Baroque pop

Baroque pop is a pop rock music subgenre spurred by recording artists from the United States and United Kingdom who infused rock and roll with elements of classical music. Its height of success was in the late-1960s, with several prominent exponents emerging and/or incorporating the genre into their repertoire, including: the Beach Boys, the Moody Blues, the Beatles, the Left Banke, the Fifth Estate, the Rolling Stones, Love and Procol Harum.

Baroque pop's mainstream popularity faded by the 1970s, partially because punk rock, disco and hard rock took over; nonetheless, music was still produced within the genre's tradition, and it exerted an influence on subsequent movements such as Philadelphia soul in the 1970s and chamber pop in the 1990s, which both incorporated the spirit of baroque pop while the latter contested much of the time's low fidelity musical aesthetic.

Since the 1990s, baroque pop has seen a revival; several prominent artists, such as Belle and Sebastian, Regina Spektor and the Divine Comedy, have performed or incorporated elements of the genre in their work.

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The Beach Boys

The Beach Boys are an American rock band formed in Hawthorne, California in 1961. The group's original lineup consisted of brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and their friend Al Jardine. They emerged at the vanguard of the "California Sound", performing original surf songs that gained international popularity for their distinct vocal harmonies and lyrics exploring a southern California youth culture of surfing, cars, and romance. Influenced by jazz-based vocal groups, 1950s rock and roll, and doo-wop, Brian led the band in devising novel approaches to music production, arranging his compositions for studio orchestras, and experimenting with several genres ranging from pop ballads to psychedelic and baroque.

The group began as a garage band managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, with Brian's creative ambitions and sophisticated songwriting abilities dominating the group's musical direction. After 1964, their albums took a different stylistic path that featured more personal lyrics, multi-layered sounds, and recording experiments. In 1966, the Pet Sounds album and "Good Vibrations" single vaunted the group to the top level of rock innovators and established the band as symbols of the nascent counterculture era. Following the dissolution of Smile, Brian gradually ceded control to the rest of the band, reducing his input because of mental health and substance abuse issues. Though the more democratic incarnation of the Beach Boys recorded a string of albums in various music styles that garnered international critical success, the group struggled to reclaim their commercial momentum in America. Since the 1980s, much-publicized legal wrangling over royalties, songwriting credits and use of the band's name transpired.

The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960. With members John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, they became widely regarded as the foremost and most influential act of the rock era. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, the Beatles later experimented with several genres, ranging from pop ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock, often incorporating classical elements in innovative ways. In the early 1960s, their enormous popularity first emerged as "Beatlemania", but as the group's music grew in sophistication, led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney, they came to be perceived as an embodiment of the ideals shared by the counterculture of the 1960s.

The Beatles built their reputation playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg over a three-year period from 1960, with Stuart Sutcliffe initially serving as bass player. The core of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison went through a succession of drummers, most notably Pete Best, before asking Starr to join them. Manager Brian Epstein moulded them into a professional act and producer George Martin enhanced their musical potential. They gained popularity in the United Kingdom after their first hit, "Love Me Do", in late 1962. They acquired the nickname "the Fab Four" as Beatlemania grew in Britain over the following year, and by early 1964 they had become international stars, leading the "British Invasion" of the United States pop market. From 1965 onwards, the Beatles produced what many consider their finest material, including the innovative and widely influential albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles (commonly known as the White Album, 1968) and Abbey Road (1969).

Baroque

The Baroque (US /bəˈroʊk/ or UK /bəˈrɒk/) is often thought of as a period of artistic style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and music. The style began around 1600 in Rome, Italy, and spread to most of Europe.

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumph, power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. However, "baroque" has resonance and application that extend beyond a simple reduction to either style or period.