Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance. Consensus among music historians – with notable dissent – has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as understood in other disciplines. 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 class; and the Protestant Reformation. From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school.
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 work of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus, and William Byrd. Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, along with a flourishing system of music education in the area's 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.[1]
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, and both vocal and instrumental. 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.
(This is my initial list of points to hit in the lede -- they can expand in the text)
- Changing conception of music from realm of abstract -- "pure relationships" -- to expression allied with poetry, religion, painting
- Music as expressive of text
- Expansion of available range, harmony, timbre; regulation of dissonance, fluidity of motion
- Freedom from medieval constraints, formal and intervallic; gradual emergence of harmony and tonality
- Secularization
- Increasing autonomy of instrumental music
- Rise of virtuosity in vocal and instrumental performance
- Birth of modern music notation
- Most modern instruments began
- Spread of music through publishing
- Rise of a bourgeois class; consumption
- How-to books
- At the end of the period, birth of opera as a deliberate attempt to resurrect ancient Greek music
Get rid of the "overview" and replace with the following structure:
History edit
Early Renaissance edit
By the early 15th century, the burst of musical creativity in France and Italy – the ars nova in France, the music of the Trecento in Italy, and the manneristic style of the ars subtilior in the courts associated with the Antipopes of the Western Schism – had largely faded. The political map of Europe had changed, with the holdings of the Dukes of Burgundy, mostly in the present-day Low Countries and northeastern France, becoming the new center of power in northern Europe. France’s power had declined under the depredations of the Hundred Years’ War with England and her allies. Many English musicians working on the continent, in Paris, Burgundy, and elsewhere, brought a new sound from England: the “contenance angloise”, the “English countenance”, the sweet sound of third- and triad-rich music. This is the sound that most distinguished the music of the early Renaissance from the preceding medieval era. Formerly treated as a dissonance, the third was considered “sweet” by many commentators of the period. [insert quote]
The Low Countries, now under the rule of the Dukes of Burgundy, had cities which were centers of crafts, banking, and commerce. With wealth came patronage of the arts. Also in the region, every cathedral and collegiate church gave singers a rigorous training in music; from this pool of talent came most of the composers of the age. A new polyphonic musical style was born in this environment, gradually moving away from medieval concepts such as isorhythm. Another innovation dated to the early fifteenth century was the use of large-scale unifying devices. The cyclic mass, in which a composer uses a single piece of source material to construct each movement, was such an innovation. John Dunstable and Leonel Power wrote the first masses based on a cantus firmus, and the anonymous Missa Caput with its unifying cantus firmus in the tenor was hugely influential on the subsequent development of the polyphonic mass in Europe.
- find cites for everything
- English sound, influence on continent; lack of sources in England because of Henry VIII's arson (as an aside, maybe); Burgundians, because of the political stability, riches, power, and patronage, which commences almost two hundred years of Franco-Flemish domination of music in Europe; Dufay, Binchois; dearth of music by native Italians, and in France (early) and Germany. First cyclic masses, full triads, formes fixes
High Renaissance edit
Polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish; Obrecht, Ockeghem; types of masses; secular music; Italian secular music, the frottola; printing, rise of mercantile/bourgeois class; Josquin and his contemporaries; the generation after Josquin, Gombert; theorists and writers on music -- Tinctoris, Vicentino, others
Late Renaissance edit
- Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Palestrina, Lassus, Byrd, Victoria; madrigals, late French chanson
- National styles, diffusion: Spain, Portugal, England, elsewhere (may subsume this into the other sections)
- Transition to Baroque: Venetian school, mannerism, Camerata, seconda prattica, Monteverdi
Genres and forms edit
- Sacred
- Mass
- Motet
- Secular
- Chanson
- Madrigal
- Others (villancico, etc.)
- Crossover (madrigal spirituale, ceremonial motet, etc.)
- Instrumental
Style edit
- Intervals, dissonance, harmony, polyphony, iconic stature of Palestrina and why
- Gradual development of functional tonality, with cadential structures, root motions of fifths, demise of the church modes