RENAISSANCE MUSIC

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 to 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 invention of the Gutenberg press made distribution of music and musical theory
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, Victoria 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 (OED 2005).
Music, increasingly freed from medieval constraints, in range, rhythm, harmony,
form, and notation, became a vehicle for new 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 also became more self-sufficient with its availability in printed form,
existing for its own sake. Many familiar modern instruments (including the violin, guitar, lute
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and keyboard instruments), developed into new forms during the Renaissance responding to
the evolution of musical ideas, presenting further possibilities for composers and musicians to
explore. Modern woodwind and brass instruments like the bassoon and trombone also
appeared; extending the range of sonic color and power. 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.