Renaissance music is classical music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1450 to 1600. Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, since there were no abrupt shifts in musical thinking during of the 15th century, and since the process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, but 1450 is used here.
Overview
Style and trends
The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music (in the Middle Ages, thirds had been considered dissonances: see interval). Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century: the beginning of the 15th century showed simplification, with the voices often striving for smoothness. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music—in the Middle Ages, the narrow range made necessary frequent crossing of parts, which also made it necessary to write highly contrasting parts.
Renaissance music was modal as opposed to tonal. Modality began to break down towards the end of the period, with root motions of fifths, one of the defining characteristics of tonality, becoming common, especially near cadences.
Genres
Principal liturgical forms which endured throughout the entire Renaissance period were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular forms (such as the madrigal) for their own designs.
Common sacred genres were the mass, the motet, the madrigale spirituale, and the laude.
During the period, secular music had an increasingly wide distribution, with a wide variety of forms, but one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost. Secular music included songs for one or many voices, forms such as the frottola, chanson and madrigal.
Secular vocal genres included the madrigal, the frottola, the caccia, the chanson in several forms (rondeau, virelai, bergerette, ballade, musique mesuré), the canzonetta, the villancico, the villanella, the villotta, and the lute song.
Purely instrumental music included consort music for recorder or viol and other instruments, and dances for various ensembles. Common genres were the toccata, the prelude, the ricercar, the canzona, and intabulation (intavolatura, intabulierung). Instrumental ensebles for dances might play a basse danse (or bassedanza), a pavane, a galliard, an allemande, or a courante.
Towards the end of the period, the early dramatic precursors of opera such as monody, the madrigal comedy, and the intermedio are seen.
Theory and notation
According to Margaret Bent (1998), "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness."
Renaissance compositions were notated only in individual parts; scores were extremely rare, and barlines were not used. Note values were generally larger than are in use today; the primary unit of beat was the semibreve, or whole note, and notes with black noteheads (such as quarter notes occurred less often. This development of white mensural notation may be a result of the increased use of paper (rather than vellum); the weaker paper was less able to withstand the scratching required to fill in solid noteheads.
Accidentals were not always specified, somewhat like fingering notation today. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint." See musica ficta. A singer would interpret his or her part by figuring cadential formulas with other parts in mind, and when singing together musicians would avoid parallel octaves and fifths or alter their cadential parts in light of decisions by other musicians (Bent, 1998).
For information on specific theorists, see Johannes Tinctoris, Franchinus Gaffurius, Heinrich Glarean, Pietro Aron, Nicola Vicentino, Tomás de Santa Maria, Gioseffo Zarlino, Vicente Lusitano, Vincenzo Galilei, Giovanni Artusi, Johannes Nucius, and Pietro Cerone.
Early Renaissance music (1450 - 1500)
Burgundian School of composers demostrated charactersistic of the late Medieval era and the early Renaissance.
Towards the end of the 15th century, polyphonic sacred music (as exemplified in the masses of Ockeghem and Obrecht) had once again become complex, in a manner correlating to the stunning detail in the painting at the time.
Middle Renaissance music (1500 - 1550)
This was followed in the early 16th century by another trend towards simplification, as can be seen in the work of Josquin, and later of Palestrina, who was partially reacting to the strictures of the Council of Trent, which discouraged excessively complex polyphony as inhibiting understanding the text.
Late Renaissance music (1550 - 1600)
In Venice, from about 1550 until around 1610, an impressive polychoral style developed, which gave Europe some of the grandest, most sonorous music composed up until that time, with multiple choirs of singers, brass and strings in different spatial locations in the Basilica San Marco di Venezia (see Venetian School). These multiple revolutions spread over Europe in the next several decades, beginning in Germany and then moving to Spain, France and England somewhat later, demarcating the beginning of what we now know as the Baroque musical era.
The Roman Schoolwas a group of composers of predominantly church music, in Rome, spanning the late Renaissance into early Baroque eras. Many of the composers had a direct connection to the Vatican and the papal chapel, though they worked at several churches; stylistically they are often contrasted with the Venetian School of composers, a concurrent movement which was much more progressive. By far the most famous composer of the Roman School is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose name has been associated for four hundred years with smooth, clear, polyphonic perfection.
In the late 16th century, there were several important, contrasting trends. In secular music, especially in the madrigal, there was a trend towards complexity and even extreme chromaticism (as exemplified in madrigals of Luzzaschi, Marenzio, and Gesualdo).
Music with essentially Renaissance characteristics continued to be composed, particularly in England, but also in Spain, Portugal, and France, for the first few decades of the 17th century (see English Madrigal School, air de cour).
The brief but intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them, is known as the English Madrigal School. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models. Most were for three to six voices.
Musica reservata is a term referring to either a style or a performance practice in a cappella vocal music of the latter, mainly in Italy and southern Germany, involving refinement, exclusivity, and intense emotional expression of sung text.
In addition, many composers observed a division in their own works between a prima prattica (music in the Renaissance polyphonic style) and a seconda prattica (music in the new style) during the first part of the 17th century.
Transitioning to the Baroque
Meanwhile, beginning in Florence, there was an attempt to revive the dramatic and musical forms of Ancient Greece, through the means of monody, a form of declaimed music over a simple accompaniment; a more extreme contrast with the preceding polyphonic style would be hard to find; this was also, at least at the outset, a secular trend. These musicians were known as the Florentine Camerata.
See also
Sources and further reading
- Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0393095304
- Judd, Cristle Collins (ed.) (1998). Tonal Structures of Early Music. New York: Garland Publishing. ISBN 0815323883.
- Bent, Margaret. "The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis".
- Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Music in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines Series I). Bloomington, Indiana. Frangipani Press, 1986. ISBN 089917034X
- Oliver Strunck, Source Readings in Music History. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1950.