The Renaissance was a period of momentous change, which began in Italy and eventually spread across Europe to the rest of the world. It marked the true beginning of the modern West with the resurgence of Greek Antiquity, including awareness of the self, humanism and the importance of education among the newly forming upper classes. The lasting impact of the Renaissance on the world of music is undeniable and through studying its origins we can better understand how notation, form and theory in music beyond the Renaissance has been affected by it. The musical developments in the Renaissance offer a foundation upon which subsequent musical eras have built and refined into a standard which was then practiced for centuries.
Many factors impacted the transition to and development of the Renaissance, some of them being the rise of humanism, religious change, political upheaval across Europe, the invention of the Gutenberg Press and the growth in influence of the bourgeoisie, all of which are inextricably linked. In particular, the tragedy of the Black Death, which ravaged Europe during the 1300s, left in its wake a proportionally wealthier class of people; survivors of the Black Death ended up with a higher standard of living than before. The Black Death’s impact on Europe saw a cultural, religious and political shift in the society of the 15th Century in Europe. Among other influences, the Black Death affected the authority that the Church had over society; while the Church became corrupted by surviving, but unfit clergymen, many people lost their faith in the role of the Church. This was decisive in the emergence of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on human values and experiences, rather than submitting oneself to religion. The shift in focus can be seen in paintings, architecture and sculptors by the artists of the time. For example, the emergence of 3-dimensional artwork and sculptures like Donatello’s statue of David, ca.1440, is a stark contrast to the 2-dimensional nature of medieval art. The shame of the naked human body in the Medieval era and the celebration in the beauty of it in the Renaissance signifies a shift in cultural perspective and parallels with the overall shift in the cultural acceptance of realism and humanism in society. Art was to imitate life and became something relatable to the people who received it. These ideas of naturalism, perspective, texture and interest in the individual also have parallels in music.
It is in the area of music that perhaps the greatest development toward the theory and application of the art can be identified as having spawned during the Renaissance. The Renaissance in music was a period that witnessed the flowering of sacred and secular vocal and choral musical genres such as the polyphonic mass, motet, anthem and madrigal. The later Baroque era saw the early development of opera, oratorio, cantata, as well as independent instrumental forms such as sonata, concerto and solo keyboard music, and a variety of influential dance forms. The rich cultivation of what is understood as Western Art Music has its roots in the bustling, ever-changing world of the Renaissance. The Renaissance sets itself apart from the time that came before it – the Dark Ages or medieval era – with the idea of humanism. The idea of music as an expressive art, somehow intended to touch and express human emotion was not widely practiced before this massive cultural shift. The medieval approach to music was mathematical; music was considered symbolic of number in sound; medieval composers often referred to the Pythagorean ratio of number to sound to identify consonance and dissonance. The intellectual value of philosophy and attention to aesthetics and emotion found its way to the art of music around the second half of the 15th Century.
It is important to note that the theory of humanism in music has its roots in the Italian courts, where theorists such as Johannes Tinctorus produced texts about how music showed interest in humanistic tendencies. Homophony and imitative polyphony was developed by the ‘masters’ of the Dutch school, Josquin and Ockeghem etc. in particular and was used by composers in the increasingly popular form of simultaneous composing – In the Renaissance, polyphony was gradually written in the view of harmony, to the depth of the intervals that were formed and in the resolution of dissonance. However, this kind of close attention to dissonance resolution didn’t happen until at least mid to late 15th century. Tinctorus famously quotes in one of his treatises on music “It is a matter of great surprise that there is no composition written over 40 years ago which is thought of by the learned as worthy of performance”. This haughty commentary not only speaks to the revolutionised way of writing music in the 15th century, which made it much more harmonic and pleasing to the senses, but also highlights the new position that music had in society; music had to be interesting and had to invoke an emotional response that spoke to the listener as an individual, instead of purely as an exaltation to God.
Whereas before music was composed exclusively for the Church, the Renaissance saw an increase in secular music being written for courts and other non-religious institutions. The increasing aesthetic value that music had among the upper classes contributed to the status-value that composers and musicians had in society. The role of the travelling musician became incredibly important to the dissemination of musical styles across Europe and is the cause for secular forms such as the French chanson, the Italian madrigal, the German tenorlieder, the Spanish villancico, and the English song to be refined and diversified across schools of teaching. That being said, while secular music was indeed increasingly popular, religious works made developments of their own, often recycling earlier material from masses and superimposing motives in others, leaving out just the cantus firmus. This kind of imitation mass can be seen in Se la face ay pale, written in the 1430s by Guillaume Du Fay. Du Fay borrows material from earlier sections and places them in the Gloria. A head motive is used to link each ‘movement’ of the mass. In the case of the Gloria the motive occurs with the words ‘Et in terra prax’ and with each section of the mass written in the same mode, with slight movements away from the F centre, we start to see a commonality linking each section together. The imitative nature of this mass has huge implications for later eras in the history of Western Music, where symphonies by Mozart, Beethoven and even Grieg use recurring motives and movements away from tonal centres to related keys to link movements together.
A humanistic element of music that has its roots in the Renaissance came in the form of ‘word painting’. The idea that music was a decorative art was gradually superseded by the desire to clearly convey the words in a piece. We can see natural accentuation of syllables developing in the madrigal De la belle contrade d’oriente, written in the mid 16th Century by Italian composer Cipriano de Rore, where the use of interlocking phrases actually acts to convey breathlessness, with a changing of voices in every other bar. This transition to music serving the words was hugely important, especially in the development of later forms of music such as the opera or program music. It is here in the Renaissance that the first steps toward declamatory recitative can be witnessed.
While music of the medieval era was indeed beautiful and impressive, its purpose was decorative and acted as an accompaniment to the Word, or liturgy. The Flemish composer Josquin Des Prez is considered to be the leading composer of the Renaissance. Despite writing much of his music in the 15th century, Josquin used harmony for expressive purposes, using suspensions for emphasis and emotion. He manipulated the vocal lines to reflect the liturgical material that the music was set to, often taking the voice to the highest registers in climactic sections and down into the lowest registers when text mentions death, for example. He developed the style of the motet and set the standard for composition in the 16th century after him.
Polyphonic textures were indeed used before the Renaissance, but the attention to the way various lines interacted with each other was mainly explored during the Renaissance; where a medieval composer wrote lines separately, a Renaissance composer would build textures layer by layer, using imitative polyphony to weave parts together simultaneously. For example, a more vertical approach to counterpoint was taken, and in the building of lines from the bass upwards we start to see a development toward writing with modern triad and chordal structures. The harmonic quality in a piece and the way it influenced emotion impacted the way composers wrote their music too; instead of focussing on the piece as a whole, care was taken almost bar-by-bar to how each voice related to the voices around it. In particular the chanson by Josquin Des Prez, Mille regretz has a particularly organised writing style, with each phrase of text given an equivalent musical phrase, that fits harmonically as well as rhythmically. As this kind of approach to composing music was fairly new, and because the use of the eight medieval church modes was still prevalent, early Renaissance pieces have a dissonant nature in some parts, where the refining of harmonic modes and chordal structure was not yet developed. However, music began to be built on consonances, around which dissonances would resolve, thus revealing an insight to the modern cadential progressions we recognise today.
This lead to the development of harmony through to the Baroque era, where chords and triads are seen to be refined into the musical notation we recognise today. It is often presumed that harmony as a concept was not practiced before the Baroque era. However, during the late 15th and 16th centuries polyphony certainly was written harmonically. The concern that composers gave to simultaneous composing meant that music was written vertically, therefore, if not an understanding of the Baroque-established treble-bass polarity, a growing awareness toward the harmonic structure in a piece certainly did exist. Returning to Du Fay’s De la belle contrade d’oriente, the harmony is influenced by the poetry as well. In this piece the mode centres on F, more specifically mode 6 or Hypolidian. However, in the particularly emotional recitative-like speech in the female voice, the harmony changes, reaching triads like E and Db major and then wildly modulating from A major to C minor. The use of chromaticism and notes outside of the mode directly relates to the feeling of anguish and sorrow coming across in the reflective sestet. This freedom in counterpoint is used to accurately reflect the turmoil being displayed by the text, which is also a fantastic example of word painting. The use of chromaticism was considered rather extreme and was often used in pieces like De la belle contrade d’oriente to convey profound emotions, but by the end of the 16th century it was considered a standard ‘ornamentation’ technique.
Musical form developed dramatically toward the end of the Renaissance, as the popularity of secular music encouraged composers to step outside of the liturgical style of writing. Harmony was by now conceived as vertical entities, for music that was pleasing to the senses; dissonance had to be regulated in terms of consonances. This kind of understanding was further refined in the Baroque era, where the fundamental chord structure that we recognise today, with root position and inversion chords really started to take shape. As composers delved into secular forms of music such as the madrigal, pieces were written with heavier instrumentation, with varied instrument combinations such as the viola de gamba, the lute, keyboards and voices demanding some kind of common ground in tuning. The prolific publication of ensemble pieces such as Possente spirto from L’Orfeo by Monteverdi necessitated the development of equal temperament across instruments.
With harmony and treble-bass polarity developing in leaps and bound during this time, the notion of resolving to a tonic came about and resulted in the development of tonality and key systems. The fundamental basis for tonal harmony in music was conceived during the Renaissance and Baroque eras and lasted from around the late 17th century through to the early 20th century! The modal structure used in the early Renaissance was slowly superseded by key systems based on the cycle of fifths. The French theorist Jean-Phillipe Rameau, in his Traité de l’harmonie (Treatise on Harmony, 1722) was the first theorist to describe the tonal system and is considered the most influential theorist on the development of modern Western Music. His treatises mention works by another influential composer of the 17th century, Archangelo Corelli, who was a prolific writer of instrumental music in the Baroque era. Corelli’s music was extremely lyrical and used motivic techniques in his pieces, with brief modulations to nearby keys, always focusing on the gradual expansion of the original motive.
This can be seen in the first movement of his Trio Sonata Op. 3, No. 2, where each movement opens with a single subject which is then modulated and re-orchestrated as the movement progresses. Corelli’s music can truly be considered tonal, with its organised nature giving it a sense of direction that differentiates it from modal music. For example, measures 8-10 and 12-14 sees chords with their roots falling down through the circle of fifths, which is the natural path of chord progressions in tonal music.
It is important to understand the significance of the developments in music that occurred during the Renaissance, because whilst some elements of Renaissance music were streamlined and reworked to fit tonal harmonic structure better, the musical language that was created during the Renaissance set the foundation for modern Western art music in the form of treatment of dissonance, text-setting, equal-temperament and the many forms and genres of music that blossomed over the 15th and 16th centuries. The legacy of humanistic thought and aesthetics that was born during the Renaissance affects the appreciation that society has on the Arts to this day