Chapter 13 -- Secular Renaissance Music

Illustration 1: Song for Voice and Lute by Thomas Morley (image courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library and Petrucci Music Library)

Musical notation is highly complex and while it makes use of only a few symbols, a great many rules and situations govern how it is written. Because it was so complicated, music wasn't directly benefited by Gutenberg's invention. It wasn't until the era of the personal computer before the notation of music was truly revolutionized. This revolution didn't involve a change of rules as much as a system that could handle all of the available rules and the exceptions.

However, if it didn't come it at the head of the race in the Renaissance, it certainly reached the finish line on the coattails of the literacy revolution.

The earliest printing of music came about just after 1500--prior to that it was all copied by hand.

A byproduct of mass reproduction is a standardization of the language or communication medium. Within a century of the first printed music, the system of notation had evolved and become standardized to where it is very similar to what we have now. However, without the process of movable type and the ripple effect of increased literacy and the upward mobility of the Middle class, music wouldn't have taken off in the direction that it did.

That upward mobility included a lifestyle with disposable income, with leisure time, and the ability to learn to read and write. That also included musical literacy.

The first music printed was a popular form of vocal music called the "madrigal". A madrigal is a short composition that set a piece of poetry to music. Usually written for a number of voices, the lyrics of many of the songs spoke of love, death, life and philosophical observations. They used imitation (similar to the exposition of a fugue where one voice will sing a phrase and other voices will successively sing the same line or a variant of it) and text painting (where the composer will have a vocal line shaped to follow what it is literally expressing: for example, a phrase with the word 'death' may well have a slowly descending melody line, while a phrase with the words 'rise up' will have the melody go upward).

The first madrigals were composed in Italy by Marenzio, Gesualdo, and Monteverdi of these are in a style called mannerist after a bold affected style of Renaissance painting. They have highly unsual harmonies for the time (for that matter, for almost any time) and tried to be more emotionally unrestrained.

Illustration 2: Mannerism, as explained by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC As the mindset of the Renaissance spread throughout Europe, it eventually reached England where the madrigal hit its high point. Some of the best (and most well known madrigals) were composed by William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes, and Thomas Morley.

Madrigals also had an additional distinction: they were composed not for the ruling class, not for the church and the clergy, but for members of the Middle Class. This was the first time in Western history anything like that had ever happened.

The middle class had to gain some serious financial clout for this to occur--at the expense of the monarchy and the Church. Let's look briefly at the causes and changes that took place.

a) Workers became scarce as a result of the massive casualties from the Black Plague b) Wealth became more concentrated in the family members that survived c) Humanism began in Western culture, focusing on the pleasures of the present as opposed to the reward of the afterlife d) There was more of an opportunity to enjoy the pleasures of life e) The Protestant Reformation which weakened the power of the Catholic Church f) A relatively new low-cost printing material to appear on the scene--paper g) Movable type permitted the growth of literacy by increasing the amount of books h) Being able to read when there was nothing to read was a useless talent--it was no longer useless i) Literacy--and musical literacy--became important parts of the lifestyle of the Middle Class j) An economic situation where income could be made from printing music k) Ditto building musical instruments, because. . . l) . . . people could afford them and the printed music and have sufficient leisure time to take advantage of them

The Middle Class had to be able to read and write—that in and of itself is a profound change. They had to have a lifestyle where survival wasn't such an all-consuming task that they were able to have leisure time. They had to have a disposable income to be able to afford the music and the instruments to play it on.

Mass reproduction of music would only have made sense when there was a broader market base: in an era where the major consumers were a (very) few monarchies and a very small number of churches, printing would have been far more trouble than it was worth.

They had to have a philosophy that permitted them to experience some of the luxuries of existence and not focus entirely on the afterlife.

As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the wealthy banking family the Medicis supported artists and ideas in Florence, Italy. It was a model for the rebirth of many disciplines in the Renaissance. It was a time of reaching out to different countries and different time periods for knowledge and inspiration.

It was a game changer.

As noted earlier, the printing of music also had an important ripple effect on the entire field: a need for standardization.

In the unit on notation, we saw several important parameters develop in the Renaissance--dynamics, tempo, and tone color. Why would someone need to invent them if he could just tell the musicians how loud, how fast, and what to play? Or do it himself?

That may well reveal the answer--it was not a given that the composer was the performer or was even in the general area. It was a sign that music was branching out as a salable commodity. The composer likely also had a little more stake in his personal reputation (foreshadowing things to come).

There is very little surviving instrumental Medieval music. There is a great deal more in the Renaissance (although the overwhelming majority of music composed was still sacred).

Several families of instruments appeared with a number of member spanning ranges from low to high, analogous to the family of voice ranges of singers.

Ensembles of these instruments—known as consorts—became common and there is music specifically composed for those instruments. Those instruments included consorts of viols (a bowed string instrument that is a forerunner of the violin family), recorders (wooden ancestors of the modern flute), krummhorns (a double reed). The virginal (ancestor of the harpsichord) was a common instrument and there are many surviving manuscripts of virginal music. A large body of purely instrumental secular music survives, much of it being dance music. Many of the song forms, including ballads crossed over from the Middle Ages. In instrumental music, we don't yet see large scale forms similar to a symphony (the nature of the Mass Ordinary as a program was a step in that direction), but there were instrumental suites composed. A suite is a collection of short movements (often based around common dances of the era).

Illustration 3: Krummhorn and recorder, two staples of Renaissance instrumental music

Around 1600 a composer by the name of Jacopo Peri began an ambitious setting of the text of a classical Greek play in a number of vocal episodes. Peri's works--known by the Latin of the word "works"--opera--would set in motion a musical style that would represent a profound change of musical style that would cause historians to mark as the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of a new musical era.