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The Renaissance Music was instrumental and vocal music that was written during the Renaissance era that covered the period from the c.1400 with the end of the medieval era to around 1600 with the beginning of the Baroque era (Vendrix, 2017). Similar to arts, music of the renaissance era was influenced in greater heights by the developments that defined the early modern period, that is the rise of humanistic thought, the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, the increased innovation and discoveries, the growth of commercial enterprises, the rise of a bourgeois class and the protestant reformation. It is from the changing society; there emerged a common, unifying language, the polyphonic style, which meant music with multiple, independent melody lines that were performed simultaneously.
In 1439, the printing press was invented and to which enabled easier and cheap distribution of music and other musical theory texts on a wider geographical scale and to many people. Before the invention of the printing press, music and theory texts had to be hand-copied, which was an expensive and time-consuming process. With the emergence of the bourgeois class, the demand for leisure and entertainment music increased. Two types of Renaissance music existed that included sacred and secular music.
The early renaissance music was dominated by the Latin mass due to the supremacy of the catholic church, making the music sacred (Clarke, 2016). As a result of the catholic church influence, the sacred music was mostly polyphonic masses and the motets in Latin for use in the churches, for example, lamentations I by Thomas Tallis. Despite the steady movement away from the church due to the rise of the humanistic thought, churches remained crucial places for training musicians and singers, and as the period went on, the Protestant Reformation gathered pace prompting music for use in Protestant churches.
Secular music, on the other hand, was very dependent upon the courts, which financed and supported musicians. Secular music pushed the boundaries and laid the foundation for functional harmony with most of the composers trying to incorporate emotions into pieces. Secular music in the renaissance was mostly vocal, but the instrumental music was developing (Coelho & Polk, 2016). Some of the common musical instruments of the renaissance include viol da gamba, trumpet, cornett, harp, lute, sackbut and the keyboard. Renaissance composers were divided into early and later composers. Examples of early composers include John Taverner (1490-1545) and the late composers William Byrd (1567-1643).
References
Clarke, M. (2016). Sacred Sound for a Holy Space: Dogma, Worship and Music at Solemn Mass during the Victorian Era, 1829–1903. In Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (pp. 55-78). Routledge.
Coelho, V., & Polk, K. (2016). Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420–1600: Players of Function and Fantasy. Cambridge University Press.
Vendrix, P. (2017). Music and the Renaissance: Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Routledge.
