Renaissance music

• 1. Introduction

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  Renaissance music stretches across the 15th and 16th centuries, covering a period when European composers broke from medieval constraints and invented something entirely new. What drove that transformation? Why did musicians from the Low Countries flood into Italy? And how did a style born in the British Isles come to define an entire era on the continent? The answers begin with a single term that a Flemish composer, writing in about 1476, used to explain everything that had changed in European music: the "new art."

• 2. The English Countenance

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  John Dunstaple, who died in 1453, left behind roughly fifty surviving works, yet his influence on continental Europe was extraordinary. The poet Martin le Franc named it in his Le Champion des Dames, calling it la contenance angloise, the English countenance, and adding that it had shaped the work of Dufay and Binchois. The Flemish theorist Tinctoris, writing around 1476, called Dunstaple the fons et origo of the style, its wellspring and origin.

  What the English countenance actually meant was a move toward full triadic harmony, three-note chords built on thirds and sixths. In the Middle Ages, thirds and sixths had been treated as dissonances. Dunstaple reversed that judgment. Scholars believe he encountered French fauxbourdon while on the continent with the Duke of Bedford, borrowed some of its sonorities, and built his own elegant harmonies from intervals of the third and sixth.

  Because copies of Dunstaple's works have been found in Italian and German manuscripts, his reputation clearly spread widely during his lifetime. His contemporary Leonel Power was similarly pivotal: Power is the composer most fully represented in the Old Hall Manuscript, one of the only undamaged sources of English music from the early 15th century, and he was among the first to set separate movements of the ordinary of the Mass in a thematically unified way intended for continuous performance.

• 3. The Franco-Flemish Ascent

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  Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, combined with a flourishing system of music education in the area's churches and cathedrals, produced an extraordinary surplus of trained singers, instrumentalists, and composers. Churches and aristocratic courts across Italy competed to hire them. That flow of talent northward to south reversed completely by the end of the 16th century, when Venice, Rome, and other Italian cities had absorbed the northern musical influences and become the new centers of activity.

  Guillaume Du Fay, born around 1397 and the central figure of the Burgundian School, was regarded by his contemporaries as the leading composer in Europe during the mid-15th century. He composed in nearly every form available to him: seven complete masses, twenty-eight individual mass movements, twenty-two motets, and eighty-seven chansons that can be definitively attributed to him have survived. Du Fay may have been the first composer to apply the term fauxbourdon to the simpler parallel-writing style that became prominent in 15th-century liturgical music.

  Josquin des Prez, who died on the 27th of August 1521, gradually acquired a reputation during the 16th century as the greatest composer of his age. Writers as different as Baldassare Castiglione and Martin Luther recorded his fame. His mastery of technique and expression was universally imitated, and his position at the center of the Franco-Flemish School meant that the polyphonic style he refined became the common musical language of the era.

  Gilles Binchois, born around 1400, filled a different role within that school. His secular songs, mostly rondeaux written for the Dukes of Burgundy, were prized for their carefully shaped, singable melodies. His tunes were copied decades after his death and served as source material for mass composition by later composers. About half of his surviving secular music is held in the Oxford Bodleian Library.

• 4. Print, Commerce, and Spread

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  The invention of the printing press in 1439 changed who could own music and how far it could travel. Before printing, every copy of a musical text had to be made by hand, a process that was both slow and expensive. After printing, chansons, motets, and masses moved across Europe at a pace that had no precedent.

  The emergence of a bourgeois class drove demand upward. Educated amateurs wanted music for leisure and entertainment, not only for liturgy. That demand gave secular forms new commercial weight and encouraged composers to write for private performance rather than exclusively for the church.

  By the end of the 16th century, the northern musical dominance had inverted. Italy had absorbed the Franco-Flemish tradition and become a center of innovation in its own right. Opera arose at this time in Florence, developed as a deliberate attempt to resurrect the music of ancient Greece. The musicians responsible were known as the Florentine Camerata, and their experiment with monody, a form of declaimed music over simple accompaniment, marked as sharp a break from polyphony as polyphony itself had once been from earlier medieval practice.

  In Venice, from about 1530 until around 1600, a polychoral style developed at the Basilica San Marco di Venezia in which multiple choirs of singers, brass, and strings were placed in different spatial locations within the building. That sound spread from Venice into Germany, then to Spain, France, and England, tracing the boundary of what would become the Baroque era.

• 5. Notation and Its Silences

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  The scholar Margaret Bent observed that Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by modern standards, and that translating it into modern form acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts the original openness. Scores, as modern listeners understand them, were extremely rare. Composers notated music only in individual parts, and barlines were not used.

  The primary unit of beat was the semibreve, or whole note, which could contain either two or three of the next subdivision, the minim, depending on context. These different groupings were called perfect or imperfect tempus and perfect or imperfect prolation, distinguishing three-to-one ratios from two-to-one. Note values were generally larger than those in use today.

  Accidentals, added sharps, flats, and naturals, were not always written into the score. Renaissance musicians were expected to know, from their training in counterpoint, which accidentals a passage required. A singer would interpret a part by working out the cadential formulas alongside the other voices, avoiding parallel octaves and parallel fifths and adjusting in response to decisions made by fellow performers. It is largely through contemporary tablatures for plucked instruments that scholars have reconstructed which accidentals the original performers actually played.

  The shift from vellum to paper during this period had an unexpected consequence for notation itself. Paper was too weak to withstand the heavy scratching required to fill in solid black noteheads, so the style of white mensural notation, in which noteheads were left unfilled, emerged. Earlier notation, written on vellum, had used solid black noteheads. Other colors and filled-in notes continued to appear in specific contexts, mainly to signal imperfection, alteration, or temporary rhythmic changes.

• 6. Sacred and Secular Forms

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  The Mass and the motet were the principal liturgical forms and remained in use throughout the Renaissance period. Masses were normally titled by the source material from which they borrowed. A cantus firmus mass drew a single monophonic melody, usually from chant, usually placed in the tenor voice and usually in longer note values than the surrounding parts. Beginning around 1500, a new technique called pervasive imitation appeared, in which each voice would imitate the melodic and rhythmic motifs sung or played by the others.

  John Dunstaple wrote his Missa Rex seculorum as a clear example of the cantus firmus technique, and Leonel Power's mass based on the Marian antiphon Alma Redemptoris Mater placed the antiphon literally in the tenor voice in each movement, without melodic ornament.

  On the secular side, the Italian madrigal and the French chanson spread throughout Europe and were absorbed into the wider polyphonic practice. The German Lied, the Italian frottola, and the Spanish villancico each developed distinct regional characters. Purely instrumental music included consort music for recorders or viols, dances such as the pavane, galliard, saltarello, and basse danse, and solo arrangements for lute, vihuela, harp, or keyboard known as intabulations.

  In England, the flowering of the musical madrigal ran mostly from 1588 to 1627. English madrigals were a cappella, generally light in style, and began largely as copies or translations of Italian models. Most were written for three to six voices. The English votive style of polyphony, characterized by high treble lines and long solo verses with melisma, had peaked earlier; the largest collection of that repertory is the Eton Choirbook, compiled in the late 15th century. Erasmus, in a 1519 letter to Ulrich von Hutten, criticized the excessively virtuosic treble verses, writing that the boys did nothing but distort the words so that the text could not be understood.

• 7. Instruments and Ensemble Color

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  At the beginning of the 16th century, instruments were considered less important than voices, used primarily for dances and to accompany singing. That subordination gradually gave way as instrument-building evolved to match the demands of polyphony, and as composers began writing music that existed, in printed form, for its own sake.

  The viol, developed in the 15th century, commonly had six strings and was typically played with a bow. Its structural traits, sharp waist-cuts, similar frets, a flat back, thin ribs, and identical tuning, gave it close kinship with the plucked vihuela, though its larger size changed the playing posture entirely, requiring the instrument to rest on the floor or between the legs. When played that way, it became known as the viola da gamba, to distinguish it from viols played on the arm, the viole da braccio that eventually evolved into the violin family.

  The sackbut, sometimes spelled sackbutt or sagbutt, replaced the slide trumpet by the middle of the 15th century. The cornett was made of wood but used a cup mouthpiece like a trumpet and was played by blowing into one end while fingering holes along the outside. Both the cornett and the sackbut shared a rare distinction: from at least as early as the 13th century, when instruments were divided into haut, loud outdoor types, and bas, quieter intimate ones, those two were among only a small group that could play freely in both categories.

  The shawm was the most popular double-reed instrument of the period, commonly heard in the streets alongside drums and trumpets because of its brilliant, piercing, and often deafening sound. The recorder used a whistle mouthpiece rather than a reed and was usually built with seven finger holes and a thumb hole. Early woodwind instruments like the bassoon and trombone also appeared during this era, extending the range of sonic color available to composers and expanding what a mixed instrumental ensemble could achieve.

  By the close of the 16th century, the system of church modes had begun to break down entirely, giving way to functional tonality, a system based on musical keys that would dominate Western art music for the next three centuries. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the most famous composer of the Roman School, brought together the functional needs of the Catholic Church with the prevailing musical styles of the Counter-Reformation, and that alignment gave his masses and motets their enduring place in the repertory.