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The Renaissance. Prelude . Prelude. The Renaissance was both a cultural movement and a historical period. Its chronological range and defining characteristics are matters of ongoing debate, but in music the term is conventionally applied to the period from about 1420 to 1600. Prelude.
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The Renaissance Prelude
Prelude • The Renaissance was both a cultural movement and a historical period. Its chronological range and defining characteristics are matters of ongoing debate, but in music the term is conventionally applied to the period from about 1420 to 1600.
Prelude • The term Renaissance—”rebirth” in French—was coined by later historians to designate what they saw as an era marked by the revival, or rebirth, of attitudes and ideals rooted in classical antiquity. Many of the philosophical, technological, and artistic innovations of the Renaissance were inspired by the recovery of ancient works, particularly from Greece, that had for all practical purposes been lost to western Europe for almost a thousand years.
Prelude • Medieval scholars were familiar with only scattered works of Plato and other Greek writers, and even then only in Latin translations; Aristotle’s works were better known but not in their original Greek. But Greek versions of the writings of these and many other ancient authors had been preserved to the east, in Islamic and Byzantine libraries, especially in and around the Byzantine capital Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey).
Continued. • By the late 14th century, Western scholars were beginning to find and bring home many of these sources. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, a new wave of manuscripts arrived in the luggage of scholars seeking refuge in the West. This influx of ancient works—and the ideas that they contained—coincided with significant transformations in European society and its economy.
Growth of the Middle Class • By the early 15th century, the population was rising again after the devastations of the Black Death. Increased trade and prosperity challenged feudal structures and promoted the growth of cities and city-states, regions ruled from a single urban center. Banks and insurance companies, which had first appeared toward the end of the medieval era, became increasingly common over the course of the 15th century.
Renaissance Humanism • The discovery of what was for Europeans a New World in 1492 opened up not only new territories but also new ways of thinking about the universe, prompting fundamental changes in the very perception of humanity’s place in the world. The discovery of previously unknown but advanced civilizations like those of the Aztecs and Incas would help inspire emerging scientific theories that the earth was not the center of the universe.
Humanism • The sudden abundance of pre-Christian sources from classical antiquity introduced Western minds to yet another new—or rather, very old—way of looking at the world. The ancient Greeks had measured the universe in terms of the human values and reason, and many scholars of the early 15th century, adopting this “new” outlook for themselves, created a philosophical movement known as humanism.
Renaissance humanists were committed to independent reasoning, careful study of the ancient classics in their original languages (particularly Greek), and a reliance on original sources rather than secondhand commentary about those sources. They also believed in the basic dignity of humankind. Humanists did not reject religion—indeed, many of them were among the most eloquent advocates of the church—but they sought understanding through a process guided as much by reason as faith.
Scholasticism vs Humanism • Humanism was a sharp departure from the scholasticism that had dominated late medieval intellectual life. Scholasticism relied almost entirely on abstract thought and the accumulation of wisdom through disputation. Commentaries—and commentaries on commentaries—were an important venue of scholastic thought, provided they came from the pens of acknowledged authorities. Scholasticism harbored deep suspicions about the reliability of the human senses and therefore had little place for empirical evidence or observation. Humanism, in contrast, combined reason with empirical evidence with results that often challenged the received wisdom of even the greatest authorities.
Vernacular • The impact of humanism extended well beyond the fields of philosophy, theology, and science. Renaissance writers as a whole were deeply influenced by humanism and its efforts to explore the human mind. Following the lead of such late medieval figures as Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer, more and more writers began to produce works in the vernacular—Italian, French, English and Spanish—which in turn contributed to an ever-growing sense of national identity in the various regions of Europe.
Moveable Type • The speed with which ideas could be disseminated in Renaissance Europe accelerated exponentially with the invention of movable type and the printing press in the mid-15th century. The significance of this new technology can scarcely be overstated. Before printing, the written word was scarce and remote. Even Bibles were a rarity. Manuscripts were expensive to produce and inconsistent in their texts; because they were produced by hand, now two manuscripts were identical, no matter how careful the scribes who copied them. But after Johannes Gutenburg produced the first printed Bible in Mainz (Germany) around 1455, it became possible to generate multiple and essentially identical copies of the same work in a relatively short period of time at only a fraction of the cost of a comparable number of manuscripts.
Moveable Type • Printing spread swiftly across Europe. By 1500, the city of Venice was home to no fewer than 150 presses, including that of Aldus Manutius, who made a handsome profit producing elegant yet relatively inexpensive editions of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient authors in the original Greek. It has been estimated that between the invention of the printing press in the mid-1450s and the end of the 15th century, some 25,000 different books were printed in Germany alone; with an average press run of 250 copies, this would mean a total of about 6 million printed books. The first music printed with movable type appeared in Venice in 1501.
Literary Figures of the Renaissance • Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) was widely admired by his contemporaries. His masterpiece, The Faerie Queene(1596), is an allegorical romance dedicated to Elizabeth I. The complex nine-line Spenserian stanza he invented for this work was adopted by the 19th century by such poets as Keats, Shelley, and Byron. • William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is generally regarded as the greatest playwright of the English language. His works probe the complexities and ambiguities of human character—Hamlet’s crippling doubt, for example, or Lady Macbeth’s destructive lust for power—in language of immense poetic force and inventiveness.
The Protestant Reformation • Humanism and printing combined to ignite the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century. When a German monk named Martin Luther (1483-1546) nailed a list of grievances to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in 1517, he was only the latest in a long line of individuals to voice objections to various church practices. The immediate object of Luther’s protest was the sale of indulgences—certificates from the pope or bishop promising forgiveness in the next life for sins committed in this one. But if Luther was on the first to protest what he saw as church corruption, he was among the fist with access to the power of the printing press to promulgate his views. Between 1517 and 1520, Luther’s books sold an estimated 300,000 copies in some 370 editions in both Latin and German.
Protestant Reformation • The Protestant Reformation, as its name implies, arose as an expression against corrupt church practices and a desire to reform them. Luther and his followers emphasized the individual’s personal relationship to God and preached a doctrine of salvation based on faith rather than on works. Protestants also encouraged worship in the vernacular, although Luther himself found himself upheld in the importance of Latin both in the liturgy and in the education of youth.
Protestant Reformation—Conflict • Such views did not sit well with the established church. Luther was declared a heretic, and his published writings against the church doctrine were used as evidence against him when he was excommunicated in 1521. Later that year, at the Diet of Worms (Diet is an archaic word for an assembly; Worms, a city on the Rhine in western Germany), he refused to recant his position before the assembled leaders of the Holy Roman Empire. The political ramifications of Luther’s stand were far reaching. The German people eventually split along Protestant and Catholic lines according to the professed faith of their local ruler.
Split from Luther • Luther himself was challenged on matters of doctrine by other Protestants as early as 1521, and a host of Protestant sects emerged over the ensuing decades. Ulrich Zwingli and Jean Calvin were among the first to break with Luther over various theological issues and establish their own denominations. Henry the VIII, antagonizing the authority of the pope in Rome, declared himself head of the Church of England. Over the course of the next century, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians all rejected the authority of Rome, each group establishing its own course on matters of doctrine, liturgy, and music.
Catholic Consequences • The Roman Catholic Church, as it gradually came to be known—prior to the Reformation, there had been only one church in the West—did not sit idly by in the face of this religious revolution. It responded first by subjecting suspected heretics to trial, excommunication, and sometimes imprisonment or even death. The Counter-Reformation of the mid-16th century was a more systematic and positive attempt to retain or win back believers to the Roman Catholic Church, in part through a modification of doctrine and practices, in part through music.
Renaissance Painting and Sculpture • The contrast between medieval and Renaissance perceptions of the world are particularly evident in the realm of painting and sculpture. Renaissance painters differed from their earlier counterparts in a number of important ways. One of the most striking of these was the use of linear perspective, a method for creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface. The technique had been familiar in an intuitive way to the ancient Greeks but was almost entirely lost over subsequent centuries.
Medieval vs. Renaissance • Another characteristic of Renaissance art was a renewed interest in the human body. Medieval artists had, for the most part, used nudity for depicting lasciviousness on earth or the torments of the damned in hell. In contrast, Renaissance artists, like the artists of antiquity, became interested in the human body as an object of admiration. They also display an unprecedented interest in the scientific details of human anatomy.
Humanism in Art • This interest in the human anatomy accompanied by one of the most distinctive characteristics of Renaissance art, a desire to capture individual character in portraiture. The seven figures in the 12th-century depiction of King David and his musicians in the St. Alban’s Psalter all have essentially the same visage. Except for his size and ornate robes, David looks no different from the others. In contrast, each of the seven choir boys in Luca dellaRobbia’s 1431 sculpture for the choir gallery of the Florence Cathedral has a distinctive appearance and personality.
Music in Renaissance Society • As secular courts increased in size, number, and importance during the Renaissance, so too did their influence on the arts. Rulers now measured their greatness not only according to their territory, treasure, and military might, but also by what might be called their cultural capital. The arts as a whole benefited enormously from this newfound concern from cultural prestige. The Medici in Florence, the Este dynasty in Ferrara, the Sforza dynasty in Milan, the collective leadership of the Republic of Venice, the Vatican in Rome, the royal court of Naples—all these and other principalities, duchies, and kingdoms throughout Italy, and eventually throughout Europe, placed great value on having talented poets, painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians active at their courts.
Performing Ensembles • Any court with pretensions to cultural importance maintained its own roster of musicians to perform during services in the court chapel as well as for banquets, dances, and other festivities of a more secular nature. The size and quality of these musical organizations varied greatly; a well-funded capella, as such an ensemble was called, typically consisted of between 12 and 20 musicians but could be larger or smaller according to the resources of the court treasury at any given time. Affluent courts actively recruited the best musical talent they could afford.
Music on the Move • Composers and musicians were considerably more mobile in the Renaissance than before. The English composer John Dunstable spent a good portion of his career in France. Guillame Du Fay, Josquin des Prez, and Orlande de Lassus, all born in the Low Countries, were drawn to the active cultural life of courts on the Italian peninsula. Du Fay spent time in the courts of Florence, Rome, and Milan; Josquin in Milan, Rome, and Ferrara; and Lassus in Mantua and Rome. All three returned north of the alps later in their careers.
Composers in Residence • The church remained an important source of patronage as well. The surviving repertory indicates that the demand for new polyphonic liturgical music—from settings of the Mass Ordinary to hymns to motets—was enormous. Many affluent churches maintained resident composers, providing them with housing and a fixed income in exchange for music on demand.
Jobs • The invention of the printing press provided yet another source of income for composers of all varieties of music, from secular songs to settings of the Mass Ordinary. Music that had once circulated in relatively scarce manuscripts could now be sold in quantity to a much wider audience.
Improvised Music • As during the medieval era, only a fraction of the music of the Renaissance was the work of professional composers and musicians. Most music was performed in the context of an unwritten tradition that operated outside any system of notation. For those who pretended to gentility, however, the ability to read music, sing, and play at least one if not more instruments was considered an essential grace. Royals themselves set the standard. The English king Henry VIII took great pride in his abilities both as a composer and singer. His daughter, Elizabeth I, was renowned as a lutenist and keyboard player.
