Now we're going to talk a little bit about music from the Renaissance Period
which runs from about 1400 - 1600.
So this is one of our longer periods of time.
We know a good bit about music from the Renaissance Period
but again it's not something you're going to hear a lot in concerts. It's just not as big an
audience for that as music from later style periods.
So what do we know about music from the period?
One... is
that church music from this period
is almost always
a cappella.
A cappella. That means...
cappella means chapel so it's like at church, that's basically what that means,
but what a cappella music is
is voices only.
There are no instruments.
So whereas today you think of church music and you may think of anything from
organ to a praise band depending on what kind of church experience you have,
at this period of time
it would be all
vocal. So
lots of wonderful music from that period of time. In fact, choral
group still do a lot of this music because it is a wonderful opportunity
to
focus on really listening to each other. You don't have instruments to help you
stay on pitch, so you have to really focus on that.
So church music, mostly a capella.
If it's not church music or what we would call secular
music as opposed to sacred music for church,
it might be a cappella
but chances are that there would be instruments involved in that.
It's about function. A lot of music would have been used for festivals,
dancing,
parties,
just entertainment, and if you're having entertainment you can have
some more instruments going with it.
This is the first period of time where we also really think about
solo instrumental music.
When we looked at that early music, instrumental groups, we saw groups of
musicians so they were playing together for the most part,
but in the Renaissance Period we start to see the solo musician
as a factor.
Part of that is because this is the period of time when we have a troubadours and the trouvères
and all those people
traveling about,
but your sort of basic street corner musicians, where they would just set
up and. . .
and perform so
if you can do it by yourself then whatever money gets thrown into your hat
you don't have to share, so there's
probably some financial incentive for being a solo musician.
So the instruments that we could play
that way would be things like the lute where you could play melody
and play your own harmony.
So that's more interesting for the audience.
We also start to see keyboard instruments appearing at this period of time.
Obviously you're not going to sit on the corner with
your keyboard instrument; that's not too practical.
But we do have some small... they actually had little portable keyboards, they're not
pianos yet, they're not even harpsichords yet.
They're very small
keyboards,
limited range,
limited sound,
possibilities they can't play very loudly,
but we do have literature
for those kinds of instruments so you might actually hear those performed in events.
Now when we were in the earlier period of time,
if you wanted to write the ideal piece of music,
religiously speaking here which is what most music was at the time,
then you would write it in triple meter. Think about that.
Why would religious music focus on triple meter?
You know your church history! The obvious answer is triple
equals
the trinity!
So triple meter was considered perfect
if you were an early musician. So if you were going to write perfect music you
would write it in triple meter.
Here's your little historic sidelight for that!
So on the music, when they wrote it,
to indicate it was triple meter, they didn't put 3/4 like we would today.
They just drew a circle,
because a circle is perfect,
and that would indicate triple meter so when we went away from triple meter,
as we start to see in the Renaissance,
they cut that circle in half.
What does that leave us?
A 'C'
and if you've taken music lessons
you know that that C stands for 4/4 time,
and if you put a line through it like this then you get
cut time,
so it are comes from that circle from our perfect triple meter way back
went to not-so perfect
and then we cut that in half.
So there's a
little thing you can dazzle your friends with or maybe answer a question on jeopardy one
day.
So now we're going into duple meter because we're not so interested
in making the perfect
church piece of music anymore.
Obviously, church music is still there, very important,
but the perfect is not so much an issue.
Another thing that we start to see in vocal music which is really interesting
is what we call
word
painting,
word painting.
So what that is is that you're singing along and you have a text. The text has some
meaning.
What a composer would try to do
is to write the music
so that
it would illustrate the text.
So let's say that we have written a lovely song about falling in love -
lots of those - they go back for ever! Love songs are eternal.
So we might sing
"Oh, I'm falling in love,"
you would fall
on the falling sound; the sound would go down to match the words,
or if we were singing about
something rising up,
the pitch would go up and up and up and up!
Those are obvious examples. Some of them are really subtle!
One of my favorites is a
piece called "Oy May," which just means alas
and so it's this sad, sad,
you know this person's having tragedy
and all through
this piece every time the word "oy may" comes along it's like
...oy... may...
It just sounds sad
like I can't bear
anymore.
They wrote it into the music that way.
They might also take a word like
thousand,
in Italian, mille,
and they would say mille mille mille mille mille and repeat it over and over and over
so you got the sense of
thousand-ness.
So sometimes it's a really obvious
word painting. Sometimes it's a little more subtle like that. So as we listen to
music from this period and
all the way through the next hundred and fifty years or so
that's a pretty common technique. So you can start to listen for that.
Course it's tricky because of a lot of music is in a foreign language so you really have to
pay attention to what the original word was so you know that they are now
singing about that so you can get the translation.
So let's look at a couple of pieces that actually put all these bits together.
One really important vocal kinds of works from this period of time is called a
motet.
It actually has been going along for a while now. We had this in the earlier
period.
As I said when we talked about "O Splendidisima Gemma,"
what they would do is take
an existing line of some kind of music and add other lines of music to it.
They got a little crazy with that sometimes.
What we will see sometimes in motets from the Medieval
Period
is that
you might have a chant line at the bottom. There would be
you know some holy texts
about
Christ have mercy on us or whatever,
but then the two texts above it
might be
telling some really bawdy story or talking about some man chasing a woman
around her desk, to put it in a sort of modern context.
So you could have
really contradictory kind of ideas going
in these texts.
So, and they might not even be singing the same text you could have three
different texts being sung simultaneously,
which you'd think,"How on earth did anybody know what was going on?" Well, maybe they didn't really
need to know what was going on. Maybe it's just all about the sound.
So we're going to listen to a
Medieval motet, and I'm just going to let you do that on your own
time,
that shows you
three lines and even has the music there for you so you can see the notation and you can
see
how everybody's just going... kind of going their own way.
It's in French. The translation's not really important cause we don't care whether
they're singing racy things.
It is something about love cuase it's got the word "amour" in there and we know that that's
a love word in French, so...
Listen to that and then
come back and we will look at
this
motet, and there was that Renaissance Period.
So like I said, the Renaissance motet,
it's going to be religious.
Earlier period, it could be anything.
In fact, there are lots of fun books full of those things where
they do fun things like where the lines sort of feed into each other, and each line individually
looks really innocent, but then you put them together and you get something completely racy.
But then the renaissance Period... we're going to swing back the other way
and be a little bit more religious about it so
the Renaissance motet is a religious work.
What we'll have in this
is at least one text, only one text, sorry, just one text,
and it's going to be in Latin and we know it's religious right? We're singing in Latin
The example that I had given to you is by a French composer named Josquin des Prez.
He was a composer in the French court,
but he also worked at the papal court in Rome so he obviously had really
strong religious connections. So he got both
the secular world and the religious world to work in.
The piece that we're going to listen to by him is called "Gaude Maria Virgo,"
which's another... it's In Praise of Mary, in praise of the virgin, so again
we're looking at that whole Mary
approach to
worship,
and I've given you a hyperlink for the translation so you'll know what they're singing
about.
You can listen for the word gaude as it comes around every time because it happens
quite a lot and that'll help you keep track of where you are
in the text. So we're listening to this, remember that
it's a cappella, so there won't be any instruments.
You might listen to see what kind of meter it's in,
and we know that it's going to be polyphonic texture because we've got all
these different lines going together.
Remember that this is the period of time when painters first started to figure
out how to make paintings have perspective.
So our musicians are really just following along
with their
painter brothers and sisters in developing this new technique. So listen
to the
Medieval motet
and then
listen to
the Renaissance motet
and see how things have advanced in just a few short years.