In order to understand what's different about Baroque music, it's helpful to have a basic idea of Renaissance music. Although scholars use the same designations for musical style periods as those used for art and literature, the exact boundaries of the periods don't necessarily coincide. The Renaissance is especially difficult to pin down, as it occurred at vastly different times in different places in Europe. In the history of music, the Renaissance is generally thought to date from the mid-fifteenth century through the sixteenth century, with some fuzziness at each end. These dates are further complicated by geographical considerations, as Renaissance music was initially more of a northern European phenomenon, whereas the Baroque period begins in Italy first. However one defines the two periods, their musical styles are truly distinct. Although it is never a simple matter to define such an esoteric concept as musical style, it is possible to convey something of the changing aesthetic from Renaissance to Baroque in a brief overview.
Renaissance polyphony
Renaissance music is characterized by what is called "equal-voice polyphony," in which a complex texture of different voices creates a more or less continuous, harmonious work. "Voices" do not mean individual singers but refer to different musical lines (soprano, alto, tenor and bass, for instance). Renaissance composers also based their compositions on the eight church modes, which are essentially scales with patterns of whole and half steps that are not the same as the two modes we use today, major and minor.
Composers in this era (including Guillaume Dufay, Josquin Desprez, Pierluigi di Palestrina, the latter probably the most famous) generally concentrated on creating seamless, elegant musical textures that obeyed very strict rules of counterpoint (how the voices fit together) rather than focusing on expressing emotions or ideas. This is not to say that the music is not beautiful and moving, which it certainly is, only that the composers were more focused on the abstract beauty of the musical relationships rather than on conveying the emotion or mood of a text. A good example is "Nuper rosarum flores / Terribilis est locus iste," a motet by Guillaume Dufay.
This motet was composed for the dedication in 1436 of Brunelleschi's dome on the famous cathedral (the Duomo) in Florence. The proportions among the parts in a very complex canon that structures the composition are 6:4:3:2, which are the proportions of Solomon's temple; they are also, furthermore, proportions that directly relate to the structure of the Florentine dome itself. Clearly, one would not actually hear this relationship, but it exists as a symbolic, intellectual reference that was an integral part of the composition. Word painting and the rise of the madrigal
As the Renaissance continued, the style gradually changed, and one finds, bit by bit, instances where composers began to pay close attention to the meaning of the text and consciously tried to illustrate it. Bear in mind that the majority of musical manuscripts from this time were for vocal music. This is due in part to the fact that music notation was an invention of the ninth to eleventh centuries, and was
primarily designed to fix the repertory of Gregorian chant so that the liturgical practices of the Church could be more uniform throughout Europe. The repertory in which this gradual shift of focus is most obvious is that of the Italian madrigal. Some of the most famous composers of sixteenth-century Italian madrigals are (roughly chronologically) Jacques Arcadelt, Cipriano de Rore, Adriano Willaert, Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Luca Marenzio. Note that the earlier composers had Flemish names; at the beginning of the sixteenth century Flemish composers began traveling to Italy, marking a shift in the musical center of gravity in Europe as well.
Their madrigals increasingly employ a compositional device known as word painting. This means, simply, writing music that attempts to illustrate particular words--for example, fast notes on the word "running," a rising vocal line on the word "sunrise," dissonance on the word "bitterness" and so on. In
addition to encouraging an emphasis on the text of a vocal work, this genre is important also because it represents a shift of focus from sacred to secular music, which occurs in part as a result of the increased interest in Italian poetry during the sixteenth century. Another important development, however, was perhaps just as critical to the blossoming interest in secular music, which at this time is primarily represented by madrigals and other part-songs. Around 1500, Ottaviano Petrucci succeeded in obtaining a monopoly to print music in Venice. He had invented a technique that allowed him to use movable type, instead of the laborious, and uneconomical, woodblock engravings that had sufficed previously. Petrucci churned out books of songs, which were so successful that publishers in other cities soon followed suit.
Most noteworthy among those publishers was Pierre Attaignant of Paris, who further improved upon Petrucci's invention by creating a system that would allow both music and staves to be printed in a
single impression-a much more economical answer to the challenge of printing music. Thus a repertory of music that people could conceivably perform in their homes for their own amusement was disseminated not only through Italy but through all of Europe. What's more, Petrucci's early prints included a very cosmopolitan selection, so that a wide variety of styles and forms were made available to an increasingly large buying public. Although this output of madrigals and chansons circulated widely in the courts and cities of Europe, by the late sixteenth century most of the musical innovations occurred in the Italian cities. Italy's predominance on the musical scene resulted in part from a patronage system in which princes and dukes (generally not excessively secure in their positions) vied with one another to create instant credibility by setting up lavish establishments. Such extravagant displays of power and status included exorbitant spending on the arts and music.
The Florentine Camerata
It was in one such court, in Florence at the time of the Medici, that a group of intellectuals began a style movement that radically altered the musical aesthetic of the Renaissance. This group, known as the Florentine Camerata, met to discuss burning issues such as the ideal way to perform tragedy, and dedicated themselves to the study of the classical (i.e., Greco-Roman) authors.
One of the hotly debated issues was the supposed ability of music to move the emotions as described by the ancient Greeks. The members of the Camerata realized that music as they knew it did not have the miraculous effects that Plato and Aristotle wrote about, neither succeeding in inciting people to war nor in calming a raging madman. Whether or not music ever possessed such powers, this thinking of the Camerata led to one of the few instances in the history of music in which a genre was actually consciously invented rather than evolving organically from what existed before.
Certain of the group's members, including Counts Bardi and Corsi, decided that the music of their day was going about the business of expressiveness all wrong. It made no sense to them to illustrate the meaning of individual words; they felt that the sense of an entire thought should be expressed. Although some late-sixteenth-century composers had pushed the limits of word painting to an extreme, to the point where the device became quite mannered (most notably Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa), for the Camerata such music still failed to satisfy their need for true expression. In order to achieve the desired results, they needed compositional resources that were not available within the style of the Renaissance madrigal. In particular, the idea of many voices singing the same text at different times, however lovely-sounding, ran counter to the ultimate goal of clear expression. The members of the Florentine Camerata felt that listeners would be unable to distinguish the words themselves, let alone be moved by a true perception of the emotional content of a given text. Therefore, they began to think in terms that reversed the prevailing hierarchy of music and text, and to think of the words as the most important part of a vocal work, with the music there simply to support them. This departure from Renaissance musical style inaugurated the beginning of the Baroque era in music.
