L.L. Handel - Water Music "Air"

A quick description of the piece makes for another great High Baroque studying tool. Four part strings, with harpsichord continuo, trading the main theme back and forth between the winds and the strings. Simple and easy to follow functional tonality. Cadences feature a trill on the upper neighbor for a V-I, perfect authentic cadence. Unchanging rhythm, with dotted patterns in the Baroque idiom which is so easy to recognize, and lends the music much of its stately charm. The few motives are used and developed throughout the piece, and the main theme is so easily discernible from start to finish.

Water music has always been, when I come back to it, an upbeat and life-affirming masterpiece for me. I always forget just how fantastic it is, and years at a time have gone by without my thinking of it at all. Nevertheless, a mistake easily rectified. I do wonder though what it is about the piece that makes it not quite so paramount to my casual listening agenda. I may attribute it to the fact that it can be seen as salon music, rather than a High Baroque masterpiece. Or maybe it can lack the "Gravitas," of some other works of the period by Handel and other composers.