The Complete History of Music, Part 2: The Renaissance

The renaissance signifies rebirth after the middle ages, reviving ideas from ancient Greece and Rome, with the printing press spreading music to amateurs, courts, and multilingual church worship.

Trace europe's renaissance by highlighting economic growth, polyphonic music, and humanism, with milestones like Gutenberg's movable type, Columbus's voyage, Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's David, Luther's 95 theses, and Shakespeare.

Explore how Renaissance music develops polyphony, introduces sackbut and oboe-like instruments, and splits sacred and secular sounds into madrigals and word painting within church patronage.

Explore how musicians trained within court chapels as salaried members of a ruler's entourage, performing sacred and secular music, often as boys' choir members with broad education.

Explore Josquin Desprez, a renowned renaissance composer known for diverse styles and debated authorship. Hear a Maria piece attributed to him, showcasing his melodic ideas and beautiful melodies.

Explore the rise of the castrato in Renaissance music, including boy choirs and high voice traditions, and Morici, the last castrato, with reflections on historical context and recordings.

Explore renaissance compositional developments such as expanding vocal ranges, adding a bass, experimenting with more choir voices, imitative counterpoint, and equal voice treatment to broaden harmony and explore dissonance.

Explore how Renaissance tuning expanded beyond Pythagorean intonation by adding the third and sixth to the root, fourth, fifth, and octave, while noting many notes remain not perfectly in tune.

Printing innovations with movable type spread sheet music worldwide, making it more reliable, reducing copying errors, and enabling amateurs, professionals, and home instrumental music-making.

John Tunstall, an English composer, held royal court positions and his music reached Europe through France. The piece, a Latin alleluia carol for three voices, explores homophonic and polyphonic textures.

Trace the rise of the polyphonic mass from five-part early masses to the cantus firmus concept, linking movements by shared melodies, harmonic ideas, and the bass's grounding.

Study Guillaume Dufay, a highly regarded Belgian composer who served many European courts and shaped the polyphonic mass, exemplified by his Gloria in a mass.

Trace the Franco-Flemish rise in the early 16th century, as northern composers blend medieval roots with English influence, expand vocal ranges, and develop imitation in masses and chanson.

Explore chanson, a French three-voice renaissance song in rondo form, featuring longer melodies sung in one breath, explicit voice equality, and imitative textures where each voice acts as a soloist.

Explore Antoine Busnois, a renowned renaissance composer known for masses and secular chansons, and examine his prolific secular songs, including the piece 'je ne puis vivre'.

Examine Renaissance masses that expand vocal virtuosity, emphasize tenor and bass ranges, and explore cantus firmus structures, with playful paraphrase and multi-staff notation as exemplified in Buckingham’s mass.

Examine Ockeghem's music through a transcription preserving original notation quirks, as two- and five-stave writing shifts to modern four-stave notation with timing irregularities.

The Reformation shifted sacred music toward congregational singing in vernacular languages, introducing chorales and psalms, while Catholic Latin chant persisted; Luther, Calvinism, and the Church of England reshaped church music.

Luther fostered congregational singing in the Lutheran church, using German with Latin and preserving Catholic music, while composing corrals for unison services drawn from Gregorian chant and German devotional songs.

Calvinists stripped worship to unison, unaccompanied metrical psalms in vernacular French, publishing salters of 150 psalms to spread this simple, metrical singing.

Explore how the Church of England blends catholic roots with sacred music, emphasizing the service and the anthem, polyphony, and clear English texts, such as Tallis's if you love me.

Examine the Council of Trent's approach to catholic music during the Reformation, balancing polyphony with clarity for congregations, illustrated by the Pope Marcellus Mass.

Explore Jewish music in 16th-century Europe, rooted in oral services with leader–response patterns, notated with tay mean accents, and how the Hasan blends Gregorian chant and arabian music.

Explore the rise of secular songs during the Renaissance, driven by international style, printed music, and the emergence of amateur musicians who read sheet music.

Explore how Spanish songs like the Valencia peasant tradition circulated to aristocrats, featuring short stroke melodies with varying lyrics and a repeating tune.

Explore how songs in Italy during the Renaissance feature the soprano carrying the melody with lute accompaniment, Italian text, and simple harmony.

Explore the madrigal, the Renaissance’s dramatic Italian vocal form, emphasizing expressive text setting via a through-composed structure, with four voices (later five or six) and occasional lute accompaniment.

Explore the rise of the French chanson in secular music, featuring light, pleasurable melodies sung in the highest voice with simple love texts and repeated musical material with varied lyrics.

Explore how the German lead emerges with the melody still in the tenor, while Italian madrigals dominate Germany and shape a developing German lead with Italian characteristics.

Explore the English madrigal's evolution from the Italian madrigal through court consort song, and hear Thomas Morley's 'My Boney Lass' with two parts, refrains, and a light dance-like texture.

Explore the renaissance's instrumental music, from notated work to improvisation, and meet sackbut, lute, oud, viola da gamba, violin, cornet ensemble, crummy horn, and harpsichord.

Renaissance dance music was largely improvised, sometimes over a baseline or a dance form that dictated meter and tempo, with the base dance featuring five steps.

Vocal scores inspired early instrumental music as performers embellished sustained notes on keyboards and lutes. Organists and choirs used improvisation, accompaniment, and theme and variation in sacred and secular settings.

Discover instrumental music emerging as its own genre in the Renaissance, featuring keyboard-centered works, improvisation, embellishments, organ preludes, and church interludes, not strictly bound to sheet music.

The lecture recaps the Renaissance overview and emphasizes that music continues to evolve, then previews the Baroque era with Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Scarlatti.

Access special links to join the class Facebook community, receive coupon discounts for other courses, and download a PDX bundle of goodies for the next steps.