THE GREAT COMPOSERS
written by Wendy Thompson
published by Hermes House
starting with the Middle Ages (5th-15th centuries)
to the Renaissance (14th-17th centuries)...
Music Sets #301-319
(L) Renaissance dances
(R) History of music - from Ancient Greece to Renaissance
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Sacred music and secular (non-religious) music were the two main genres of Western music during the Middle Ages and Renaissance era.
Sacred music: music in the Middle Ages was largely the preserve of the church.
The oldest written examples of secular music are songs with Latin lyrics. However, many secular songs were sung in the vernacular language, unlike the sacred songs that followed the Latin (or Greek) language of the Church.
These earliest types were known as the chanson de geste (song of deeds) and were popular amongst the traveling jongleurs and minstrels of the time.
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Polyphony
Polyphony is a texture (melodic+rhythmic+harmonic) consisting of independent melodic voices, as opposed to
* monophony (music with just one voice) or
* homophony (music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords).
Guillaume de Machaut (Music Set #303) had many innovations included being the first to write music in four parts (voices).
Polyphony has 3 main formats:
(1) Counterpoint - voices that are harmonically interdependent, but independent in rhythm and contour. (Click to hear an example.)
It has been most common in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in Baroque music.
(2) Canon - a counterpoint technique that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration (e.g. quarter rest, one measure, etc.)
The initial melody is called the leader (or dux), while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower (or comes).
Pachelbel's Canon is a good example, which has 3 voices engaged in canon, [plus an independent 4th voice called the basso continuo that was introduced in the Barogue period].
(3) Fugue - is a counterpoint technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.
The term fugue originated from Latin, which is related to both "to flee" and "to chase".
- In the Middle Ages, the term was widely used to denote any works in canon style
- By the Renaissance, it had come to denote specifically imitative works
- Since the 17th century, it described the procedure of imitative counterpoint.
Source: Wikipedia.
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| Musical Entertainment - Sebastiano Florigerio (1500–c.1560, Italian) - oil on canvas (91x117 cm) 1530s-40s - Bavarian State Painting Collections (Munich) |
“Along with new secular forms of song in the 16th century, instrument music was more frequently copied down than it had been in the Middle Ages.
“The Renaissance saw more and more of the merchant classes in the performance of music; the invention of music printing by Petrucci in 1501 meant that music could be sold and distributed more easily, cheaply, and reliably than ever before, though much was still in written form. Wealthy patrons of the 16th century demanded vocal and instrumental music for all sorts of combinations.
“Dances such as the stately pavan and the gilliard became enormously popular. Secular vocal music was written in vernacular languages and very often had an amorous subject. The madrigal rose to prominence in the 16th century .....
“To compose and write down music, one had to be musically literate to some degree, especially for the composition of polyphony. People who received an education were usually church [people] or part of the nobility. During the Renaissance, the merchant classes value an education for their sons and, to some extent, daughters.”
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| The Female Musicians - unknown Netherlandish painter - oil on panel (60 × 53 cm) c.1530 - Schlossmuseum Rohrau, Austria |
“The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century had inevitable musical consequences, largely because the Protestant reformers destroyed as much Catholic music as possible and replaced it with new, more direct styles, particularly in England. This made extraordinary demands of English composers of the period, for instance, Thomas Tallis.
“The simplest post-Reformation religious polyphony involved straightforward chanting in harmony, all voices moving together in the same rhythm as one another (homophony).
“Other polyphonic musical forms were contrapuntal. The idea of a musical texture where voices imitated one another in counterpoint became a distinguished feature of sacred and secular music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.”
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