It has taken me sometime to locate the significance of music in the renaissance. Perhaps part of it has been the inherently visually inclined nature of our society in the ubiquitous television and motion pictures. Families are considered entirely underprivileged and out cast if they miss the most recent programs or can’t afford their own television. The result has engendered a societal understanding that is largely visually focused and secondarily concerned with auditory input. But perhaps this is a subject best reserved for later discussions. The Renaissance worldview produces an entirely other understanding of these components: the world of forms is most easily accessed through the auditory pathway, so that this was the preferred venue of performance (to some extent). The Renaissance holds a kind of rebirth of this Grecian ideal, in the sense that it is established in reflecting the importance of the harmonies of the universe. The perfect motions of the heavens, in their perfected circular flight patterns was thought to be accompanied by a series of harmonious and perfect sounds, according to the Courtier written by Castiglione. What can be done with this? How is it possible for humanity to attain and mimic perfection? The fact that the Renaissance thinkers saw this as a possibility evinces their extreme humanism, in recognition of mankind’s capability to achieve unlimited ambitions. It is interesting how the methodology applied to music in the Renaissance truly reflects the course’s delineated themes of the Renaissance: individualism, humanism, secularism, and historical self-consciousness. The appreciation for at least the versatile aspect of individualism is very strong in the composition of Renaissance composers, in that peoples are no longer continuing the long-standing tradition of monotonous plain chant in the church or else where, but begin to incorporate a versatility in ranges and parts: often times hopping around in response to one another in frattolas and working in harmony as if mimicking the patterns of a wave for the madrigal compositions. The ensuing versatility led to a true sense of Creativity in that the people knew that what music they were making was something entirely different, new and worthy of mention. Though it was based off the prime ideals achieved in ancient Greece, at least the recorded ideals of pursuing a controlled balance along with a precise mimicry of the perfect proportions in Pythagorean calculations, there was something significantly new and innovative in their works. No longer did the music have to follow a direct sense of direction in the church. Not every song is any longer caught up in fields of the trinity and new ways of pronouncing the dogma of the church in respect to the Virgin Mary and the likes. Rather, people adapt Petrarch’s texts, which are arguably anything but Christian, through text-painting, controlled dynamics, precise emotional response that is not over expressed but in a very classical-British-queen style states emotions simply, “I am feeling dismayed,” without an emotional expression, as well as a growing respect for trained tempos and pleasing sounds for the ear (especially during the high Renaissance). The emergence of secularism can even be seen in the note grouping seen in Renaissance music! Because peoples grouped in threes for the significance of the Trinity before the Renaissance, we can see the exceedingly ecclesiastical mindset occupying peoples of those times. And yet this seems not the case for Renaissance composers, who used whichever tempo matched the text best for each specific piece! What a Creative concept! Along with this Creative aspect we also witness the resurgence of literature as the primary vessel of composition, the controlled expressions, the sophistication in style and form, as well as the use of vernacular in music produces an utterly new respect for local speech over and against those of the church in pure Latin (another example of secularism)! We therefore see evinced a sort of obvious grouping in the music of the Renaissance as an utter embodiment of all things crucial to our renaissance mindset. This is only fitting in recognition that the auditory senses are the quickest access point to the world of forms, so that the pure form of music should be composed of the forms most crucial to the Renaissance worldview: A divine musical frenzy leading the way for the divine Renaissance frenzy.
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