Music (Western/Classical): Renaissance Music

The beginning of the musical Renaissance has thus been placed as early as 1300 (by Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Besseler), as late as 1600 (by Edward J. Dent), and at various dates in between (see Blume, 1967). The consensus that has emerged with respect to the year 1430 owes much to Tinctoris and to a wish to maintain the use of the term Renaissance in some relation (even if uncomfortable) to its use in the study of history generally. The principal danger in its use derives from the extent to which, as framed in the 19th century and still widely used, it describes the Middle Ages in the essentially negative terms of shackles needing to be thrown off by modern heroes (as in Lowinsky, 1954). Such large-scale conceptions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as broad cultural phenomena run the risk of falsifying the individual works of both periods that they purport to explain and may inhibit an appropriate critical response to them.

The 15th century saw the emergence of a musical language that ultimately spread throughout all of Western Europe. This language and its dissemination was due in large measure to the work and travels of musicians from the Low Countries, including what is now part of northern France. These musicians, whose culture was principally French, were especially prominent in Italy in the 15th century. They have sometimes been described as constituting one or more schools spanning the 15th and 16th centuries. Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, in 1826, defined three "Netherlands schools," the first headed by Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1400–74), the second by Johannes Ockeghem (ca. 1410–97) and Jacob Obrecht (ca. 1450–1505), and the third by Josquin Desprez (ca. 1440–1521). In part because the term Netherlands is misleading with respect to the geographic and cultural origins of these composers, some more recent writers (including Willibald Gurlitt, Heinrich Besseler, and Paul Henry Lang) have preferred to term the first of these Burgundian and the second and third variously as Flemish and Franco-Flemish, respectively, or simply (combining the second and third) Flemish, Netherlandish, or Franco-Netherlandish (Gustave Reese). Each such label, however, entails its own compromises.

Renaissance, music of the. (2003). In D. M. Randel (Ed.), The harvard dictionary of music (4th ed.). Harvard University Press. Credo Reference: https://ezproxy.southern.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/harvdictmusic/renaissance_music_of_the/0?institutionId=2258