2. Important Musical Considerations in the
Renaissance
 Individualism and free of expression and rules
 Political and social stability enabled reason and
free inquiry
 Music and art celebrated human achievement
whilst glorifying God
 Humanism- Celebration of human achievement
 Use of Major and Minor modes
• Polyphonic Imitation (a musical idea that is
immediately echoed by another voice part or
instrument)
• Word-painting (using musical symbolism to
represent the meaning of the text; most common
in the madrigal)
• The Invention of Music Printing (by the Italian
printer, Petrucci, in 1501)
• The Rise of Secular Music

3.  Equity among the voices (SATB)
 Style dominated late 15th and 16th Century music.
 Geographical centre: North east France, Belgium and Holland/Netherlands.
 Wide range of textures; Polyphony to monophony and dodecaphony.
 The choral mass A cappella is the school’s greatest achievement.
 Retrograde: Melody sung backwards.
 Inversions
 Canon: The cannon made its first appearance during the 1300s in the popular Caccia of the Medieval era. It was
abandoned at the turn of the next century and reappeared with new popularity during the latter part of the 1400s.
The new canon employed some interesting techniques.
 Mass: A new form of mass emerged, called the cantus Firmus mass. Here, each successive section of the ordinary had
the same melody. These Cantus Firmus were usually written in the plainsong style, but sometimes secular music was
used. Most of the time, these masses were based on Cantus Firmus.

Motet : The Franco-Flemish motet made use of sections written in duet style, choral style, fugal or imitative style, and
imitative counterpoint .
Secular Music: The chanson remained the dominant form of secular music, as it had been in the English style. The
Franco-Flemish school made variations to it and made it less sectionalized. Lieder, a monophonic or polyphonic German
secular work, gained popularity from the end of the 1400s to the end of the 1500s.

4.  He was the most famous European composer
between Guillaume Dufay and Palestrina, and is
usually considered to be the central figure of
the Franco-Flemish School.
 Wrote 100 Motets, 18 Masses and 70 other
Chansons and Secular music
 Traveled around Europe, predominately around
Italy and France.
 Widely considered by music scholars to be the
first master of the high Renaissance style of
polyphonic vocal music that was emerging
during his life.

6.  Following the predominant practice of
the time, the setting of Ave Maria is
in A cappella
 First volume of motets that was
printed in 1502
 Written around 1476 and 1497.

7.  To begin this motet, Josquin borrowed the opening phrase of a well-known sequence in honor of the
Virgin, Ave Maria, Gratia Plena. He then ornamented the phrase and distributed equally to all four voices in
imitative fashion: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. For the next three "Hails" (bars 16, 28, and 39) Josquin
crafted his own melodic material, arranging it in pairs of imitating voices (soprano-alto, followed by tenor-
bass).
 Josquin uses the four vocal lines in many other types of textures. The vocal writing is smooth and the
harmonies are more consonant than works from the Middle Ages.
 Throughout this section of the motet, as well as in the rest of the piece not heard in this excerpt, Josquin
skillfully varies the textures, using the contrast between two, three, or four voices to create distinct
musical sections
 The opening uses polyphonic imitation, in which each voice sings the same melody in succession. In this
style, the voices often continue to add secondary melodies to accompany the following voice entries.
 This technique of paired imitation was a favourite of Josquin. Perhaps to effect variety in the face of what
has been a uniformly polyphonic texture in duple meter, Josquin switches at bar 48 to homophonic texture
and triple meter, only to return to the original texture and meter, with more duets, for the final "Hail" (bar
57).
 This piece was and still one of his famous works as it portrays a lot of his style and technique in terms of
polyphony, dynamic contrast, syncopated rhythms.

8. Books
 Lang, chapter 9 (The Renaissance), published in USA (1941), Music in western civilisation
 Donald Jay Grout & Claude V.P, Chapter 6, published in GB (1962), A history of western music
 Carl Parrish, Chapter 5 (Franconian notation), published in USA (1957), The notation of Medeval music
Websites
 Geni
02/10/12
Great Composers of the Old Schools of Classical Music (XI - XIX Centuries)
http://www.geni.com/projects/Great-Composers-of-the-Old-Schools-of-Classical-Music-XI-XIX-
Centuries/9418
 Author unknown
31/10/12
Atrium musicologium
http://musicologicus.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/franco-flemish-school.htm
 Lilia Melani (Author)
30/10/12,
Renaissance http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ren.html