Why I call Baroque music “subtle” sometimes

Baroque music isn’t really “subtle” by definition. It’s very ornate, often very passionate, and is overall intended to be very grand in most cases. Grand and subtle aren’t words that really go together in everyday life.

I still think of it as being very subtle, though. Baroque music is so complex and grandiose that a lot of very unnoticed artistry goes into the underpinning mechanisms that get it all to work in the first place. The parts in one of J.S. Bach’s fugues that aren’t currently carrying the subject are supporting it harmonically and providing contrast that the idle listener doesn’t necessarily notice, but that brings out the thematic material. That, in my opinion, can be defined as subtlety.