For Grade 9 Elem/HS The University of Manila. This is about the Music of the Renaissance period, its types and famous composers of that era.

1. Renaissance Music

2. RENAISSANCE MUSIC
It is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe
during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has
been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and
to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period,
therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years
after the beginning of the Renaissance as it is understood in other
disciplines.

4. Music was increasingly freed from medieval constraints, and more variety was permitted
in range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation. On the other hand, rules of counterpoint
became more constrained, particularly with regard to treatment of dissonances. In the
Renaissance, music became a vehicle for personal expression. Composers found ways to
make vocal music more expressive of the texts they were setting. Secular music absorbed
techniques from sacred music, and vice versa. Popular secular forms such as the chanson
and madrigal spread throughout Europe. Courts employed virtuoso performers, both
singers and instrumentalists. Music also became more self-sufficient with its availability in
printed form, existing for its own sake.

6. Precursor versions of many familiar modern instruments (including the violin, guitar, lute and
keyboard instruments) developed into new forms during the Renaissance. These instruments were
modified to respond to the evolution of musical ideas, and they presented new possibilities for
composers and musicians to explore. Early forms of modern woodwind and brass instruments like the
bassoon and trombone also appeared, extending the range of sonic color and increasing the sound of
instrumental ensembles. During the 15th century, the sound of full triads became common, and
towards the end of the 16th century the system of church modes began to break down entirely, giving
way to functional tonality (the system in which songs and pieces are based on musical "keys"), which
would dominate Western art music for the next three centuries.

8. From the Renaissance era, notated secular and sacred music survives in quantity,
including vocal and instrumental works and mixed vocal/instrumental works. A wide
range of musical styles and genres flourished during the Renaissance, including masses,
motets, madrigals, chansons, accompanied songs, instrumental dances, and many others.
Beginning in the late 20th century, numerous early music ensembles were formed.
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.

9. RENAISSANCE MOTET
is a highly varied choral musical composition. The motet was one of
the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music.

12. RENAISSANCE MASS
Masses were based on same texts and melodies of earlier monophonic
Gregorian chants, but with multiple voice parts added to the chant. The
Ordinary Mass consists of multiple movements, using the texts of
Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and other liturgy.

14. GUILLAME DUFAY
was a Franco-Flemish composer and music theorist of the early
Renaissance. Regarded as the leading European composer by his
contemporaries, his music was widely performed and copied. Du Fay
held various music positions during his lifetime, and was associated
with the Burgundian School as well as among the first composers, or at
least a predecessor of the Franco-Flemish School.

15. His most famous and celebrated work, the complex motet Nuper
Rosarum Flores, was written for the consecration of Filippo
Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral and is considered an
icon of Western culture. Du Fay left behind an extensive oeuvre,
including pieces representative of virtually every genre of polyphonic
music from his time.His music effectively synthesized a wide variety of
styles: the Contenance angloise of John Dunstaple, the famous Missa
Caput, and the techniques of his younger contemporaries Johannes
Ockeghem and Antoine Busnois.

18. SECULAR MUSIC
is non-religious music. Secular means being separate from religion. In the West, secular music
developed in the Medieval period and was used in the Renaissance. Swaying authority from the
Church that focused more on Common Law influenced all aspects of Medieval life, including music.
Secular music in the Middle Ages included love songs, political satire, dances, and dramatic works.
Drums, harps, recorders, and bagpipes were the instruments used in secular music because they were
easy for the traveling musicians to tote about. Instruments were taught through oral tradition and
provided great dancing music and accompanied the stanzas well. Words are an important part of
secular music. Words were added for most and many common people to sing songs together for
entertainment. Music styles were changed by secularization.

21. MADRIGAL
is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance (15th–16th c.) and early Baroque
(1600–1750) eras. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices
varies from two to eight, but usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the
madrigal varied between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets.Unlike the
verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals were through-
composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer
expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being
sung.

24. THOMAS MORLEY
was an English composer, theorist, singer and organist of the Renaissance. He
was one of the foremost members of the English Madrigal School. Referring to
the strong Italian influence on the English madrigal, The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that Morley was "chiefly responsible
for grafting the Italian shoot on to the native stock and initiating the curiously
brief but brilliant flowering of the madrigal that constitutes one of the most
colourful episodes in the history of English music."

25. Living in London at the same time as Shakespeare, Morley was the most
famous composer of secular music in Elizabethan England. He and Robert
Johnson are the composers of the only surviving contemporary settings of verse
by Shakespeare.
Morley was active in church music as a singer, composer and organist at St
Paul's Cathedral. He was also involved in music publishing. From 1598 up to
his death he held a printing patent (a type of monopoly).He used the monopoly
in partnership with professional music printers such as Thomas East.

28. CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI
baptized 15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, string player,
choirmaster, and priest. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in
the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the
Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
Born in Cremona, where he undertook his first musical studies and compositions,
Monteverdi developed his career first at the court of Mantua (c. 1590–1613) and then
until his death in the Republic of Venice where he was maestro di cappella at the basilica
of San Marco. His surviving letters give insight into the life of a professional musician in
Italy of the period, including problems of income, patronage and politics.

29. Much of Monteverdi's output, including many stage works, has been lost. His surviving
music includes nine books of madrigals, large-scale religious works, such as his Vespro
della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610, and three complete operas.
His opera L'Orfeo (1607) is the earliest of the genre still widely performed; towards the
end of his life he wrote works for Venice, including Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and
L'incoronazione di Poppea.
While he worked extensively in the tradition of earlier Renaissance polyphony, as
evidenced in his madrigals, he undertook great developments in form and melody, and
began to employ the basso continuo technique, distinctive of the Baroque.

30. No stranger to controversy, he defended his sometimes novel
techniques as elements of a seconda pratica, contrasting with the more
orthodox earlier style which he termed the prima pratica. Largely
forgotten during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries,
his works enjoyed a rediscovery around the beginning of the twentieth
century. He is now established both as a significant influence in
European musical history and as a composer whose works are regularly
performed and recorded.