The Importance Of Music And Renaissance Music

1. Renaissance

An age of curiosity and individualism, exploration and adventure and the rebirth of human creativity are the words that describe the Renaissance and was the time of Humanism. The humanism, an intellectual movement was focus on the human life and its accomplishments.

The musical activity shifted from the church to the court due to the loss of church power and new humanistic ideas that gradually increased. All upper and middle class had to be educated because education was the symbol to show their status and it was compulsory to be trained in music.

Renaissance era focused on music was also known as the golden age of a capella choral music because performers did not need the instrumental accompaniment. Composers used word painting at the Renaissance era. Word painting is a musical representations of specific poetic image. It was important on the effect of the harmonic chords rather than composing one melody above another and as mentioned above, Renaissance melodies were usually a capella.

There are two types of music called sacred and secular music. In sacred music, two main forms are mass and the motet. Secular music had often changes of mood and the madrigal is one of the form in secular music which is a composition for vocal that has homophonic and polyphonic combinations in texture. It is different to the sacred music’s motet because madrigal uses vernacular, word painting and unusual harmonies (Anonymous D, n.d.).

2. Renaissance composer