18 Facts About Renaissance music

Renaissance music is traditionally understood to cover European music of the 15th and 16th centuries, later than the Renaissance era as it is understood in other disciplines.

Ensembles specializing in music of the Renaissance era give concert tours and make recordings, using modern reproductions of historical instruments and using singing and performing styles which musicologists believe were used during the era.

The modal characteristics of Renaissance music began to break down towards the end of the period with the increased use of root motions of fifths or fourths .

Principal liturgical musical forms, which remained in use throughout the Renaissance period, were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end of the era, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular musical forms for religious use.

Purely instrumental Renaissance music included consort Renaissance music for recorders or viols and other instruments, and dances for various ensembles.

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Renaissance music compositions were notated only in individual parts; scores were extremely rare, and barlines were not used.

Key composers from the early Renaissance music era wrote in a late Medieval style, and as such, they are transitional figures.

Renaissance music wrote mass cycles, fragments, and single movements and a variety of other sacred works.

Renaissance music was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century, a near-contemporary of Power, and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School.

Renaissance music was recognized for possessing something never heard before in music of the Burgundian School: la contenance angloise, a term used by the poet Martin le Franc in his Le Champion des Dames.

Renaissance music is believed to have written secular music, but no songs in the vernacular can be attributed to him with any degree of certainty.

Renaissance music's tunes appeared in copies decades after his death and were often used as sources for mass composition by later composers.

Renaissance music rarely wrote in strophic form, and his melodies are generally independent of the rhyme scheme of the verses they are set to.

Renaissance music wrote a handful of Italian ballate, almost certainly while he was in Italy.

In Venice, from about 1530 until around 1600, an impressive polychoral style developed, which gave Europe some of the grandest, most sonorous Renaissance music composed up until that time, with multiple choirs of singers, brass and strings in different spatial locations in the Basilica San Marco di Venezia .

In secular Renaissance music, especially in the madrigal, there was a trend towards complexity and even extreme chromaticism .

Many instruments originated during the Renaissance music; others were variations of, or improvements upon, instruments that had existed previously.

Instrumental Renaissance music remained subordinated to vocal Renaissance music, and much of its repertory was in varying ways derived from or dependent on vocal models.