PRE BAROQUE MUSICRENAISSANCE PERIOD

PREPARED BY: GERALDINE REYES

Renaissance music 

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.

Genres Principal liturgical forms which

endured throughout the entire Renaissance period were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular forms (such as the madrigal) for their own designs.

Early Renaissance music (1400–1467)

This group gradually dropped the late Medieval period's complex

devices of isorhythm and extreme syncopation, resulting in a more

limpid and flowing style. What their music "lost" in rhythmic complexity,

however, it gained in rhythmic vitality, as a "drive to the cadence" became a prominent feature around

mid-century.

Middle Renaissance music (1467–1534) In the early 1470s, music started to

be printed using a printing press. Music printing had a major effect on how music spread for not only did a printed piece of music reach a larger audience than any manuscript ever could, it did it far cheaper as well. Also during this century, a tradition of famous makers began for many instruments. These makers were masters of their craft.

Late Renaissance music (1534–1600) In Venice, from about 1534 until around

1600, an impressive polychoral style developed, which gave Europe some of the grandest, most sonorous music composed up until that time, with multiple choirs of singers, brass and strings in different spatial locations in the Basilica San Marco di Venezia (seeVenetian School). These multiple revolutions spread over Europe in the next several decades, beginning in Germany and then moving to Spain, France and England somewhat later, demarcating the beginning of what we now know as the Baroque musical era.

Musica reservata is either a style or a performance practice in a cappella vocal music of the latter, mainly in Italy and southern Germany, involving refinement, exclusivity, and intense emotional expression of sung text.

Masses

The 15th and 16th century masses had two kinds of sources that were used, monophonic and polyphonic, with two main forms of elaboration, based on cantus firmus practice or, beginning some time around 1500, the new style of pervasive imitation. Four types of masses resulted:

Cantus firmus mass (tenor mass) The cantus firmus/imitation mass The paraphrase mass The imitation mass (parody mass)

Masses were normally titled by the source from which they borrowed. Cantus firmus mass uses the same monophonic melody, usually drawn from chant and usually in the tenor and most often in longer note values than the other voices. 

Mannerism

In the late 16th century, as the Renaissance era closed, an extremely manneristic style developed. In secular music, especially in the madrigal, there was a trend towards complexity and even extreme chromaticism (as exemplified in madrigals of Luzzaschi, Marenzio, and Gesualdo). The term "mannerism" derives from art history.

Transition to the Baroque Beginning in Florence, there was an attempt to

revive the dramatic and musical forms of Ancient Greece, through the means of monody, a form of declaimed music over a simple accompaniment; a more extreme contrast with the preceding polyphonic style would be hard to find; this was also, at least at the outset, a secular trend. These musicians were known as the Florentine Camerata.

We have already noted some of the musical developments that helped to usher in the Baroque, but for further explanation of this transition, see antiphon, concertato, monody, madrigal, and opera, as well as the works given under "Sources and further reading."

Instruments of the Renaissance Many instruments originated

during the Renaissance; others were variations of, or improvements upon, instruments that had existed previously. Some have survived to the present day; others have disappeared, only to be recreated in order to perform music of the period on authentic instruments. As in the modern day, instruments may be classified as brass, strings, percussion, and woodwind.

Brass

Slide trumpet Cornett Trumpet Sackbut 

Strings

Hurdy-Gurdy Lute Viol Lyre Irish Harp

Percussion

Tambourine Jew's harp

Woodwinds (aerophones)

Shawm Reed pipe Hornpipe Bagpipe/Bladderpipe Panpipe Transverse flute Recorder