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.

Late Renaissance music (1550 - 1600)

In Venice, from about 1550 until around 1610, 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 (see Venetian 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.

Related Topics:
Venice - San Marco di Venezia - Venetian School - Baroque

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The Roman School was a group of composers of predominantly church music, in Rome, spanning the late Renaissance into early Baroque eras. Many of the composers had a direct connection to the Vatican and the papal chapel, though they worked at several churches; stylistically they are often contrasted with the Venetian School of composers, a concurrent movement which was much more progressive. By far the most famous composer of the Roman School is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose name has been associated for four hundred years with smooth, clear, polyphonic perfection.

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The brief but intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them, is known as the English Madrigal School. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models. Most were for three to six voices.

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Musica reservata is a term referring to 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.

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In addition, many composers observed a division in their own works between a prima prattica (music in the Renaissance polyphonic style) and a seconda prattica (music in the new style) during the first part of the 17th century.

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Mannerism

In the late 16th century, as the Renaissance era closes, an extremely manneristic style develops. 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).

Related Topics:
Luzzaschi - Marenzio - Gesualdo

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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.

Related Topics:
Florence - Monody - Florentine Camerata

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

Related Topics:
Polychoral - Concertato - Monody - Madrigal - Opera

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