in palace aroused the composer's homesick feelings. It was exactly the homesickness that had constantly brought about beautiful Italian tunes, dynamic rhythms and rich chords in his works and by which the concept of hometown was reconstructed. Therefore, this thesis tends to adopt the angle of "returning to the spiritual home" to analyze the value of preserving of the Italian humanistic awareness, artistic experience, dance types and instrumental music types in Scarlatti's works as well as tends to grasp and study the composer's purpose and cultural connotation in his music creation from a macro angle in a way of philosophical thinking and arguing.In this thesis, the author takes the Italian style in Scarlatti's works as the central argument, takes the two clues of Scarlatti's keyboard sonata and Italian music terms which interweave either evidently or obscurely as the development gist. The author tends to make research on the Italian style in Scarlatti's works from the macro angle to the intermediate and to the micro angles. This thesis consists of four parts. The firstpart serves as the introduction of the creation background, the influencing elements and the general style of Scarlatti's works. The adopting and deserting of Baroque and Rococo way of thinking and the creation experience of antecedent composers helped to form his own unique quality of music. In the second part, by studying the inner relationship between the special terms in Scarlatti's works and later composers' aesthetic inclination, the author explains the significance of the continuation of cultural life and the searching of life in our today's creation. The analysis of the limits and development of sonata in the past and today provides the theoretical basis for evaluating and commenting on the historical position of Scarlatti in the history of western keyboard music development. The third part begins with the Italian humanistic environment and introduces the presentation of Scarlatti's Italian music terms. The ornamental and capering movement trend, liberty and luxuriance, etc can be regarded as the Italian folk culture's influence on Scarlatti's works and on the other hand the splendor Scarlatti has brought to the development of Italian music development. Then, by the micro study of the dance types, instrumental music types, rhythm, tune, musical forms and performing techniques, etc, the author tends to raise the significance and depth of the existence of Italian types in Scarlatti's works to a higher level of understanding. The last part, that is the fourth part, in the interpretation of "aesthetic significance ", the author discusses the research value and the existential value of this topic. This is a kind of care of and reflection on life development and it helps us to have a clear sense of historical development and our position in it. We need a self-denying process, for without denial, the load of cultural development would be heavy.