Instrumental Recitative

Instrumental music in Baroque period started to liberation gradually, composersdrew nutrition from vocal music to assisted instrumental music writing. Recitative asone of solo type in Opera, it is called Instrumental Recitative when use it ininstrumental music.From the point of morphological feature, firstly, instrumental recitativedistinguished from the vocal recitative by human voice singing and acting specifictext, it refers to the style which uses instrument languages (such as rhythm, tempo,melody of instrumental music) to express a phrase, period or even movement ofdeclamatory character. The second, functionally, the primary emotional function leadto structure function, namely instrumental recitative expressing a typified musicemotion, which normally corresponding emotion like grief, tragedy, weep and so on,and then produce a dramatically contrast effect from tempo and rhythm in certaincontext. Finally, from a performance practice perspective, generally according to thecomposer’s instructions or certain emotional needs in a composition, based onperformance the declamatory character, performers could improvise discretionarily onmusic rhythm and tempo that different from other strict measured style of music.This thesis through the classification, technique, functional role and performancepractice of instrumental recitative discusses its morphological feature. We canconsider that instrumental recitative stem from vocal recitative, but due to the specialproperties of instrumental music and constantly development of music acknowledgeand creation concept, the significant meaning and role of instrumental recitative in acomposition ultimately transcend vocal recitative. Subsequently, this thesis expand theemotional function of instrumental recitative. Based on the background of thedominant music aesthetic idea which is the theory of music affection in western musicworld from ancient period, as one of specific practice method, discussed theinstrumental recitative in before and after Baroque Period.From the early time in Baroque Period, due to instrumental recitative cannot completely separate “text” so they expressing music emotion by musical-rhetoric todescribe and intimate the tone of colloquial style and content of specific text. Whenthe instrumental recitative form into a default and fixed emotion type, in the followingpre-classical, classical and romantic period, particularly after instrumental musicseparated text totally, instrumental recitative become a emotion symbol use infollowing period in order to express composer’s their own emotion.