Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word baroque was originally a Portuguese term for an irregularly shaped pearl. In May 1734, a satirical review in the Mercure de France described the music of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie as du barocque to complain about its lack of coherent melody.
The systematic application of the term to music did not occur until 1919 when Curt Sachs adapted Heinrich Wölfflin's theories of the visual arts. This academic formalization defined the period between 1600 and 1750 as a deliberate artistic age.
A group of humanists, musicians, and poets gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to form the Florentine Camerata in late Renaissance Florence. They sought to revive the musical drama of ancient Greece by rejecting complex polyphony in favor of monody.
Jean-Baptiste Lully became a pre-eminent court style composer who purchased patents from the monarchy to be the sole composer of operas for the French king. He completed fifteen lyric tragedies and established himself as an early example of a conductor who beat time with a large staff.
By 1700, the oboe had replaced the shawm as the main woodwind instrument in an ensemble. The natural horn became common in orchestras around this time, leading to its standard specification as an accompaniment to the Italian string orchestra by 1750.
These suites commonly began with a French overture followed by a succession of four different types of dances: the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. Later suites interpolated one or more additional dances between the sarabande and gigue, such as the gavotte, bourrée, minuet, and rigaudon.