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What is the difference between renaissance and medieval music?

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17K views 89 replies 23 participants last post by  Mandryka  
M
#1 ·
josquindesprez said:
A few more vocal options for you:

Early Renaissance:
Guillaume Dufay, Isorhythmic Motets (there are 13, skip around if you want)

Middle Renaissance:
Josquin Desprez, Qui Habitat
Click to expand...
Are you sure Dufay and Josquin aren't medieval style composers?
 
#8 ·
It’s a fair question. I included Allegri as Renaissance but his dates line up more with the early Baroque (though the style strikes me as plainly Renaissance). But honestly I’ve never seen Josquin mentioned as a Medieval-period composer, and I’ve always seen Dufay as one of the first composers of the early Renaissance. Obviously the labels are going to cause trouble with borderline composers (I’d always consider Beethoven Romantic, but certainly a lot of people place him as Classical), but I hear Dufay’s polyphony as closer to the Renaissance than the Medieval period.
 
M
#9 · (Edited)
Many people would say that Dufay is one of the first reneaissance composers, but what I want to do is probe that a bit. What is it about Dufay's music (as opposed to his birth and death dates) which makes it somehow embody renaissance ideals more than medieval ones? That's the question I want to pose.

The question is central because of style -- when people say "he's a renaissance composer" they mean he has a style which is harmonious, consonant and fluid. I want to question this for Dufay and Ockeghem and possibly for Josquin too.

josquindesprez said:
I hear Dufay's polyphony as closer to the Renaissance than the Medieval period.
Click to expand...
Of course he can be played like that if you want -- you could play Machaut like that if you want! Don't forget that even as late as Josquin we're talking about scores where there's a lot of uncertainty about things as basic as how to manage dissonances, how to place the text, how many singers to use and with what types of methods of forming and blending the sounds . . . What you hear is always the result of someone's performing edition, which may be based on all sorts of presumptions about the correct style for Dufay, Josquin etc.

(This thread was prompted because I was listening to some Josquin sung by the old group Pro Cantione Antiqua which really did sing it as though it was music by a proto Brahms or Schubert. And I started to ask myself what, exactly, do we now know which shows that that way of singing it is a misunderstanding.)
 
#12 · (Edited)
Guillaume de Machaut ca. 1300-1377 I consider this renaissance music... with nothing to back me up, and admittedly it's pretty early... so would the 14c be the transition?

As for performing methods, perhaps there is a timeline somewhat different than for composition... lagging behind the composers, and maybe this is what Mandryka is thinking about...

Camerata Nova has some recordings that sound "earlier" in performance style, their Lassus and Palestrina are keepers in my collection.
 
#67 ·
Machaut (1300-1377) is late medieval, in the ars nova style and Ciconia (1370-1412) is ars subtilior, also late medieval. Dunstaple (1390-1453) is a composer whom I have read is both medieval and early renaissance. Listen to the end of phrases/pieces and you can hear that major/minor chords emerge during the renaissance timeline and reach "our" tonality. I'm trying to explain that tonal cadences become more common as time goes by, opposed to modal harmony. Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) is maybe the first renaissance composer (until I read myself up...)
 
#17 ·
In my studies I have seen three dates marking the beginning of the musical Renaissance: 1400, 1420, 1450. I am right now looking at a college text entitled "Music in the Renaissance" by Howard M. Brown. His date is 1420.

It is not just a chronological thing. There are stylistic factors which differentiate medieval music from Renaissance music.
 
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#25 ·
I read a couple of articles telling that Dufay's use of dominant cadence distinguished Renaissance music from Medieval music. Early Dufay was using double leading-tone cadence, but in Nuper Rosarum Flores (1436), he used D triad leading to the final Gm, the first use of dominant cadence. Since then, the popularity of double leading-tone cadence declined. Medieval music, especially its cadence, sounds very strange to me (I like it), and I guess the dominant cadence and more frequent use of 3rd make Renaissance music more familiar to my ears.
 
#31 ·
I don't know when the Renaissance Historically started, because is INDIFFERENT. A simple date / year has NO impact to the civilization. Important is when this period is starting to produce culture. And this is AFTER the fall of Constantinople at 1453. Take a look at EVERY serious / well known name of an artist, politician, philosophe, architect etc. and you will immediately understand what I mean.
 
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#38 · (Edited)
It would seem that this would be an identification of trends.
 
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M
#42 · (Edited)
Let's take a real example.

If you look at a mass in Chigi, say the Ockegham L'homme arme, the placement of the text isn't something you can read off the page. Indeed some of the mass text seems not to fit the music at all. How you make sense of that has all sorts of consequences for the way the voices interact, and the resulting rhythms and harmonies.

Some, indeed most, performers sing the music so as to maximise consonance, and to make the whole cohere and blend in a sweet way. And that's based on an ideological presupposition about what sort of sound reflects renaissance ideals as much as anything else. The music in their hands sounds safely predictable because those ideals are really very similar to late Baroque and even classical ideals.


What I'm trying to do is expose that for the presupposition that it is. And scrutinise it.

I want to suggest that what's going on is nothing short of an appropriation, an occupation, a colonisation, of the (early) renaissance by the modern.

My line of thought really comes out of trying to make sense of what Bjorn Schmelzer and Rebecca Stewart and their pupils do with the music, and the ensemble The Sound and the Fury.
 
#43 ·
Mandryka said:
...Some, indeed most, performers sing the music so as to maximise consonance, and to make the whole cohere and blend in a sweet way. And that's based on an ideological presupposition about what sort of sound reflects renaissance ideals as much as anything else. The music in their hands sounds safely predictable because those ideals are really very similar to late Baroque and even classical ideals....What I'm trying to do is expose that for the presupposition that it is. And scrutinise it....I want to suggest that what's going on is nothing short of an appropriation, an occupation, a colonisation, of the (early) renaissance by the modern.
Click to expand...
Oh, so this academic style of thinking about harmony works in both directions? It sounds like an ideology trying to rewrite history in its own terms. Remain pure, Mandryka, and seek the truth.
 
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#46 ·

Is this what you're talking about?
 
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M
#47 · (Edited)
(Glad you're getting involved!)

That's the composer and one of the masses, but that thing's got a score in modern notation, someone has made that from a manuscript which looks nothing like it! For example, the manuscript doesn't put the words under the music all the time. There may be huge sections of it which seem to be textless. Rhythms and pitches and accidentals may not be shown etc etc. And that's where the problems begin, because in making that performing edition he has (I'm suggesting) made all sorts of judgements about the nature of Ockeghem's music.

It's a wonderful thing, Early Music, like those people at the end of The Republic, we can just make out some shadows on the wall of our cave!
 
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