We know from the many paintings of the Renaissance period that there were wind instruments, including recorders, shawms and a variety of bagpipes, plus horns of various sorts; stringed instruments played with a bow (mainly of the viol family); plucked stringed instruments (such as the lute, harp and cittern); and keyboard instruments, including several different sizes and types of organs, spinets and virginals. It is likely that players of these instruments not only improvised dance music and doubled vocal parts but also occasionally stood in for parts when not all voice ranges were available.

Although notated music from the early Renaissance that is specifically composed to take advantage of the capabilities of different instruments is fairly rare, it was clear that some of the part-songs were in fact intended to have all but the top voice played by instruments. In addition, there are manuscripts of organ music (for use in churches) that date from the fifteenth century. There were probably other pieces for instruments, but manuscripts did not always clearly mark whether a part was intended for an instrument or a voice. And if a part were clearly instrumental there was often little indication of which instrument it was intended for.

	Tablature
	Tablature includes various systems of notation in which the symbols provided instructions about which key to depress or where to place a finger on a string. French lute tablatures had six-line staves, one line for each string, and then numbers were used to indicate where on the string to place the finger. Tablatures also indicated time values, and there are a great variety of systems that were used, depending on the instrument and the local traditions.

This was true even of the most common type of instrumental works, arrangements of existing songs for lute or keyboard. The lute, in particular, was extremely popular. Although it is not especially easy to play well, a system of notation called tablature made it comparatively easy to read lute music with a minimum of specialized training. There were also keyboard tablatures, which similarly created an easy-to-follow notation for amateurs. (The symbols for guitar chords today work on the same principle of tablature.) The popularity of the method led a printer named Ottaviano Petrucci to produce collections of lute intabulations of many well-known songs, as well as arrangements of dance melodies for keyboard and lute.

Indeed, perhaps because proficiency on the lute or the spinet was considered de rigueur for an accomplished lady or a courtier, these books apparently sold well. Baldassare Castiglione, in The Courtier, one of the most important, and interesting, best-sellers of the sixteenth century, mentions the necessity of musical ability as an accoutrement for the successful lady or gentleman of the court. The Courtier was essentially a guidebook about how to comport oneself at court, so that one could fulfill one's role in a way that would gain notice and advance one's career.

The rise of the violin

	Viol
	Viol refers to a family of bowed stringed instruments popular from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. They originally had movable frets on the neck, like a guitar today, and were shaped somewhat differently from members of the violin family. The viola da gamba is the lowest of these instruments, earning its name because it was rested between the knees when it was played. The viols generally had more strings than the violin, six being the norm. The name viola da braccio originally referred to the tenor member of the viol family, but gradually it became synonymous with the modern viola. The viols had a softer and subtler sound than the violin and other members of that string family.

Although the lute and the keyboard remained very popular in the seventeenth century, especially for amateur players, another instrument gradually asserted itself in the growing repertory of nonvocal music: the violin. In fact, a telltale sign that one is listening to Baroque rather than Renaissance music is the use of the violin. The violin started life as an extremely humble, low-class instrument, used mainly because it was loud enough to rise above the hubbub at a party or be heard above the stomping of feet when it accompanied dancing. It was also the instrument that a dancing-master used to accompany lessons. The viols, with their softer, more subtle sound, were initially the stringed instrument of choice in refined settings.

But in the seventeenth century fashion began to change, and composers started to write idiomatic violin music. By the mid-seventeenth century, the positions of the two instrument families (viol and violin) were reversed. It's rather difficult to discern which came first, the fashion for the sound of the instrument or the rather wonderful music that composers such as Salomon Rossi and Biagio Marini wrote for the violin. However this transformation took place, by midway through the seventeenth century the violin was the undisputed king of instrumental music.

Changes in musical language
The gradual rise of autonomous instrumental music makes a fascinating study. It is bound up with the change in musical language that occurred in the Baroque, whereby the use of a melodic, or horizontal, logic in compositions was gradually replaced by one that was vertical. This means, essentially, that composers were increasingly occupied with the considerations of harmony, and that composed music began to sound more and more as though it were in the major or minor modes rather than in one of

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the eight church modes. (These are scales that have different patterns of whole and half steps than the familiar major and minor scales we use today.)

Without going into too much depth, this new tonal orientation involved establishing a pitch as "home," or tonic, then leaving it, so that the process of returning to it created a degree of tension that glued the music together. This compositional technique allowed untexted music to sustain the interest of the listener for longer and longer time spans. Thus brief instrumental refrains, or interludes in the midst of vocal works, gradually took on lives of their own and became separated from any vocal works altogether; a purely musical logic supplied the necessary structure, without the aid of a text.

	Discussion
	The evolution from Renaissance to that of Baroque was characterized, in part, by a changing demographic of performers. For example, tablatures enabled amateur musicians to quickly learn how to play basic melodies, which they could then perform in court. What other musical genres or artistic movements introduced a new demographic of artists, such as women, or people with differing cultural backgrounds?

A substantial musical background is helpful to understanding this rather difficult concept, and indeed, the exact nature of the transition from modal to tonal music is still being debated among music theorists and historians today. One way at least to hear this change is to listen to a Renaissance madrigal, then listen to "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi" from Monteverdi's Orfeo, and finally listen to a movement from a trio sonata or a concerto grosso by Arcangelo Corelli.

The madrigal relies entirely on the words to supply its form, in that each line of the text receives its own distinct musical idea that directly relates to the words themselves. The strophic song from Orfeo is quite short, rhythmically vital and based on dance rhythms, but to ears accustomed to common practice tonality it seems somewhat static and repetitive. And, finally, the Corelli work depends on the establishment of a tonal home base to create the tensions that inform its shape and structure.