Music of Renaissance

• “Renaissance," from Old French, meaning

"rebirth," usually in a spiritual sense. The
Renaissance period in western history was a
cultural movement that began in Florence, Italy in
approximately 1400 A.D. and gradually spread
through most (but not all) of Europe.
• The Renaissance marks the passing of European
society from an exclusively religious orientation
to a more secular one, and from an age of
unquestioning faith and mysticism to one of
belief in reason and scientific inquiry.
• Renaissance music is European music written
during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning
of the musical era is difficult, given the gradually
adopted "Renaissance" characteristics:
musicologists have placed its beginnings from as
early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.
 Early Renaissance
(1400–1467)
• This group gradually dropped the late
Medieval period's complex devices of
isorhythm and extreme syncopation, resulting
in a more limpid and flowing style. What their
music "lost" in rhythmic complexity, however,
it gained in rhythmic vitality, as a "drive to the
cadence" became a prominent feature around
mid-century.