Dramatic events in music around 1600 in Italy profoundly affected the music of Europe during the Baroque era. Several groups of literati and musicians formed societies to revive the artistic principles of ancient Greece. They experimented with a type of drama that would use music as an adjunct to poetry. The musical result was the negation of polyphony, the reduction of melody to a position subservient to the text, and the creation of a bass line with improvised accompanying harmony to support the drama in the singing voice, altogether a direct repudiation of the ideals of the Renaissance. This was early opera. A 17th-century Italian composer, Claudio Monteverdi, referred to the style as seconda prattica and within his lifetime developed it into a much finer medium than the experimental style he inherited.

The new style greatly affected instrumental practice. Those instruments that could not produce expressive sounds and that could not imitate the passions as represented by the skilled singers were relegated to the middle or lower register of the ensemble, where they could serve either as an inconspicuous background or as a contrasting support for the predominantly expressive melody. If the Renaissance was the era of woodwinds, the Baroque was the era of strings, and the violin family assumed a dominant position throughout both Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, wind instruments were not overlooked, and before the end of the period, they were altered in order to compete with the strings. In the meantime, the winds were useful for dance music and municipal music (i.e., for town ceremonies). Particularly in Germany, the loud winds of the Renaissance continued to be used. They maintained their 16th-century functions of being played regularly from towers, and they were always available for music in churches and palaces.

By the early 1730s, however, when Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel were producing many of their great works, reaction had set in against the presumed pretentiousness of the elaborate Baroque style, and a premium was placed on simplicity and clarity. The importance of the bass line diminished, and the counterpoint (the art of combining multiple melodic lines in a single composition), reborn in the 18th-century style, was again abandoned. By mid-century, the sentimental style of an ornamented simple melody over an uncomplicated texture of basic tonal harmony had taken over, and it was on this foundation that Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart based their mature Classical style. Wind instruments of Renaissance type were then preserved only in rural areas or as folk instruments, and the new winds, developed in the 18th century, challenged but never quite captured the supremacy of the strings.

The Baroque opera demanded the depiction of the grand and majestic, so, obviously, the trumpet was important. The instrument was now compactly folded once to reduce 7 feet (2 metres) of tube to only a little over 2 feet (60 cm) of length. The normal keys of the period were D or C, a terminal crook lowering the D instrument when C was desired. The leading trumpeter played in the high or clarino range, which included the pitches of the fourth octave, where the tone was particularly magnificent and where the available diatonic notes permitted the playing of melodies, trills, and various ornaments. Other trumpets played successively lower pitches. The trombone was used in opera and church orchestras. By the Baroque period, it was being made in three sizes—f alto, B♭ tenor, and F bass—sizes that remained in use in Germany through much of the 19th century. The treble cornett gained a new use in the Baroque. Because its range equaled that normally used by the violins in the 17th century, it could substitute for them or contrast with them and also be effective in contrast with the soprano voice. Consequently, it was useful in Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo (first performed 1607) and in many German church cantatas, as well as in instrumental ensembles. Difficult to play, it was extremely treacherous, and to be played with sufficient control, it needed not only a good musician but also one with luck. The names of the Renaissance wind instruments are familiar to many music lovers, because the Baroque organ adapted so many stops imitating the colour of these instruments. The beating reed adapted in the Renaissance regal (a small pipe organ) was taken into the organ proper and formed a variety of useful colours.

Woodwind instruments were far too valuable for their individual tone colours to remain subservient to the ubiquitous violins, and in Paris the musician and instrument builder Jean Hotteterre, his family and associates all skilled wood turners, redesigned first the oboe and later the recorder, the transverse flute, and the bassoon—all in the last half of the 17th century. With the advent of these instruments, Renaissance woodwinds gradually vanished. The new instruments were turned in short sections, peculiarly with a broken profile—that is, an unevenly expanding or contracting bore between sections—a feature not long retained.