Music Appreciation: The Middle Ages and The Renaissance and Baroque

• only one line is performed at a
time

• music with more than one line sounding
at a time
• Composing music with multiple independent lines first arose in the 10th century, and became popular around 1200
• Most early polyphonic compositions were written to celebrate major feasts
• Paris is where the most significant amount of polyphonic music was composed in the 12th and 13th centuries
• Composers from Paris who composed early
polyphonic music were were called the “ars antiqua”

Five sections
• Kyrie
• Gloria
• Credo
• Sanctus
• Agnus Dei
• The tradition of setting these five sections to music continues to this day
• Music of a Renaissance Mass is based upon imitation

• written about nonreligious
subjects
• Favorite subjects were love, duty, friendship,
ceremony, and poetry.
• Rose to popularity in the 12th century when the
troubadours were active
• “courtly love”

• Most of the music that survives was designed for use in the Roman Catholic liturgy

• a musical setting of a religious text, usually in
Latin, but not traditionally associated with the Catholic liturgy and Mass
• Four voices are normally present, but is sung by a small choir rather than by soloists
• Since composers were not bound by rules set out by the Council of Trent, they wrote richer and more unusual music for motets than they did for the fixed liturgical texts of the Mass
• The music is highly expressive, with a sensitive and compelling approach to the meaning of the text

• Organum was an early polyphonic composition
• Early organum harmonized the original
monophonic plainchant
• Later, one voice would slow down the original
plainchant to allow a second voice to floridly sing above it
• Note the difference between the original and
organum versions of “Alleluia pascha nostrum”

secular vocal pieces for a small group of singers, usually unaccompanied

most important part of the services at a catholic church

The Notre Dame School, important to the history of music because it produced the earliest repertory of polyphonic (multipart) music to gain international prestige and circulation.

The composers of the Notre-Dame school are all anonymous except for two, Léonin, or Leoninus (late 12th century), and Pérotin, or Perotinus (flourished c. 1200), both of whom are mentioned in a 13th-century treatise by an anonymous Englishman studying in Paris.

Antonio Vivaldi

Expressive style typical of some early music in which volume levels shift abruptly from soft to loud and back without gradual crescendos and decrescendos.

a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

A suite, in music, is an ordered set of instrumental or orchestral/concert band pieces. It originated in the late 14th century as a pairing of dance tunes and grew in scope to comprise up to five dances, sometimes with a prelude, by the early 1600s.

An oratorio (Italian pronunciation: [oraˈtɔːrjo]) is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias.

past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb cantare, “to sing”) is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir.

a dramatic work in one or more acts, set to music for singers and instrumentalists.
grand opera, light opera, musical, musical comedy, opéra bouffe, operetta
opera as a genre of classical music.
a building for the performance of opera.

In musical form and analysis, exposition is the initial presentation of the thematic material of a musical composition, movement, or section. The use of the term generally implies that the material will be developed or varied.

Doctrine of the affections, also called Doctrine Of Affects, German Affektenlehre, theory of musical aesthetics, widely accepted by late Baroque theorists and composers, that embraced the proposition that music is capable of arousing a variety of specific emotions within the listener.

The concerto grosso (pronounced, Italian for big concert(o), plural concerti grossi [konˈtʃɛrti ˈɡrɔssi]) is a form of baroque music in which the musical material is passed between a small group of soloists (the concertino) and full orchestra (the ripieno or concerto grosso).

he first or final movement of a solo concerto, concerto grosso, or aria may be in “ritornello form”, in which the ritornello is the opening theme, always played tutti, which returns in whole or in part and in different keys throughout the movement.

Ars nova refers to a musical style which flourished in France and the Burgundian Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages: more particularly, in the period between the preparation of the Roman de Fauvel (1310-1314) and the death of the composer Guillaume de Machaut in 1377 (whose poems were a large inspiration for …

church music sung as a single vocal line in free rhythm and a restricted scale (plainsong), in a style developed for the medieval Latin liturgy. For over 1000 years, has been the official music of the Roman Catholic Church

In music, a cantus firmus (“fixed song”) is a pre-existing melody forming the basis of a polyphonic composition.

Or arias in music, was originally any expressive melody usually, but not always, performed by a singer