no deviation was countenanced in this musique mesurée.
Though theorists continued to discuss music as a branch
of mathematics, in practice musicians became more text-
orientated, and the carefully devised numerical structures
present in so much earlier music were only occasionally
discernible.
Another trend in favor of verbal clarity, affecting mu-
sical idioms, manifested itself in ecclesiastical reforms, no-
tably those of the Council of TRENT. This assembly was
concerned about the lack of intelligibility of the text in
composed liturgical settings. A purging of musical idioms
was called for in order to right the position. Again there
were a number of extreme reactions, but a more rational
response to the council is evident in the works of most
composers, notably PALESTRINA. Polyphonic compositions
became organized in such a way that there was greater
coincidence of words between the differing vocal lines;
earlier this had generally been only a secondary consider-
ation.
Italy has been regarded as the cradle of the Renais-
sance but, at least until the second half of the 16th cen-
tury, most influential composers hailed from the
Netherlands and northern France. It was not until the
early 16th century that Italians themselves gained any sta-
tus as composers; in fact, foreigners were crucial in the
early development of the MADRIGAL, a genre that more
than any other embodied a sophisticated synthesis of Ital-
ian poetry and music. Many northerners found employ-
ment in Italy at sophisticated courts and in high
ecclesiastical posts. But it is questionable whether these
Franco-Flemish musicians, or indeed their music, can be
considered as products of the same cultural development
that gave birth to contemporaneous works of literature
and fine art. Their native Italian patrons were certainly
men of the Renaissance, but few were equipped to exert
any substantial influence on the manner in which their
servants actually wrote. They could, of course, control the
creative life of the musician as far as it fell to them to de-
cide which occasions merited musical participation; the
current level of prosperity determined what forces would
be available for any particular event.
While musicians, like other artists, were bound by the
strictures of their patrons, there was a developing sense of
the composer as a creator, rather than one who merely
sought to reflect the order already present in the created
universe. Theoretical writings of the Renaissance demon-
strate the marked decline in interest in musica theorica in
favor of a view of music in which sound and harmony
were all-important, and the ears were the ultimate judge
(see MUSIC THEORY). Trained ears were necessary to the
appreciation of the more recondite areas of musical per-
formaance. With the emphasis on this human-centered
notion of music came the practice of reflecting nature,
particularly in the madrigal.
Despite the dominance of the Netherlanders in this
period, music also flourished outside the courts and
churches where they were active. England had a strong
and individual tradition of florid church music which was
brought to an abrupt end by the Reformation. In Germany
a parallel, though less severe, hiatus was the result of reli-
gious changes there. In the Iberian peninsula liturgical
music was produced which could worthily be heard
alongside the sacred output of many musicians active in
Italy.
There is no doubt that the 15th and 16th centuries
were a flourishing period for musical composition. Con-
nections can be made between some of the tendencies
which emerge in the music of the period and those in fine
art, the field in which the term “Renaissance” was origi-
nally applied. It is perhaps wrong to emphasize too
strongly the term when dealing with the music of this pe-
riod. There are certain ways—the lingering interest in nu-
merology, for instance—in which the music is still a
product of the medieval era. On the other hand, Renais-
sance music so closely resembles that of the Baroque in its
attitude to the central issue of text that to delineate the
characteristics of a single period too minutely is to mis-
understand its place in the historical continuum.
See also: ARS NOVA; MUSIC PRINTING AND PUBLISHING
Further reading: Ignace Bossuyt, Flemish Polyphony
(Louvain, Belgium: Davidsfonds, 1994); Howard M.
Brown, Music in the Renaissance (1976; 2nd ed. Upper Sad-
dle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999); Isabelle Cazeaux,
French Music in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Ox-
ford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1975); Peter Le Huray, Music and the
Reformation in England, 1549–1660 (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1978); New Oxford
History of Music: Vol. III Ars Nova and the Renaissance,
1300–1540, eds Anselm Hughes and Gerald Abraham
(London: Oxford University Press, 1960; repr. 1988); ∼,
Vol. IV The Age of Humanism, 1540–1630, ed. Gerald Abra-
ham (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Claude V.
Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought
(New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press,
1986); Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance (rev. ed.
1959; repr. London: Dent, 1977); John E. Stevens, Music
and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen and
Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961; repr.
Cambridge University Press, 1979).musical instruments TINCTORIS’s late 15th-century dic-
tionary defines an instrument as a “body which causes
sound, either by nature or by skill.” In the latter category,
a tremendous variety of instruments was known and cul-
tivated during the Renaissance, affecting musical practice
at every level. In recent decades, a point of particular con-
tention has been the combination of voices and instru-
ments in the performance of written polyphony from this
period, with some scholars advocating an all-vocal (a33228 8 mmuussiiccaall iinnssttrruummeennttss