The Renaissance
1400-1600
Rebirth
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRmkj19i4Yk
• The Renaissance – the name given to the complex motion
of thought that created drastic changes from the 15th
through 16th centuries.
• Began in Italy as they hoped to bring back their fruitful
past.
• Politically there was not much change. There was still
conflict between city-states.
• Revival of new culture powered a model for new values.
• The age of Columbus and Magellan (South East Asia, first
circumnavigation of the earth). Leonardo da Vinci
(invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music,
mathematics, engineering) and Shakespeare.
Rebirth
• Renaissance guided a growing world with the values of
human beings and nature.
• Accordingly, artists made their work more relevant to
the needs of people.
• Had a brighter vision for the development of art.
Wanted to take music to where it had not gone before.
• Medieval art:
https://lookatittiswayvc.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/
6018150838_a1abc036a3_z.jpg
• Renaissance
art:http://www.artble.com/imgs/9/b/3/416525/birth_
of_venus.jpg
New attitudes
• Plainchant – Why keep the same ol’ boring melody.
Let’s make it better!
• Found plainchant to be guidelines, not rock-solid
melodies.
• When they used a plainchant, the act of modifying it
through embellishing rhythms and smoothing out
awkward intervals was called paraphrase.
• With this paraphrase, the chant melodies were given
more grace. Why hide them in the tenor line? They
were given to the sopranos to make it stick out.
Early Homophony
• 15th century, rebirth of composed homophony
– music in a harmonic texture.
• Independence in polyphonic voices vanishes
because composers moved to form simple
chords.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwvcvjQ
7KO8
Guillaume Dufay
• Born in Northern France (1400-1475)
• Worked in Italy for 25 years, where he became
acquainted with artists and thinkers of the
renaissance.
• Along with those thinkers, he grew to know
the royalty that supported them.
• Became a local celebrity at the French
cathedral of Cambrai.
“Ave Maris Stella”
• A homophonic setting of a Gregorian hymn; one of the
most tuneful plainchant genres.
• Addressed to the virgin Mary and was sung on many special
feasts in her honor.
• “Hail, star of the sea, Nurturing Mother of God, And ever
Virgin, Our blessed port to Heaven.”
• Dufay sets this so that not each stanza is his music. Every
other is a plainchant melody.
• Gives the listener ease of understanding how he
embellished the plainchant.
• For each of his stanzas, he writes in a strophic style; same
music, new text.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAQ2pBXZ6GU
The Mass
• Used to be made up of nothing but
plainchant…boring.
• Where now, by the 1450’s, composers began
to write chansons, translated from French for
“songs”, to create the mass.
• For the first time, compositions were made to
last, and make sense, from 20 to 30 minutes.
• Now taken as works of art rather than solely
used for the Church.
Parts of the mass
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Kyrie: Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy
Gloria: Glory to God in the Highest
Credo: I believe in one God, the Father almighty
Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts
Angus Dei: Lamb of God…Have mercy on us
All these works were an incredible leap forward in
musical development. Think about the symphony today
and what makes up that masterful work of art. This
was the mass in the 15th century.
• Here is an example of Renaissance Gloria text setting.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUiYFNIIl8s
High Renaissance Style
• Essentially a great change in style of the
Renaissance era.
• Beginning of 16th century began the blend of
two vocal techniques.
• Imitative counterpoint and homophony.
Imitation
• 1500-1600: Most polyphony was most was imitative.
• Reflects ideas of balance. Part interacting with each other
and playing off each other’s motives.
• How do they do this?
• One voice enters with the set text and motif. Soon another
voice enters with the same motif but at a different pitch
level.
• Meanwhile, old voices continue with new melodies that
compliment the later voices.
• Each voice has its own melodic quality. Think polyphony.
• Josquin Deprez – Missa Pange lingua
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlB1HR4BgUg
High Renaissance Homophony
• Composers once again focus on the horizontal more than the vertical.
• Chordal sonorities were once again secondary while the focused more on
the distinction of separate voice parts.
• What they achieved: a rich chordal quality, while still producing
polyphonic lines that achieve independence.
• Was this completely pure homophony?
• No.
• Why?
• I’ll tell you why.
• They were still independent lines that could stand alone.
• However, some composers used passages built off of “block chords”
• But they were able to use homophony for both a contrast to imitative
texture, as well as an expressive resource.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yi2MMtIimY
Other characteristics
• Ideal tone color of this time comes from
unaccompanied music.
• Tempo and dynamics don’t change too much.
• Rhythm is fluid with no real accents so that
the meter is not obscured.
• Melodies never make up a very large range in
any one voice.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRPEJko
Estc
Josquin Desprez
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First major composer of the High renaissance.
Born in northern France (1450-1521).
Also travelled early to Italy like Dufay.
He lived the life. His patrons were big name folk
like Pope Alexander VI and Louis XII of France.
• “Miserere Mei Deus”
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pBEHBXm
Kk
New Thoughts
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What is the point of music?
Why is there text?
Why is there music?
High Renaissance composers said we can make music
better and depict our emotions.
• Words express feelings, and music enhances words.
Let’s do what we are able to do!
• Late Renaissance composers were guided by the idea
of musical expression.
• Became more in tune with what words they were
singing.
How did they do this?
• 1. They strove for an accurate declamation of
the text – rhythms and melodies are accurate
to speech.
• A lessening of mellismatic text.
• The renaissance was the first era when words
were set to music naturally, clearly, and
vividly.
How did they do this?
• 2. Word painting
• Composers matched their music to the meaning of the
words that were being set.
• Examples: Heaven – High, Earth – Low, Fly – many notes
• And not just particular words would effect music. Words
like grief and torment bring upon dissonanace and
chromaticism.
• Silly silly word painting – Italian word of Eyes – “Occhi” set
as two different notes. Cheesy.
• Thomas Weelkes - As Vesta was from Latmos Hill
Descending, p. 87
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGTB1q2yEhQ
Give it a shot!
• Try writing your own text painting to the text
below.
• “Let every mountain and hill made low; the
crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”
Late Renaissance
• High Renaissance released an outburst of new
technical flavor.
• However, it have Late Renaissance composers
the flexibility to do new things with it all the
way through the 16th century.
• Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, and
William Byrd are all composers of the late
Renaissance style.
Palestrina
• 1525 – 1594
• A singer in many of Rome’s churches and chapels. Also the
director in some.
• Made music in the Sistine Chapel. Important guy.
• In his youth, he wrote many secular pieces, which were
widely popular.
• However, he later recanted and apologized for them as he
found his faith.
• Later wrote hundreds of masses.
• Example of his work. O Magnum Mysterium. We heard
Victoria’s setting of this text earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1QjkhENZg8
Sticking it to the man
• Because singing is so powerful in religion,
societies have felt the need to control it; they
don’t want composers going overboard.
• The counter-reformation was a movement that
helped limit the power of musicians in church
services.
• Because Palestrina is great, he was able to
convince the Pope that he could still make words
be clearly heard with a complex polyphonic style.
• For this, he because the most revered
renaissance composer for later centuries.
Pope Marcellus Mass
• The piece that convinced the Pope to let Palestrina do his
thing.
• Contrast: Josquin vs. Palestrina. Palestrina has much more
homophony. Only the last line really employs pure
polyphony.
• Palestrina uses more voices. 6 rather than 4. Alternates
between choirs. Ex. High voices answered by low voices.
• Palestrina uses the rich shift of tone colors and harmonies
to convey his message set by the counter-reformation.
• Josquin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1wlcC_cn-c
• Palestrina http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIvs7C2nW88
The Renaissance Motet
• 16th century motet is a short composition of Latin
words. Made up of short sections of homophony and
high renaissance imitative polyphony.
• Text is nearly always religious.
• Compared to the mass, they were pretty similar in
musical style. Different in length.
• Having texts not directly taken from the Mass,
composers were able to have more of a variety.
• William Byrd – Listen for text not in the mass. Similar
sound and tone color to the mass set by Palestrina.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ElPSsjf1E
Italian Madrigal
• Created ca. 1530. New secular type of musical work.
• A short composition set to a one-stanza poem. Made
up of many different ideas and texts, many of love.
• Ideally sung by one singer per part. Used in an intimate
setting.
• Musical outline is similar to High Renaissance sacred
works such as Masses and motets.
• Continued the tradition of imitation and word painting.
• Palestrina – Sicut Cervis
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBBqvh0FyhI
Italian Madrigal
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Come Again, Sweet Love
Madrigal that speaks of love and “delight”
Text painting. Ascending line…
Come again! sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yDjjzpYL98