Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600. The invention of the printing press in 1439 made it cheaper and easier to distribute music theory and music texts.
About Renaissance music in brief
Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600. The development of polyphony produced the notable changes in musical instruments that mark the Renaissance from the Middle Ages musically. The invention of the printing press in 1439 made it cheaper and easier to distribute music theory and music texts on a wider scale. Prior to the invention of printing, written music and music theory had to be hand-copied, a time-consuming and expensive process. The rise of the bourgeois class; the recovery of a common, unifying musical language, and the Protestant Reformation all contributed to the development of Renaissance music. The music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the Early Modern period: the rise of thought; increased innovation; the growth of commercial enterprises; and the emergence of the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school of chansons, motets, and madrigals. In the Renaissance, music became a vehicle for personal expression. Composers found ways to make vocal music more expressive of the texts they were setting. Secular music absorbed techniques from sacred music, and vice versa. Early forms of modern woodwind and brass instruments like the bassoon and trombone also appeared, extending the range of sonic color and increasing the sound of instrumental ensembles. During the 15th century, full triads became common, giving way to functional tonality.
This later developed into one of the defining characteristics of tonality during the Baroque era. Beginning in the late 20th century,. numerous early music ensemble were formed. Ensembles specializing in music give concert tours and make recordings, using modern reproductions of historical instruments and using singing and performing styles which musicologists believe were used during the era. The main characteristics of Renaissance Music are. The use of multiple, independent melodic lines, performed simultaneously – became increasingly elaborate throughout the 14th century with highly independent voices. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music – in the Middle ages, the narrow range made necessary frequent crossing of parts, thus requiring a greater contrast between them to distinguish the different parts. The modal characteristics of renaissance music began to break down towards the end. The movement from the D minor chord to the G Major chord is an interval of a perfect fourth. The move from the G major to the C Major chord is also an intervals of aperfect fourth. This led to the use of root motions of fifths or fourths. An example of a chord progression, in the key of C Major: \”D minorG MajorC Major\”. The sound of full triad became common in the Renaissance. The system of church modes began to give way tofunctional tonality, which would dominate Western art music for the next three centuries.
You want to know more about Renaissance music?
This page is based on the article Renaissance music published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 26, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
