The Renaissance Era

Abstract The Renaissance era was important for the creation of genres that either would continue throughout the remaining historical eras or would disappear during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and then reappear in the twentieth century. The enduring genres that were newly created during the Renaissance include the sacred forms developed as a result of the Protestant Reformation—the French Calvinist psalm setting, German Lutheran chorale and chorale motet, and English anthem. The genres that were created and that flourished during the Renaissance but that did not experience a continuous history are the madrigal (both Italian and English) and chanson. Genres that were created during the Medieval era—the mass (including Requiem), motet, and related sacred genres such as the Magnificat—continued to be popular throughout the Renaissance and all successive eras. Masses during the Renaissance, which were almost always based on preexisting material (chants, other masses, motets, chansons, and madrigals), utilized a variety of interesting construction techniques. The most common technique employed a preexisting tune as a cantus firmus, usually placed in the tenor voice and scored in longer note values than the other voice parts. The tune was generally presented without modification or elaboration; however, it was frequently inverted (upside down), retrograde (backward), and retrograde inverted (upside down and backward), as well as in its original form. Further common construction techniques were paraphrase (a modification and elaboration of a preexisting tune), parody (the insertion of a polyphonic section of a preexisting composition into the mass texture), soggetto cavato (a cantus firmus built from pitches derived from the vowels of a person’s name), and quodlibet (the employment of multiple secular preexisting tunes). Motets at the beginning of the era occasionally employed Gregorian chant phrases as a cantus firmus, whereas motets during the middle years of the era often employed chant material as a basis for point-of-imitation phrases. For example, Palestrina’s Veni sponsa Christi uses the four phrases of the Gregorian chant as the organizing material for the four phrases of his motet. By the end of the era, motets were by and large free in both melodic content and structure. Magnificats, on the other hand, were most often based on chant and composed in alternatim style throughout the era (i.e., phrases of Gregorian chant alternated with passages of imitative polyphony).