Answer:
THE BAROQUE - I am including the very early period where Renaissance musical space and some practices still dominated, from around Monteverdi's works starting with the 5th book of Madrigals, and culminating in Gluck. I am also including the late days of the baroque where the Rococo and pre-Classical genres also flourished.
Why? I'll give my top reasons:
The concept that the performer is co-composer in the sense that the musical notation is intentionally naked and the performer must decide on phrasing, dynamics and ornamentation, is very appealing to me and to most modern performers. Every production of any piece is intrinsically different from another, even by the same performer! It is remarkably similar to the ideas behind jazz. In addition, it allows you to enjoy a piece many times over since some works can be performed so differently they feel like 2 different pieces. With later music, especially non-vocal, the variation between performances is so small that I personally tire of them quite easily.
The musical content is a constant struggle between the awkward and mannerist (which is why Romantics christened this era as "Baroque") and delightful, pleasing and intensely emotional. If we take a piece by Handel (such as Theodora's aria "With darkness" from the eponymous opera) compared to a work like Mendelssohn's Violin concerto in E minor - both contain very emotional and even "schmaltzy" passages, but Mendelssohn being schmaltzy throughout compared to Handel's juxtaposition of pain and harmonic and textural "awkwardness" with sweetness and gentleness is more pleasing to me, and seems more challenging and engaging.
The variation in music from place to place, composer to composer and era to era is staggering. We are only aware of a tiny percentage of the surviving works, the rest languish in manuscript, and they are so diverse it is a generalization bordering on lying to say that it all constitutes one era called baroque. In my experience, such diversity is not to be found in the classical and Romantic eras. Compare for instance Rameau's opera "Platée", and the aria "Aux langeurs d'Apollon" with the nearly contemporary "Orpheo ed Euridice' by Gluck, and I could give hundreds of examples more.
pa brailiest hihi
