Renaissance music

Renaissance music is classical music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1450 to 1600. Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, since there were no abrupt shifts in musical thinking during the 15th century, and since the process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, but 1450 is used here.

Early Renaissance music (1450 - 1500)

The Burgundian School of composers, led by Guillaume Dufay, demostrated charactersistics of both the late Medieval era and the early Renaissance (see Medieval music). 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.

Related Topics:
Burgundian School - Guillaume Dufay - Medieval music - Isorhythm - Syncopation

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Towards the end of the 15th century, polyphonic sacred music (as exemplified in the masses of Johannes Ockeghem and Jacob Obrecht) had once again become more complex, in a manner that can perhaps be seen as correlating to the stunning detail in the painting at the time. Ockeghem, particularly, was fond of canon, both contrapuntal and mensural. He even composed a mass in which all the parts are derived canonically from one musical line.

Related Topics:
Johannes Ockeghem - Jacob Obrecht - Canon - Mensural

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was in the opening decades of the next century that music felt in a tactus (think of the modern time signature) of two semibreves-to-a-breve began to be as common as that with three semibreves-to-a-breve, as had prevailed prior to that time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~