Renaissance music

Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance.

Consensus among music historians—with notable dissent —has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1550, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as understood in other disciplines.

As in the other arts, the music of the period is significantly influenced by the developments that define the Early Modern period: the rise of humanistic thought; the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of ancient Greece and Rome; increased innovation and discovery; the growth of commercial enterprise; the rise of a bourgeois class; and the Protestant Reformation.

From this changing society emerges a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school.The invention of the Gutenberg press makes distribution of music and musical theory possible on a wide scale.

Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class.

Dissemination of chansons, motets, and masses throughout Europe coincide with the unification of polyphonic practice into the fluid style that culminates in the second half of the sixteenth century in the work of composers such as Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus.

Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, along with a flourishing system of music education in the area's many churches and cathedrals, allowed the training of hundreds of singers and composers.

These musicians are highly sought throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, where churches and aristocratic courts hire them as composers and teachers.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Italy has absorbed the northern influences, with Venice, Rome, and other cities being centers of musical activity, reversing the situation from a hundred years earlier.Music, increasingly freed from medieval constraints, in range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation, became a vehicle for new personal expression.

Composers find ways to make music expressive of the texts they are setting.

Secular music absorbs techniques from sacred music, and vice versa.

Popular secular forms such as the chanson and madrigal spread throughout Europe.

Courts employ virtuoso performers, both singers and instrumentalists.

Music also becomes more self-sufficient with its availability in printed form, existing for its own sake.

Many familiar modern instruments (including the violin, guitar, lute and keyboard instruments), develop into new forms during the Renaissance responding to the evolution of musical ideas, presenting further possibilities for composers and musicians to explore.

Modern woodwind and brass instruments like the bassoon and trombone also appear; extending the range of sonic color and power.

During the fifteenth century the sound of full triads becomes common, and towards the end of the sixteenth century the system of church modes begins to break down entirely, giving way to the functional tonality which is to dominate western art music for the next three centuries.From the Renaissance era both secular and sacred music survives in quantity, and both vocal and instrumental.

An enormous diversity of musical styles and genres flourished during the Renaissance, and can be heard on commercial recordings in the twenty-first century, including masses, motets, madrigals, chansons, accompanied songs, instrumental dances, and many others.

Numerous early music ensembles specializing in music of the period give concert tours and make recordings, using a wide range of interpretive styles.

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