Musical Era
Renaissance
Polyphony matures, and instrumental music finds its voice.
Where the Medieval era ended with the first tentative steps into polyphony, the Renaissance is where that idea comes into full bloom. Composers wrote dense, interweaving vocal lines - sacred masses and motets for church, and secular madrigals for entertainment - with a new emphasis on balance and clarity between voices, echoing the same ideals of proportion that Renaissance painters and architects were chasing at the same time.
The world it came from
Most music in this period was still written for the church, and the best composers held posts as choirmasters in cathedrals, monasteries, and the private chapels of popes, kings, and dukes. Many of the most admired came from the Low Countries - present-day Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern France - and traveled across Europe, carrying their style with them.
Two big changes reshaped music in the 1500s. Printing arrived: from 1501, music could be printed from movable type, so pieces traveled faster and wider than hand-copied manuscripts ever could. And the Reformation split the Western church. Martin Luther wanted congregations to sing, in German, and his hymns (chorales) became the foundation of Protestant church music for centuries. In England, the break with Rome pushed composers toward English texts. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, debated at the Council of Trent whether elaborate polyphony made sacred words too hard to understand.
What it sounds like
The ideal was smooth, balanced polyphony: four, five, or six voices, each with its own melody, moving through the same material in turn so that no single voice dominates. Dissonance is handled carefully and resolves gently, giving the music its calm, luminous quality. Vocal music was usually sung a cappella (without instruments) or with instruments simply doubling the voices.
Composers also became more concerned with text expression - making the music fit the meaning of the words. That concern drives the madrigal, where a word like "sighing" or "flying" might get its own musical illustration, and it ultimately leads into the Baroque.
The main forms
- Mass - settings of the fixed parts of the Catholic service, the largest and most prestigious sacred form.
- Motet - a shorter sacred piece on a Latin text, often a psalm or a prayer to the Virgin Mary.
- Madrigal - a secular song for a small group of voices, one per part, usually on a love poem. It began in Italy and became a craze in Elizabethan England.
- Chanson and lute song - French songs, and English songs for solo voice with lute.
- Instrumental dances - often in pairs, such as a slow pavane followed by a quick galliard.
Instruments
This is also the period when instrumental music starts to stand on its own, rather than simply doubling or accompanying singers. Dances, and pieces written specifically for viols, lutes, and early keyboard instruments, begin appearing as genuine repertoire in their own right. A Renaissance ensemble might include viols (fretted, bowed string instruments), recorders, the reedy shawm, the sackbut (an early trombone), the lute, and keyboards such as the organ and early harpsichord.
Composers to know
These are the names that matter most. Those with their own pages on this site are linked, and appear again with the era's other composers further down this page:
- Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397 – 1474) - the leading composer of the early Renaissance.
- Josquin des Prez (c. 1450 – 1521) - the most celebrated composer of his time, admired for his expressive, beautifully balanced writing.
- Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525 – 1594) - his serene, flowing church music became the textbook model of Renaissance polyphony.
- Orlande de Lassus (1532 – 1594) - wrote over 2,000 works in every genre of the day.
- Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 – 1585) and William Byrd (c. 1540 – 1623) - the giants of English church music.
- Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 – 1611) - the great Spanish composer of intense, devotional sacred music.
- John Dowland (1563 – 1626) - the master of the melancholy English lute song.
Into the Baroque
By the late 1500s, some composers were pushing harmony and expression to extremes - Carlo Gesualdo's madrigals use startling, chromatic dissonance. In Venice, Giovanni Gabrieli wrote dazzling music for multiple choirs and brass placed around St Mark's Basilica, and in Florence a group of intellectuals began experimenting with a single expressive vocal line over simple accompaniment. That experiment produced opera, and with it the Baroque era. Claudio Monteverdi, whose career spans both eras, is the bridge.
Where to start listening: a madrigal collection (Monteverdi's early books are a good entry point) shows off the era's combination of intricate vocal writing and real emotional expression in the text. For sacred music, try Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli, or Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium
- a single motet for forty independent voices, one of the most astonishing sounds in all of choral music.