(MAR) Renaissance Music Lesson

Renaissance Music Lesson

Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance Period. As in the other arts, the music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the Early Modern period:

• the rise of humanistic thought
• the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of ancient Greece and Rome
• increased innovation and discovery
• the growth of commercial enterprise
• the rise of a bourgeois (wealthy) class
• the Protestant Reformation

From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style (Music composed of relatively independent melodic lines or parts).

The development of printing made distribution of music possible on a wide scale. Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class. Dissemination of chansons, motets, and masses throughout Europe coincided with the unification of polyphonic practice into the fluid style which culminated in the second half of the sixteenth century in the works of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus, and William Byrd.

Relative political stability and prosperity, along with a flourishing system of music education in many churches and cathedrals, allowed the training of hundreds of singers and composers. These musicians were highly sought throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, where churches and aristocratic courts hired them as composers and teachers. By the end of the 16th century, Italy had absorbed the northern influences, with Venice, Rome, and other cities being centers of musical activity, reversing the situation from a hundred years earlier. Opera arose at this time in Florence as a deliberate attempt to resurrect the music of ancient Greece.

Music, increasingly freed from medieval constraints, in range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation, became a vehicle for personal expression. Composers found ways to make music expressive of the texts they were setting. Secular music absorbed techniques from sacred music, and vice versa. Popular secular forms such as the chanson and madrigal spread throughout Europe. Courts employed virtuoso performers, both singers and instrumentalists. Music for the first time became self-sufficient, existing for its own sake. Many familiar modern instruments, including the violin, the guitar, and keyboard instruments, were born during the Renaissance. During the 15th century the sound of full triads became common, and towards the end of the 16th century the system of church modes began to break down entirely, giving way to the functional tonality which was to dominate western art music for the next three centuries.

From the Renaissance era both secular and sacred music survives in quantity, in both vocal and instrumental form. An enormous diversity of musical styles and genres flourished during the Renaissance, and can be heard on commercial recordings in the 21st century, including masses, motets, madrigals, chansons, accompanied songs, instrumental dances, and many others. Numerous early music ensembles specializing in music of the period give concert tours and make recordings, using a wide range of interpretive styles.

The two main forms of sacred Renaissance music are the motet and the mass. They are similar in style, but a mass is a much longer polyphonic choral composition in five sections: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei.   A motet is also a polyphonic choral composition set to Latin text other than the five sections of ordinary of the mass.

Secular music was music that was independent of churches. Secular genres included the madrigal and the chanson. Most secular music was music set to poems.

 

View the important videos of the Renaissance before completing this module.

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