The Renaissance period of classical music spans approximately 1400 to 1600.

It
was preceded by the Medieval period and followed by the Baroque period. The
Renaissance era of music history came significantly later than the era of
Renaissance art, which arguably peaked during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, yet the Renaissance music era proved to be equally robust.

A Brief History of Renaissance Music

The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the
sixteenth century liberalized some forms of art, and both church music and
secular art music thrived during the Renaissance era. Meanwhile, the 1439
invention of the printing press helped standardize music notation across
Europe, although it would continue to evolve during the Baroque era and
Classical era. The Renaissance era itself spans three phases:
 Early Renaissance: The music of the early Renaissance centered around the Burgundian
School, a group of composers led by Guillaume Dufay in northern France and the Low
Countries. Early Renaissance music followed closely in the spirit of late Medieval music, but
with less syncopation and a greater focus on harmonic cadences. As the early Renaissance
period gave way to the middle Renaissance, church composers Johannes Ockeghem and
Jacob Obrecht pushed new boundaries in polyphony in their intricate masses.
 Middle Renaissance: The middle Renaissance began around the time that the Catholic
church's Council of Trent issued edicts discouraging the use of excessive polyphony in vocal
church music. This led to a rollback of techniques used by Obrecht and Ockeghem, but it
gave rise to a new generation of Renaissance composers who embraced simpler forms of
harmony. The most enduring composers of the middle Renaissance are the Franco-Flemish
composer Josquin des Prez and the Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina of the
Roman School. Josquin was a master of sacred music, and Palestrina introduced the
independent interlocking melody lines we now call counterpoint. At times, however, both
Josquin and Palestrina would pay homage to the simple monophonic melodies that defined
the Medieval era.
 Late Renaissance: The late Renaissance gave way to a style known as mannerism,
wherein music was embellished with various forms of ornamentation, suspension, and
even chromaticism. This would set the table for the bold, dynamic, heavily embellished
music of the Baroque era.

Renaissance Period Musical Forms

The Renaissance period gave rise to musical forms like the motet, the madrigale spirituale,
the mass, and the laude, all of which were liturgical styles of music. Secular music also had
a place in the Renaissance era; secular forms included the secular motet and motet-
chanson, the secular madrigal, the villancico, the frottola, the rondo, the ballade, the lute
song, and the canzonetta.

3 Characteristics of Renaissance Music

Renaissance music represented a great leap in sophistication from the Medieval era music of the Middle Ages.
Key characteristics of Renaissance music include:
. 1. Polyphony: While Medieval music is often characterized by homophonic singing (as in Gregorian
chants), Renaissance music by composers like Josquin, Palestrina, and Thomas Tallis emphasized
multiple voices singing in a polyphonic style. The same was true for multi-part instrumental music.
. 2. Tonal music: Most music of the Middle Ages was modal, meaning it followed musical modes as
opposed to the major scale or minor scale. In the Renaissance era, this began to change. Some music,
particularly vocal music, remained modal in nature, but newer forms like the English madrigal and the
Italian madrigal embraced the tonal music that remains popular to this day. Tonal music places strong
emphasis on cadences at the end of sections or entire pieces; this way a listener’s ear can be anchored
in a particular key.
. 3. Increased risk-taking: Early Renaissance music, like that of Guillaume Dufay, maintained the
harmonic rules of Medieval music from the late Middle Ages. But as new styles emerged over the
course of the sixteenth century, Renaissance music began pushing boundaries and introducing
moments of dissonance. Italian and German a cappella music employed a style called musica
reservata, featuring notable chromaticism and ornamentation. Meanwhile, musically bold passages by
composers like Palestrina would heavily influence early Baroque musicians, such as the Venetian
composer Claudio Monteverdi.
Instruments of the Renaissance Period
The Renaissance period saw a mix of new musical instruments and holdovers from earlier music. Common
Renaissance instruments included:
 Harpsichord
 Clavichord
 Viol
 Lute
 Rebec
 Lyre
 Guitar
 Recorder
 Cornet
 Trumpet
 Trombone (known at the time as sackbut)
 Tambourine
 Transverse flute
3 Influential Renaissance Composers
The musical literature of the Renaissance has not endured to the degree that Baroque, Classical, and Romantic
era music has. Still, several Renaissance composers remain highly influential to this day.
. 1. Josquin des Prez: Josquin des Prez was a prodigious composer of both church music and secular
music. His liturgical motets are widely taught in music schools as examples of Renaissance harmony
and notation. He was particularly known in his lifetime for composing 32 religious masses.
. 2. Carlo Gesualdo: Better known in his lifetime as Gesualdo da Venosa, this late Renaissance
composer was perhaps the most famous of his era to emerge from Italy. He was also notorious for a
string of murders he is alleged to have committed. Gesualdo published six volumes of Italian madrigals,
which featured chromaticism that would not be equaled until deep into the Baroque era.
. 3. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Simply known as Palestrina to most, this Roman School composer
is sometimes credited as the link between Renaissance and Baroque music. Palestrina's mastery of
counterpoint was among the most robust of his era. Palestrina was known for his masses, such as
the Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass), which made him famous in his own lifetime.

liturgical music, music written for performance in a

religious rite of worship. The term is most commonly associated
with the Christian tradition. Developing from the musical practices
of the Jewish synagogues, which allowed the cantor an
improvised charismatic song, early Christian services contained a
simple refrain, or responsorial, sung by the congregation. This
evolved into the various Western chants, the last of which,
the Gregorian, reached its apogee in the Carolingian Renaissance.
From the 10th century there also emerged a vast number of hymns.

Polyphony the simultaneous combination of two or more tones or melodic lines) was at
first restricted to major feasts. Solo ensembles of virtuoso singers were accompanied by
the organ or, possibly, a group of instruments. By about 1200 the early polyphonic style
culminated in the spectacular organa of the Notre-Dame
school composers Léonin and Pérotin.

opera, a staged drama set to music in its entirety, made up of vocal pieces with
instrumental accompaniment and usually with orchestral overtures and interludes. In
some operas the music is continuous throughout an act; in others it is broken up into
discrete pieces, or “numbers,” separated either by recitative (a dramatic type
of singing that approaches speech) or by spoken dialogue.

cantilena, in late medieval and early Renaissance music, term for certain vocal forms as
they were known in the 15th century; also a musical texture used widely in
both secular and sacred compositions of that century. Cantilena style is characterized by
a predominant vocal top line supported by less complex and usually instrumental tenor
and countertenor lines; it occurred both in homophonic, or chordal, music and in
polyphonic music having a contrapuntal (interwoven melody) [Link] was
defined by the Flemish music theorist Johannes Tinctoris (1436–1511) as one of the
smaller forms that usually treated love, although any subject was suitable.

lauda, a type of Italian poetry or a nonliturgical devotional song in

praise of the Virgin Mary, Christ, or the saints.

The poetic lauda was of liturgical origin, and it was popular from
about the mid-13th to the 16th century in Italy, where it was used
particularly in confraternal groups and for religious celebrations.
The first lauda in Italian was St. Francis’ moving canticle in praise
of “Sir Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” “Brother Wind,” “Sister
Water,” “Brother Fire,” and “Mother Earth”—a work that has been
called Laudes creaturarum o Cantico del Sole (“Praises of God’s
Creatures or the Canticle of the Sun”).

Laude were frequently written in ballata form for recitation by

religious confraternities, their content usually consisting of
exhortations to a moral life or of events in the lives of Christ and
the saints. These recitations evolved into dialogues and eventually
became part of the Italian version of the miracle play, the sacra
rappresentazione, a form of religiously inspired drama, which
became secularized during the Renaissance. Later in the
Renaissance some laude were written for musical settings.

Laude songs were first associated with the early Franciscan friars
(early 13th century); later, confraternities, or Laudisti, to
encourage devotional singing were founded in Florence and the
rest of northern Italy.

Although there were many writers of lauda poetry, the composers

were often unknown. Laude were simple and popular in style.
Their musical form depended on that of the period, and at times
folk melodies were used to set lauda texts. The earliest laude, from
the 13th century, were monophonic (single-line) compositions. By
the 16th century the laude appear in polyphonic (several-voice)
settings, usually in chordal style. Collections of laude from
the secular Congregazione dell’Oratorio, founded by St. Philip Neri
(d. 1595), are extant, because the singing of laude formed an
essential part of their meetings. The 16th-century lauda was
important as a step in the development of the oratorio.
The lauda remained important in Italian devotional life until the
19th century.

ayre, genre of solo song with lute accompaniment that flourished in

England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The outstanding
composers in the genre were the poet and composer Thomas
Campion and the lutenist John Dowland, whose “Flow, my teares”
(“Lachrimae”) became so popular that a large number of
continental and English instrumental pieces were based on its
melody. Other leading composers included John Danyel, Robert
Jones, Michael Cavendish, Francis Pilkington, Philip Rosseter,
and Alfonso Ferrabosco.

Generally, ayres are graceful, elegant, polished, often strophic

songs (i.e., songs having the same music for each stanza), typically
dealing with amorous subjects. But many are lively and animated,
full of rhythmic subtleties, while others are deeply emotional works
that gain much of their effect from bold, expressive harmonies and
striking melodic lines.

madrigal, form of vocal chamber music that originated in northern Italy during the 14th
century, declined and all but disappeared in the 15th, flourished anew in the 16th, and
ultimately achieved international status in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The
origin of the term madrigal is uncertain, but it probably comes from the
Latin matricale (meaning “in the mother tongue”; i.e., Italian, not Latin). The 14th-century
madrigal is based on a relatively constant poetic form of two or three stanzas of three
lines each, with 7 or 11 syllables per line. Musically, it is most often set polyphonically
(i.e., more than one voice part) in two parts, with the musical form reflecting the structure
of the poem. A typical two-stanza madrigal has an AAB form with both stanzas (AA) being
sung to the same music, followed by a one- or two-line coda (B), or concluding phrase, the
text of which sums up the sense of the poem.

a cappella, (Italian: “in the church style”), performance of a

polyphonic (multipart) musical work by unaccompanied voices.
Originally referring to sacred choral music, the term now refers
to secular music as well.

The a cappella style arose about the time of the composer Josquin
des Prez, in the late 15th century, and reached preeminence with
Palestrina in the late 16th century in the music that he wrote for
the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican. Because no independent
instrumental parts were written, later scholars assumed that the
choir sang unaccompanied, but the evidence is now that an organ
or other instruments exactly “doubled” some or several of the vocal
parts. By the 17th century, a cappella music was giving way to
the cantata, for which parts were written specifically for
instruments as well as for voices.
frottola, Italian secular song popular in the late 15th and early
16th centuries. Usually the frottola was a composition for four
voice parts with the melody in the top line. Frottole could be
performed by unaccompanied voices or by a solo voice with
instrumental accompaniment. The frottola had chordal texture and
clear-cut rhythm, usually in 3/4 or 4/4 metre. The voice parts had
narrow ranges and frequently repeated voices. Its musical style
was simple, in deliberate contrast to the complexity of more
sophisticated vocal music of the period. The frottola, as it
developed by 1530, was the direct antecedent of the 16th-
century madrigal.

The frottola was aristocratic music, although popular tunes were

sometimes incorporated.

canzona, a genre of Italian instrumental music in the 16th and

17th centuries. In 18th- and 19th-century music, the
term canzona refers to a lyrical song or songlike instrumental
piece.

In the 14th century the Italian scholar, poet, and humanist Petrarch
frequently used the canzona poetic form, and in the 16th century
canzoni were often used as texts by madrigal composers. In the late
16th century, the term canzona or its diminutive, canzonetta,
referred to polyphonic songs whose music and text were in a
lighter vein than the madrigal. These include the canzoni
villanesche (“rustic songs”) popular in mid-century.

The term “renaissance” means “rebirth.” After almost 1000 years

of the Middle Ages, there were many changes in western society
that began to help people live more freely. At the time there was a
growing middle class of merchants and businessmen and, once
again, education was becoming available to people outside the
clergy. People of the Renaissance sought ancient treasures from
the time of Greece and Rome, but this treasure was not gold and
silver, the treasure was knowledge. So much had been lost when
Rome fell. Even the great architecture of Rome had not been
matched in almost 1000 years because the formula for creating
concrete has been lost.

Rhythmic notation was developed during the Renaissance

Era by Leonin and Perotin. Today music is notated on 5 lines
and 4 spaces using notes and rests.

THE RENAISSANCE – BIRTH OF STANDARDIZED RHYTHMIC NOTATION

AN INTRODUCTION

In previous chapters we introduced the music of the Middle Ages. When we discuss
the Middle Ages, we will find that life was very difficult for most of the people living
at the time. The Catholic Church’s control of much of life slowed the rate at which
change was possible. Eventually, change would begin to bring Western society to a
time of “rebirth.” During the time of the Renaissance, composers like Leonin and
Perotin developed a way to notate rhythm.
The term “renaissance” means “rebirth.” After almost 1000 years of the Middle Ages,
there were many changes in western society that began to help people live more
freely. At the time there was a growing middle class of merchants and businessmen
and, once again, education was becoming available to people outside the clergy.
People of the Renaissance sought ancient treasures from the time of Greece and
Rome, but this treasure was not gold and silver, the treasure was knowledge. So much
had been lost when Rome fell. Even the great architecture of Rome had not been
matched in almost 1000 years because the formula for creating concrete has been lost.
We will discuss the Renaissance further in its own chapter.

Madrigal - The origin of the term madrigal is uncertain, but it probably

comes from the Latin matricale (meaning “in the mother
tongue”; i.e., Italian, not Latin). It is a form of chamber music,
polyphonic song that became popular during Europe's Renaissance and
early Baroque periods.