![]() Modern woodwind and brass instruments like the bassoon and trombone also appeared extending the range of sonic color and power. Many familiar modern instruments (including the violin, guitar, lute and keyboard instruments), developed into new forms during the Renaissance responding to the evolution of musical ideas, presenting further possibilities for composers and musicians to explore. ![]() Music also became more self-sufficient with its availability in printed form, existing for its own sake. ![]() Courts employed virtuoso performers, both singers and instrumentalists. Popular secular forms such as the chanson and madrigal spread throughout Europe. Secular music absorbed techniques from sacred music, and vice versa. Composers found ways to make music expressive of the texts they were setting. Music, increasingly freed from medieval constraints, in range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation, became a vehicle for new personal expression. Opera arose at this time in Florence as a deliberate attempt to resurrect the music of ancient Greece. By the end of the sixteenth century, Italy had absorbed the northern influences, with Venice, Rome, and other cities being centers of musical activity, reversing the situation from a hundred years earlier. These musicians were highly sought throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, where churches and aristocratic courts hired them as composers and teachers. Relative political stability and prosperity in the Low Countries, along with a flourishing system of music education in the area’s many churches and cathedrals, allowed the training of hundreds of singers and composers. Dissemination of chansons, motets, and masses throughout Europe coincided with the unification of polyphonic practice into the fluid style which culminated in the second half of the sixteenth century in the work of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria and William Byrd. Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class. The invention of the Gutenberg press made distribution of music and musical theory possible on a wide scale. From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school. As in the other arts, the music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the early modern period: the rise of humanistic thought the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of ancient Greece and Rome increased innovation and discovery the growth of commercial enterprise the rise of a bourgeois class and the Protestant Reformation. Consensus among music historians–with notable dissent–has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as understood in other disciplines. Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance.
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