Renaissance music is
European music written during the
Renaissance, approximately 1400 - 1600.
Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, given the lack of abrupt shifts in musical thinking during the 15th century. The process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, and musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s. In addition, the Italian humanist movement, rediscovering and reinterpreting the aesthetics of ancient Greece and Rome, influenced the development of musical style during the period.
The increasing reliance on the interval of the third as a consonance is one of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music (in the
Middle Ages, thirds had been considered dissonances: see
interval).
Polyphony, in use since the 12th century, became increasingly elaborate with highly independent voices throughout the 14th century: the beginning of the 15th century showed simplification, with the voices often striving for smoothness. This was possible because of a greatly increased vocal range in music – in the Middle Ages, the narrow range made necessary frequent crossing of parts, thus requiring a greater contrast between them.
The
modal (as opposed to
tonal) characteristics of Renaissance music began to break down towards the end of the period with the increased use of root motions of fifths. This later developed into one of the defining characteristics of tonality.
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.
Common sacred genres were the
mass, the
motet, the
madrigale spirituale, and the
laude.
During the period, secular music had an increasingly wide distribution, with a wide variety of forms, but one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since
printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost. Secular music included songs for one or many voices, forms such as the
frottola,
chanson and
madrigal.
Secular vocal genres included the
madrigal, the
frottola, the
caccia, the
chanson in several forms (
rondeau,
virelai,
bergerette,
ballade,
musique mesurée), the
canzonetta, the
villancico, the
villanella, the
villotta, and the
lute song. Mixed forms such as the
motet-chanson and the secular motet also appeared.
Purely instrumental music included
consort music for
recorder or
viol and other instruments, and dances for various ensembles. Common genres were the
toccata, the
prelude, the
ricercar, the
canzona, and
intabulation (intavolatura, intabulierung). Instrumental ensembles for dances might play a
basse danse (or bassedanza), a
pavane, a
galliard, an
allemande, or a
courante.
Towards the end of the period, the early dramatic precursors of opera such as monody, the
madrigal comedy, and the
intermedio are seen.
According to Margaret Bent (1998), "Renaissance notation is under-prescriptive by our standards; when translated into modern form it acquires a prescriptive weight that overspecifies and distorts its original openness."
Renaissance compositions were notated only in individual parts; scores were extremely rare, and
barlines were not used.
Note values were generally larger than are in use today; the primary unit of
beat was the
semibreve, or
whole note. As had been the case since the
Ars Nova (see
Medieval music), there could be either two or three of these for each
breve (a double-whole note), which may be looked on as equivalent to the modern "measure," though it was itself a note value and a measure is not. The situation can be considered this way: it is the same as the rule by which in modern music a quarter-note may equal either two eighth-notes or three, which would be written as a "triplet." By the same reckoning, there could be two or three of the next smallest note, the "minim," (equivalent to the modern "half note") to each semibreve. These different permutations were called "perfect/imperfect tempus" at the level of the breve–semibreve relationship, "perfect/imperfect prolation" at the level of the semibreve–minim, and existed in all possible combinations with each other. Three-to-one was called "perfect," and two-to-one "imperfect." Rules existed also whereby single notes could be halved or doubled in value ("imperfected" or "altered," respectively) when preceded or followed by other certain notes. Notes with black noteheads (such as
quarter notes) occurred less often. This development of
white mensural notation may be a result of the increased use of
paper (rather than
vellum), as the weaker paper was less able to withstand the scratching required to fill in solid noteheads; notation of previous times, written on vellum, had been black. Other colors, and later, filled-in notes, were used routinely as well, mainly to enforce the aforementioned imperfections or alterations and to call for other temporary rhythmical changes.
Accidentals were not always specified, somewhat as in certain fingering notations (
tablatures) today. However, Renaissance musicians would have been highly trained in
dyadic counterpoint and thus possessed this and other information necessary to read a score, "what modern notation requires [accidentals] would then have been perfectly apparent without notation to a singer versed in counterpoint." See
musica ficta. A singer would interpret his or her part by figuring cadential formulas with other parts in mind, and when singing together musicians would avoid parallel octaves and fifths or alter their cadential parts in light of decisions by other musicians (Bent, 1998).
It is through contemporary tablatures for various plucked instruments that we have gained much information about what accidentals were performed by the original practitioners.
The English Renaissance was a
cultural and
artistic movement in
England dating from the early
16th century to the early
17th century. It is associated with the pan-European
Renaissance that many cultural historians believe originated in northern
Italy in the
fourteenth century. This era in English cultural history is sometimes referred to as "the age of
Shakespeare" or "the
Elizabethan era," taking the name of the English Renaissance's most famous author and most important monarch, respectively; however it is worth remembering that these names are rather misleading: Shakespeare was not an especially famous writer in his own time, and the English Renaissance covers a period both before and after Elizabeth's reign.
Poets such as
Edmund Spencer and
John Milton produced works that demonstrated an increased interest in understanding English Christian beliefs, such as the allegorical representation of the
Tudor Dynasty in
The Faerie Queen and the retelling of mankind’s fall from paradise in
Paradise Lost; playwrights, such as
Christopher Marlowe and
William Shakespeare, composed theatrical representations of the English take on life, death, and history. Nearing the end of the Tudor Dynasty, philosophers like Sir
Thomas More and Sir
Francis Bacon published their own ideas about humanity and the aspects of a perfect society, pushing the limits of
metacognition at that time. England came closer to reaching modern science with the
Baconian Method, a forerunner of the
Scientific Method.
The English Renaissance differs from the
Italian Renaissance in several ways. First, the dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were
literature and
music, and the
Visual arts were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which is usually considered to begin with
Dante,
Petrarch and
Giotto in the early 1300s, and was moving into
Mannerism and the Baroque by the
1550s or earlier. In contrast, the English Renaissance can only be said to begin, shakily, in the
1520s, and continued until perhaps 1620.
The Italian and English Renaissances were similar in sharing a specific
musical aesthetic. In the late
16th century Italy was the musical center of Europe, and one of the principal forms which emerged from that singular explosion of musical creativity was the
madrigal. In
1588,
Nicholas Yonge published in England the Musica transalpina—a collection of Italian madrigals "Englished"—an event which touched off a vogue of madrigal in England which was almost unmatched in the Renaissance in being an instantaneous adoption of an idea, from another country, adapted to local aesthetics. (In a delicious irony of history, a military invasion from a Catholic country—Spain—failed in that year, but a cultural invasion, from Italy, succeeded). English poetry was exactly at the right stage of development for this transplantation to occur, since forms such as the
sonnet were uniquely adapted to setting as madrigals (indeed, the sonnet was already well-developed in Italy). Composers such as
Thomas Morley, the only contemporary composer to set Shakespeare, and whose work survives, published collections of their own, roughly in the Italian manner but yet with a unique Englishness; many of the compositions of the
English Madrigal School remain in the standard repertory in the 21st century.
The colossal
polychoral productions of the
Venetian School had been anticipated in the works of
Thomas Tallis, and the
Palestrina style from the
Roman School had already been absorbed prior to the publication of Musical transalpina, in the music of masters such as
William Byrd.
While the
Classical revival led to a flourishing of Italian Renaissance architecture, architecture in Britain took a more eclectic approach.
Elizabethan architecture retained many features of the Gothic, even while the occasional building such as the tomb in the
Henry VII Lady Chapel at
Westminster Abbey, or the French-influenced architecture of Scotland showed interest in the new style.
The notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian
Jacob Burckhardt in the
nineteenth century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many
cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the northern Italian artists (
Leonardo,
Michelangelo,
Donatello) who are closely identified with the Renaissance. Indeed, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare when
Geoffrey Chaucer was working. Chaucer's popularizing of
English as a medium of literary composition rather than
Latin was only 50 years after
Dante had started using
Italian for serious poetry. At the same time
William Langland, author of
Piers Plowman, and
John Gower were also writing in English. The
Hundred Years' War and the subsequent civil war in England known as the
Wars of the Roses probably hampered artistic endeavour until the relatively peaceful and stable reign of
Elizabeth I allowed drama in particular to develop. Even during these war years, though,
Thomas Malory, author of
Le Morte D'Arthur, was a notable figure. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable;
C. S. Lewis, a professor of
Medieval and Renaissance literature at
Oxford and
Cambridge, famously remarked to a colleague that he had "discovered" that there was no English Renaissance, and that if there had been one, it had "no effect whatsoever"
Historians have also begun to consider the word "Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive
Middle Ages. Some historians have asked the question "a renaissance for whom?," pointing out, for example, that the status of women in society arguably declined during the Renaissance. Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "
early modern" for this period, a neutral term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but does not have any positive or negative connotations.
Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the
Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The key literary figures in the English Renaissance are now generally considered to be the poet
Edmund Spenser; the philosopher
Francis Bacon; the poets and playwrights
Christopher Marlowe,
William Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson; and the poet
John Milton. Sir
Thomas More is often considered one of the earliest writers of the English Renaissance.
Thomas Tallis,
Thomas Morley, and
William Byrd were the most notable English musicians of the time, and are often seen as being a part of the same artistic movement that inspired the above authors. Elizabeth herself, a product of
Renaissance humanism trained by
Roger Ascham, wrote occasional poems like
On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life
Of the life and career of the English composer John Tuder nothing is known. His works survive in two manuscripts; one secular song is preserved in a copy made in 1501, and four liturgical pieces survive in a manuscript written during the 1470s. He flourished as a composer in the second half of the fifteenth century, therefore, and his composition of works for both ecclesiastical and secular environments indicates strongly that he was employed in aristocratic service as a singing-man of the chapel of the household of some prominent member of nobility. His setting appears to have been compiled by some member of the staff of Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the years around 1475. It is a small hand-book, not a performance manuscript but some musician‘s private collection of material of interest to him. It may well be associated in some way with Robert Wydow, who was a priest of one of the chantries in Canterbury Cathedral from 1474 to 1478, and who in the latter year became the first known recipient of the degree of Bachelor of Music from Oxford University. The Lamentations survive in a manuscript now at Magdalene College, Cambridge and is part of the famous collection of Samuel Pepys.
