Transition from Renaissance to Baroque in instrumental music
Encyclopedia
In the years centering around 1600 in Europe, several distinct shifts emerged in ways of thinking about the purposes, writing and performance of music. Partly these changes were revolutionary, deliberately instigated by a group of intellectuals in Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 known as the Camerata
Florentine Camerata
The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama...

, and partly they were evolutionary, in that precursors of the new Baroque
Baroque music
Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...

 style can be found far back in the Renaissance
Renaissance music
Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

, and the changes merely built on extant forms and practices. The transitions emanated from the cultural centers of northern Italy
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 13th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe...

, then spread to Rome, France
Early Modern France
Kingdom of France is the early modern period of French history from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th century...

 and Germany
German Renaissance
The German Renaissance, part of the Northern Renaissance, was a cultural and artistic movement that spread among German thinkers in the 15th and 16th centuries, which originated from the Italian Renaissance in Italy...

, and lastly reached England
English Renaissance
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century; like most of northern...

. In terms of instrumental music, shifts in four discrete areas can be observed: idiomatic writing, texture, instrument use and orchestration.

Instrumentation

One key distinction between Renaissance and Baroque instrumental music is in instrumentation
Instrumentation (music)
In music, instrumentation refers to the particular combination of musical instruments employed in a composition, and to the properties of those instruments individually...

; that is, the ways in which instruments are used or not used in a particular work. Closely tied to this concept is the idea of idiomatic writing, for if composers are unaware of or indifferent to the idiomatic capabilities of different instruments, then they will have little reason to specify which instruments they desire.

Specified instrumentation

According to David Schulenberg, Renaissance composers did not as a general rule specify which instruments were to play which part; in any given piece, "each part [was] playable on any instrument whose range encompassed that of the part." Nor were they necessarily concerned with individual instrumental sonorities or even aware of idiomatic instrumental capabilities. The concept of writing a quartet specifically for sackbut
Sackbut
The sackbut is a trombone from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, i.e., a musical instrument in the brass family similar to the trumpet except characterised by a telescopic slide with which the player varies the length of the tube to change pitches, thus allowing them to obtain chromaticism, as...

s or a sextet for rackett
Rackett
The rackett is a Renaissance-era double reed wind instrument.There are several sizes of rackett, in a family ranging from soprano to great bass. Relative to their pitch, racketts are quite small . This is achieved through its ingenious construction...

s, for instance, was apparently a foreign one to Renaissance composers. Thus, one might deduce that little instrumental music per se was written in the Renaissance, with the chief repertoire of instruments consisting of borrowed vocal music.

Howard Brown, while acknowledging the importance of vocal transcriptions in Renaissance instrumental repertoire, has identified six categories of specifically instrumental music in the sixteenth century:
  1. vocal music
    Vocal music
    Vocal music is a genre of music performed by one or more singers, with or without instrumental accompaniment, in which singing provides the main focus of the piece. Music which employs singing but does not feature it prominently is generally considered instrumental music Vocal music is a genre of...

     played on instruments
  2. settings of preexisting melodies, such as plainchant or popular songs
  3. variation sets
  4. ricercar
    Ricercar
    A ricercar is a type of late Renaissance and mostly early Baroque instrumental composition. The term means to search out, and many ricercars serve a preludial function to "search out" the key or mode of a following piece...

    s, fantasia
    Fantasia (music)
    The fantasia is a musical composition with its roots in the art of improvisation. Because of this, it seldom approximates the textbook rules of any strict musical form ....

    s, and canzona
    Canzona
    In the 16th century an instrumental chanson; later, a piece for ensemble in several sections or tempos...

    s
  5. prelude
    Prelude (music)
    A prelude is a short piece of music, the form of which may vary from piece to piece. The prelude can be thought of as a preface. It may stand on its own or introduce another work...

    s, preambles, and toccata
    Toccata
    Toccata is a virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or plucked string instrument featuring fast-moving, lightly fingered or otherwise virtuosic passages or sections, with or without imitative or fugal interludes, generally emphasizing the dexterity of the performer's fingers...

    s
  6. music for solo voice and lute
    Lute
    Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....



While the first three could easily be performed vocally, the last three are clearly instrumental in nature, suggesting that even in the sixteenth century composers were writing with specifically instrumental capabilities in mind, as opposed to vocal. In contention of composers' supposed indifference to instrumental timbres, Brown has also pointed out that as early as 1533, Pierre Attaignant was already marking some vocal arrangements as more suitable for certain groups of like instruments
Consort of instruments
A consort of instruments was a phrase used in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to indicate an instrumental ensemble. These could be of the same or a variety of instruments. Consort music enjoyed considerable popularity at court and in households of the wealthy in the...

 than for others. Furthermore, Count Giovanni de' Bardi
Giovanni de' Bardi
Giovanni de' Bardi , Count of Vernio, was an Italian literary critic, writer, composer and soldier.- Biography :Giovanni de' Bardi was born in Florence....

, host of a gathering of prominent 1580s scholars and artists known as the Florentine Camerata
Florentine Camerata
The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama...

, was demonstrably aware of the timbral effects of different instruments and regarded different instruments as being suited to expressing particular moods.

Idiomatic writing

In the absence of idiomatic writing in the sixteenth century, characteristic instrumental effects may have been improvised in performance. On the other hand, idiomatic writing may have stemmed from virtuosic
Virtuoso
A virtuoso is an individual who possesses outstanding technical ability in the fine arts, at singing or playing a musical instrument. The plural form is either virtuosi or the Anglicisation, virtuosos, and the feminine form sometimes used is virtuosa...

 improvised ornamentation on a vocal line – to the point that such playing became more idiomatic of the instrument than of the voice.

In the early Baroque, these melodic embellishments that had been improvised in the Renaissance began to be incorporated into compositions as standardized melodic gestures. With the Baroque's emphasis on a soloist as virtuoso, the range of pitches and characteristic techniques formerly found only in virtuosic improvisation, as well as the first dynamic markings, were now written as the expected standard. On the other hand, some of the instrumental genres listed above, such as the prelude, toccata, and intonation, were improvisation-based to begin with. Even in the early sixteenth century, these genres were truly, idiomatically instrumental; they could not be adapted for voices because they were not composed in a consistent polyphonic style.

Thus, idiomatic instrumental effects were present in Renaissance performance, if not in writing. By the early Baroque, however, they had clearly found their way into writing when composers began specifying desired instrumentation, notably Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...

 in his opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 scores.

Texture

Another crucial distinction between Renaissance and Baroque writing is its texture: the shift from contrapuntal
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

 polyphony
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....

, in which all voices are theoretically equal, to monody
Monody
In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....

 and treble-bass polarity, along with the development of basso continuo. In this new style of writing, solo melody and bass line accompaniment were now the important lines, with the inner voices filling in harmonies.

The application of this principle to instrumental writing was partly an extension of the forces of change in vocal writing stemming from the Florentine Camerata and their head Count Giovanni de' Bardi, who deliberately sought to change the way music was written, and adopted an overarching goal of a music renascence. In a c.
Circa
Circa , usually abbreviated c. or ca. , means "approximately" in the English language, usually referring to a date...

 1580 letter to Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini
Giulio Caccini , also known as Giulio Romano, was an Italian composer, teacher, singer, instrumentalist and writer of the very late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. He was one of the founders of the genre of opera, and one of the single most influential creators of the new Baroque style...

, a composer and member of the Camerata, Bardi decried counterpoint's obscuring of the text in vocal settings and advocates a return to the music of the ancient Greeks
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, which he believed consisted of a single singing line and simple accompaniment, allowing direct, intelligible expression of the text. He instructed Caccini to "make it your chief aim to arrange the verse well and to declaim the words as intelligibly as you can." While Bardi's letter dealt with vocal music, the principle of a single, clear melody dominating a simple accompaniment easily carries over to the instrumental realm. This is seen in the proliferation of hitherto unknown solo instrumental sonatas beginning shortly after Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche in 1601.

The rise of instrumental monody did not have its roots exclusively in vocal music. In part, it was based on the extant sixteenth-century practice of performing polyphonic madrigal
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....

s with one voice singing the treble line, while the others were played by instruments or by a single keyboard instrument. Thus, while all voices were still theoretically equal in these polyphonic compositions, in practice the listener would have heard one voice as being a melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

 and the others as accompaniment
Accompaniment
In music, accompaniment is the art of playing along with an instrumental or vocal soloist or ensemble, often known as the lead, in a supporting manner...

. Furthermore, the new musical genres that appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, especially the instrumental sonata, revealed a transition in ways of thinking about composition and performance, from a collaboration of equals to a soloist backed up by a relatively unimportant accompaniment. In addition, even in the mid sixteenth century, most works for voice and lute were conceived specifically as such. In the realm of English ayres, for instance, this meant that composers such as John Dowland
John Dowland
John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, singer, and lutenist. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep" , "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe" and "In darkness let me dwell", but his instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and has...

 and Adrian LeRoy
Adrian LeRoy
Adrian LeRoy is a Canadian soccer player who currently plays for FC Edmonton in the North American Soccer League.-College and Amateur:...

 were already thinking of a dichotomous melody and bass, filled in not with counterpoint but with chords "planned for harmonic effect."

Instrument use and aesthetics

A third major difference between Renaissance and Baroque music lies in which instruments were favored and used in performance. This is directly related to a larger shift in musical aesthetics
Aesthetics of music
Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic sub-discipline is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant...

, again stemming chiefly from the Florentine Camerata. In his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, Vincenzo Galilei
Vincenzo Galilei
Vincenzo Galilei was an Italian lutenist, composer, and music theorist, and the father of the famous astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei and of the lute virtuoso and composer Michelagnolo Galilei...

, like Bardi, lauds the music of the Greeks, convinced that their music had "virtuous and wonderful effects" on listeners, while saying that modern composers did not know how to "express the conceptions of the mind [or] how to impress them with the greatest possible effectiveness on the minds of the listeners." The idea that music could and ought to move or impress listeners
Doctrine of the affections
The doctrine of the affections, also known as the doctrine of affects, doctrine of the passions, theory of the affects, or by the German term Affektenlehre was a theory in musical aesthetics popular in the Baroque era...

 and provoke certain archetypal
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...

 emotional states evidenced a change in thinking about music. This went hand-in-hand with the transition from polyphony to monody discussed above, for a solo instrument or pair of instruments would ideally be not only be the sole melodic vehicle but also be capable of "impressing [the listeners] with the greatest possible effectiveness."

This necessarily led to a change in the types of instruments that were preferred by composers, for many instruments of the Renaissance were greatly limited in pitch range, being designed only to play a discreet role in a consort, as well as in dynamic scope. Entire families of instruments, such as rackett
Rackett
The rackett is a Renaissance-era double reed wind instrument.There are several sizes of rackett, in a family ranging from soprano to great bass. Relative to their pitch, racketts are quite small . This is achieved through its ingenious construction...

s and shawm
Shawm
The shawm was a medieval and Renaissance musical instrument of the woodwind family made in Europe from the 12th century until the 17th century. It was developed from the oriental zurna and is the predecessor of the modern oboe. The body of the shawm was usually turned from a single piece of wood,...

s, were unsuited to carrying a solo melodic line with brilliance and expressivity because they were incapable of dynamic variation, and fell into disuse or at best provided color in string-dominated ensembles. The low instruments of the woodwind consort
Consort of instruments
A consort of instruments was a phrase used in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to indicate an instrumental ensemble. These could be of the same or a variety of instruments. Consort music enjoyed considerable popularity at court and in households of the wealthy in the...

s were all but abandoned. Even in the string family, members of the viol family – except for the bass viol, which provided the necessary basso continuo – were gradually replaced by the new and highly virtuosic violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

. The lute and viola da gamba continued being written for in an accompanimental role but could not compete with the violin in volume. The shawm was replaced by the oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...

, which had a more refined sound and was capable of dynamic nuance. The cornett
Cornett
The cornett, cornetto or zink is an early wind instrument, dating from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. It was used in what are now called alta capellas or wind ensembles. It is not to be confused with the trumpet-like instrument cornet.-Construction:There are three basic types of...

, which in the Renaissance tended to function as the soprano member of the sackbut family, survived in the early seventeenth century as a solo instrument, even having a large repertoire rivaling that of the violin, but eventually disappeared as well. However, Renaissance instruments did not vanish from use quickly; contemporary references indicate such instruments survived in chamber or military contexts well throughout the seventeenth century and even into the eighteenth.

As a general rule, however, one can see in the Baroque an overwhelming preference for those instruments that were capable of carrying a melodic line alone: those that were louder and higher, that could achieve a variety of dynamics, and that lent themselves to virtuosic display and emotional expression, none of which the Renaissance instruments were designed to do. Lower-pitched instruments, those that could not vary dynamics, or those that were cumbersome, were deprecated. Thus, the supremacy of melody in the Baroque mind had wide-reaching consequences in the instrumental choices made by composers and makers.

Orchestration

A change between Renaissance and Baroque styles can also be discerned in the realm of orchestration
Orchestration
Orchestration is the study or practice of writing music for an orchestra or of adapting for orchestra music composed for another medium...

, or instrumental groupings. As has been discussed above, instruments in the sixteenth century were grouped together in like-instrument families called consorts. With the exception of keyboards
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...

 and lutes, all instruments were conceived and built this way, from racket
Rackett
The rackett is a Renaissance-era double reed wind instrument.There are several sizes of rackett, in a family ranging from soprano to great bass. Relative to their pitch, racketts are quite small . This is achieved through its ingenious construction...

s to recorders to sackbut
Sackbut
The sackbut is a trombone from the Renaissance and Baroque eras, i.e., a musical instrument in the brass family similar to the trumpet except characterised by a telescopic slide with which the player varies the length of the tube to change pitches, thus allowing them to obtain chromaticism, as...

s to crumhorn
Crumhorn
The crumhorn is a musical instrument of the woodwind family, most commonly used during the Renaissance period. In modern times, there has been a revival of interest in Early Music, and crumhorns are being played again....

s to viol
Viol
The viol is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed musical instruments developed in the mid-late 15th century and used primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The family is related to and descends primarily from the Renaissance vihuela, a plucked instrument that preceded the...

s. As the century went on, mixed consorts of unlike instruments also became common, at times growing into large wind bands.
Regardless of the type of ensemble, a heterogeneous texture prevailed in these ensembles and in the works they played; each member of the ensemble had a distinct part in the texture, which they played through from beginning to end. In the late sixteenth century, however, Andrea
Andrea Gabrieli
Andrea Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. The uncle of the somewhat more famous Giovanni Gabrieli, he was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as...

 and Giovanni Gabrieli
Giovanni Gabrieli
Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.-Biography:Gabrieli was born in Venice...

 at St. Mark's cathedral in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

 began experimenting with placing diverse group of performers – instrumental and vocal – in antiphonal locations around the vast interior of the church, in what became known as cori spezzati
Venetian polychoral style
The Venetian polychoral style was a type of music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras which involved spatially separate choirs singing in alternation...

, divided choirs.

Such music allowed for highly dramatic effects, with sudden shifts in volume, articulation, timbre and texture, for not all of the choirs were the same size, and could be made up of radically different combinations of voices and instruments. With the addition of the basso continuo in the early seventeenth century, the concertato
Concertato
Concertato is a term in early Baroque music referring to either a genre or a style of music in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody, usually in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo...

 style (stile concertato) had essentially been developed, featuring a larger overarching ensemble out of which smaller groups were selected at will to play successive musical phrases in different styles, or to perform simultaneously in different manners. Thus one phrase might be soloistic, the next set in imitative polyphony, the next homophonic, the next an instrumental tutti, and so on. Alternatively, a chorus could declaim a text homophonically
Homophony
In music, homophony is a texture in which two or more parts move together in harmony, the relationship between them creating chords. This is distinct from polyphony, in which parts move with rhythmic independence, and monophony, in which all parts move in parallel rhythm and pitch. A homophonic...

 while violins played in an entirely different style at the same time – in a different register, in a different location in the church, all performed over a basso continuo. The stile concertato spread throughout Europe and was particularly dominant in Italy and Germany, later forming the basis of the Baroque concerto, the concerto grosso
Concerto grosso
The concerto grosso is a form of baroque music in which the musical material is passed between a small group of soloists and full orchestra...

, and the German cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

.

See also

  • Renaissance music
    Renaissance music
    Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

  • Baroque music
    Baroque music
    Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...

  • Monody
    Monody
    In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....

  • Florentine Camerata
    Florentine Camerata
    The Florentine Camerata was a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama...

  • Concertato
    Concertato
    Concertato is a term in early Baroque music referring to either a genre or a style of music in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody, usually in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK