The Renaissance[edit]

Most people do not think of music when they hear the term Renaissance. Yet, in the same sense that architects, painters, and sculptors of the 16th century were paying tribute to the newly rediscovered values of classical Greece, poets and musicians of that period attempted to do the same thing. The years between 1500 and 1600 are the most revolutionary period in European musical history; it is the century in which harmony was developed and the century that gave birth to opera.


These two developments are connected. Readers will have noted the move from the monophony of Gregorian chants to the complicated polyphonies of madrigals and other music of the few centuries before 1500. The next shift in musical perception involves a less common term: homophony; that is, the sounding of a harmonic chord or progression of chords, not meant to stand out, but which support an obvious melody on top of the harmony.


The desire—perhaps need—for homophonic music arose from a number of factors. First, there was a rejection of overly complicated polyphony of many different melodies running at the same time: second, a general, new musical aesthetic of the period, best summed up in the words of Leonardo da Vinci in 1500, who said that music was "the simultaneous conjunction of proportional parts"—that is, the sounding together of notes based on simple arithmetic rations such as 2:1 (which produces the sound of an octave), 3:2 (which produces the sound of fifth), and 5:4 (which produces the sound of a major third). Thus, if you generate notes at 400, 600, 800, and 1000 cycles per second, you have all the notes of the simplest and most harmonious sound in our music—the major chord. It really is that simple. (See Musical Acoustics.) Third on the list of factors that make the 16th century so important was the Renaissance desire to tell a story, to put people up on a small stage and have them sing songs about Greek mythology—the tale of Orpheus, for example. That is difficult to do if everyone is singing a melody at the same time; thus, polyphony gave way to homophony, and early opera consisted of relatively simple melodies with texts about Greek mythology, sung in Italian and supported by simple harmonies. The important city in Italy in this development of music in the 16th century was Florence. (See also: Florentine Camerata, Vincenzo Galilei, Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, Palestrina, Arcangelo Corelli.)


Besides Florence, two other Italian cities are particularly worthy of mention in the period around 1600. There is somewhat of a friendly rivalry between advocates of the two cities as to which one is more important in the history of the development of music in Italy. Venice justly claims its place as the birthplace of commercial opera; Naples points to its own history of church-sponsored music conservatories, institutions that developed into "feeder-systems," providing composers and performing musicians for much musical life in Italy and, indeed, Europe as a whole. (See also: Music of Venice and Music of Naples.)