A Comprehensive Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Music: Forms, Techniques, and Styles
Medieval Music
Duplum, Triplum, Quadruplum
A two-voice organum was called an organum duplum, a three-voice organum is triplum, and a four-voice is quadruplum. Voices above tenor were likewise named in ascending order: duplum, triplum, and quadruplum. Preotinus used organa for three or four voices.
Medieval Motet
13th Century- polyphonic with tenor vocal work using text from an existing discant clausula. It is in Latin or French, sacred or secular text. Tenor melodies are from chant or other melodies.
Rota
Medieval English polyphony: two or more voices sing the same melody and enter at different times, then repeat the melody until it stops.
Ars Nova
14th century France: use of new rhythmic notation. Duple and triple note values, syncopation, and rhythmic flexibility.
Isorhythm
Greek: Means equal with repetition in a voice part, usually the tenor part, of an extended pattern of durations through a section or entire composition.
Hocket
Means hiccup in French. 13th and 14th polyphony device that alternates rapidly between two voices, each resting while the other sings, as if a single melody is split between them.
Formes Fixes
Fixed forms used for poetic and musical repetition, featuring a refrain, were used in late medieval and fifteenth-century French chansons, also the ballade, rondeau, and virelai.
Ars Subtilior
Style of polyphony from the late 14th till early 15th century in southern France and northern Italy, using extreme complexity in rhythm and notation.
Renaissance Music
The Renaissance
The rebirth between the Middle Ages and the Baroque period. A revival of ancient culture and ideas and a focus on the individual, the world, and the scenes.
Humanism
A movement in the Renaissance period that used Greek and Roman culture to study things related to human knowledge and experience.
Contenance Angloise
The characteristic of Early 15th-century music English music. Use of consonance with harmonic 3rd and 6th in parallel motion.
Faburden
English improvised polyphony from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. A chant in the middle voice joined by an upper voice moving in parallel perfect fourth above and chant in parallel thirds below it, then to 5th below for ending the phrase.
Renaissance Motet
Polyphonic Mass Cycle: cycles of CHANTS for the MASS ORDINARY, consisting of one setting each of the KYRIE, GLORIA, SANCTUS, and AGNUS DEI (and sometimes also Ite, missa est); the POLYPHONIC MASS cycle of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries; and the SONG CYCLE of the nineteenth century.
Cantus-Firmus Mass/Tenor Mass: In Renaissance music, the cyclic mass was a setting of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass, in which each of the movements – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei – shared a common musical theme, commonly a cantus firmus, thus making it a unified whole.
Double Mensuration Canon: a musical canon in which the voices proceed simultaneously with the same subject at different speeds — called also prolation canon.
A paraphrase mass is a musical setting of the Ordinary of the Mass that uses as its basis an elaborated version of a cantus firmus, typically chosen from plainsong or some other sacred source.
Reformation
The 16th-century religious, political, intellectual, and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era.
Lutheran Chorale
A musical setting of a Lutheran hymn, intended to be sung by a congregation in a German Protestant Church service. The typical four-part setting of a chorale, in which the sopranos (and the congregation) sing the melody along with three lower voices, is known as a chorale harmonization.
Contrafactum
(pl. contrafacta) is”the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the musi”.
Italian Madrigal
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six.
Madrigalism
A term used to describe the illustrative devices used particularly in madrigals. This includes text painting, for example: changing the texture, tone, range, or volume to musically depict what the text is describing. See Madrigal choir and Madrigal.
The English Madrigal School
The brief but intense flowering of the musical madrigal in England, mostly from 1588 to 1627, along with the composers who produced them. The English madrigals were a cappella, predominantly light in style, and generally began as either copies or direct translations of Italian models.
The Lute Song
A generic form of music in the late Renaissance and very early Baroque eras, generally consisting of a singer accompanying himself on a lute, though lute songs may often have been performed by a singer and a separate lutenist.
Pavane and Galliard
Were a forerunner of the instrumental dance suites of the 17th century, and pavanes appear in a few early suites.
Intabulation
From the Italian word intavolatura, refers to an arrangement of a vocal or ensemble piece for keyboard, lute, or other plucked string instrument, written in tablature. … The exception is the 16th- and 17th-century Italian keyboard pieces which included both vocal and instrumental music.
Variation
A formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, orchestration, or any combination of these.
Polychoral Motet
In Western music, a motet is a mainly vocal musical composition, of highly varied form and style, from the late medieval era to the present. The motet was one of the pre-eminent polyphonic forms of Renaissance music.