Western Music

V

The Renaissance

Reacting against the complexities of the ars nova, most early 15th-century composers preferred a simpler style of music with smoothly flowing melodies, smoother-sounding harmonies, and less emphasis on counterpoint. The first major impetus toward a simpler style came from the English composer John Dunstable. The graceful aspects of his style were soon adopted by composers on the continent of Europe, especially those employed by the dukes of Burgundy in northeastern France. These Burgundian composers were noted for their chansons, in which one voice part acted as a principal melody and one or two other parts served as an accompaniment. The Burgundians also developed the practice, begun by Machaut, of composing unified settings of the Ordinary of the mass. As a result of their activities, the mass became a monumental genre comparable in scope to the symphonies of the 19th century. Masses that used a cantus firmus were often based on chansons or other secular melodies rather than on Gregorian chant. This fact reflected the increasing influence of secular interests during the Renaissance.

In writing contrapuntal music, Renaissance composers relied heavily on imitation, the successive, closely spaced restatement in one or more voice parts of the same melodic idea. The technique of imitation had been in use since the late 14th century, but during the Renaissance it became a principal structural element in music. If one voice part imitated another consistently for a relatively long span of time, the two voices formed a canon. Pairs of voices in Renaissance music sometimes moved in canon throughout an entire piece or section while shorter imitations were occurring among the other voice parts.

The most versatile early Renaissance composer was Guillaume Dufay. He wrote motets that approached the complexity of the style of ars nova as well as chansons in the newer, lighter manner. The outstanding composer of chansons was Gilles Binchois.

The influence of Burgundian composers declined by the mid-15th century. From about 1450 until about 1550 most of the important musical posts in Europe were held by composers born in present-day Holland, Belgium, and the adjoining French territories. These composers are often called Netherlanders after the name of their native region.

---

---

In general, the Netherlanders preferred a homogeneous sound, for example, that made by an unaccompanied chorus. The predominant texture of their music was contrapuntal, with all voice parts equal in importance. These musical features contrasted with the typical Burgundian sound, in which each voice part had its own color (for instance, a solo voice accompanied by two different solo instruments), and in which one voice dominated the others.

The Netherlanders continued the Burgundian tradition of composing chansons, motets, and masses. Although many excellent masses were composed in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the mass was not as exciting a challenge then as it had been to the Burgundians. The basic techniques for unifying an entire mass had become the common property of all composers, and mass texts, which always remain the same, suggested fewer new kinds of musical setting. Largely for these reasons, the motet became the vehicle for experimentation. The texts, drawn from all parts of the Bible as well as from other sources, evoked many illustrative musical ideas from composers. Chansons of the 16th century moved away from the simple charm of the Burgundian love songs. They tended either to be elaborately contrapuntal or else filled with witty musical allusions to birdcalls, the cries of street vendors, and so forth. The chansons of the Parisian composers Claudin de Sermisy and Clément Janequin exemplify the latter style.

The leading Netherlanders were Johannes Okeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, and Orlando di Lasso. Among the most prominent Italian musicians of the late Renaissance was Giovanni da Palestrina. His music typifies the even flow of choral polyphony that was the chief ideal of the Renaissance musical style. Other noted musicians of the time included the English organist and composer William Byrd and the Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. Important to the growth of music was the development of techniques for printing musical compositions. First devised about 1500 by the Venetian printer Ottaviano dei Petrucci, such techniques were soon in use in Antwerp, Nürnberg, Paris, and Rome.

VI

The Baroque Era

In the late 16th century, when Renaissance polyphony was prevalent, new developments in Italy were beginning to change the sound and structure of music. Many Italian musicians disliked the polyphonic style of the Netherlanders. Wishing to emulate their image of classical Greek music, they favored less intricate compositions marked by frequent emotional contrasts, a readily understandable text, and an interplay of various voices and instruments. Such elements became especially prominent in opera, a genre first performed in Florence at the end of the 16th century and greatly developed in the 17th century by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. Other new genres of vocal music included the cantata and the oratorio. See also Baroque Music.

Instrumental music also became increasingly prominent during the 17th century, often in the form of a continuous contrapuntal work with no clear-cut divisions into sections or movements; it bore such names as ricercare, fantasia, and fancy. A second type of composition was made up of contrasting sections, usually in both homophonic and contrapuntal textures; this type was known as the canzona or sonata. Many instrumental pieces were based on an already existing melody or bass line; they included the theme and variations, passacaglia, chaconne, and chorale prelude. Pieces in dance rhythms were often grouped together into suites. Finally, composers developed pieces in improvisatory styles for keyboard instruments; these pieces were called preludes, toccatas, and fantasias.

With the rise of new genres in the 17th century, some of the basic concepts of musical structure were transformed, especially in Italy. Instead of writing pieces in which all voices from soprano to bass participated equally in the musical activity, composers concentrated on the soprano and bass parts and merely filled in the remaining musical space with chords. The exact spacing of the chords was unimportant, and composers often allowed a keyboard player to improvise them. The terms basso continuo, thoroughbass, and figured bass refer to the bass line and the chordal filling, which formed a texture used in all types of music, particularly in solo songs.

Another important 17th-century innovation changed the fluid style of much late Renaissance music into one marked by numerous contrasting elements; it was known variously as concertato, concertate, and concerto, from concertare (Latin, “to struggle side by side”). The contrasts occurred on many musical levels, such as contrasting instruments or contrasting densities of sound, with, for example, a single instrument opposed by a group of instruments; contrasting rates of speed; and contrasting degrees of loudness. These contrasting features were made to compete or alternate with one another in order to produce an aggressive, excited musical style, which was applied to music for all instruments as well as for the voice and was used in all forms and genres.

Outstanding composers of the 17th and early 18th centuries included the following: the Italians Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti, and Antonio Vivaldi; the Germans Dietrich Buxtehude and Heinrich Schütz; the Englishman Henry Purcell; the Italian Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lully; and the Frenchman Jean Philippe Rameau.

Toward the end of the 17th century, the system of harmonic relationships called tonality began to dominate music. This development gave music an undercurrent of long-range relationships that helped to smooth out some of the abruptness of contrasts in the earlier baroque style. By the early 18th century composers had gained a firm control over the complex forces of tonality. By this time, too, they had largely abandoned the idea of frequent shifts in mood and had begun to favor a more moderate and unified approach. Often an entire piece or movement was an elaboration of one emotional quality, called an affect. The control over tonality and the emphasis on single moods were largely responsible for the feeling of security and inevitability in the music of this time, including the music of the two greatest late baroque German composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.

VII

Preclassical and Classical Periods

Beginning around 1720 new developments once again began to undermine the prevailing musical style. Younger musicians found baroque counterpoint too rigid and intellectual; they preferred a more spontaneous musical expression. In addition, the late baroque ideal of establishing a single emotional quality and maintaining it throughout a composition seemed constricting to these younger composers.

The reaction against baroque style took different forms in France, Germany, and Italy. In France the new current, often called rococo or style galant (French, “courtly style”), was represented by the French composer François Couperin. This style emphasized homophonic texture, that is, melody with chordal accompaniment. The melody was ornamented with embellishments such as short trills. Instead of an uninterrupted stream of music, as in a baroque fugue, French composers wrote pieces consisting of combinations of separate phrases, as in music for dance. The typical composition was short and programmatic, that is, it portrayed nonmusical images such as birds or windmills. The harpsichord was the most popular instrument, and many suites were written for it.

In northern Germany the preclassical style was called empfindsamer Stil (German, “sensitive style”). It encompassed a wider range of contrasting emotions than the style galant, which tended to be merely elegant or pleasant. German composers usually wrote longer compositions than the French and used a variety of purely musical techniques to unify their pieces. They did not rely on nonmusical images, as did the French. The Germans thus played a significant role in the development of abstract forms, such as sonata form, and in the development of large instrumental genres, such as concerto, sonata, and symphony.

In Italy the preclassical style did not have a special name, perhaps because it did not break sharply with music of the immediate past. Italian composers, however, contributed a great deal to the development of new genres, especially to the symphony. The Italian opera overture, often called a sinfonia, usually had no musical or dramatic connection with the opera it introduced. Italian musicians sometimes played opera overtures in concerts, and composers eventually began to write independent instrumental pieces following the format of the overture. This format consisted of three movements, the first and last in fast tempos, and the middle one in a slow tempo. Within each movement the progression of musical ideas usually followed a pattern that eventually evolved into sonata form.

Once Italian composers had established the idea of writing an independent instrumental sinfonia, the Germans took over the idea and applied much intellectual ingenuity to it. The principal German centers of activity were at Berlin, Mannheim, and Vienna. Largely as a result of German activities, differentiated musical forms, genres, and media arose. A distinction was made between the medium of chamber music, in which one instrument plays each part, and the medium of symphonic music, in which several instruments play each part. Within the category of chamber music, composers began to distinguish among several media, such as the string quartet, the string trio, and the keyboard sonata with violin obbligato. For the orchestral medium, composers wrote not only symphonies but also concertos for solo instrument and orchestra.

The symphony, sonata, concerto, and string quartet all followed similar formal outlines. They were in three or four movements, one or more of which was in sonata form. Made possible by the sophisticated use of tonality that had developed by the end of the baroque era, sonata form arose in the mid-18th century and exploited the complex web of harmonic relationships among separate tones and chords within a key, and among different keys. Sonata form was based on a movement away from and back to a principal key. To this was added the statement of opposing themes at the outset of a movement and the elaboration or separate development of one or all later on.

The climax of 18th-century musical development came at the end of the century in the music of a group of composers known as the Viennese classical school. The most important of these composers were Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. See also Classical Style.

Opera in the 18th century also underwent many changes. In Italy, where it was born, opera had lost much of its original character as a drama with music. Instead it had become a series of arias designed to display the talents of singers. Several European composers reintroduced instrumental interludes and accompaniments as an important element. They made greater use of choral singing and introduced greater variety into the forms and styles of the arias. They also tried to combine groups of recitatives, arias, duets, choruses, and instrumental sections into unified scenes. The most important reformer was the Bavarian-born Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose most influential operas were written in Vienna and Paris from 1764 to 1779. Opera in the classical period climaxed in the stage works of Mozart, in which every aspect of the vocal and instrumental lines contribute to the plot development and characterization.

VIII

The Romantic Era

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Viennese classical style as exemplified in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven prevailed throughout Europe. This style provided so satisfactory a means for achieving the musical goals of the time that almost every composer wrote in some variation of it. The style tended to become a mere formula in the hands of less skilled composers. Partly for this reason, experimenting musicians between 1810 and 1820 gradually began to reach out in new directions.

The more adventurous musicians no longer felt that it was essential to coordinate all elements in their music so as to maintain clear formal outlines. They began to value other musical goals more than the goal of formal clarity. Instead of moderation, they began to value such qualities as impulsiveness and novelty. They might, for instance, write an unusual progression of chords even though the progression did not contribute to the overall harmonic direction of a composition. Similarly, if the sound of a particular instrument seemed especially attractive during the course of a symphony, they might write a long solo passage for this instrument, even though the solo distended the shape of the symphony. In this and other ways 19th-century composers began to exhibit a romantic, as opposed to a classical, view of their art. The aesthetic goals of romanticism were especially valued in Germany and central Europe. The instrumental works of Franz Schubert, an Austrian, and the piano music and operas of Carl Maria von Weber, a German, were an early manifestation of this development in music.

The romantic composers were often inspired by literary, pictorial, and other nonmusical sources. Consequently, program music, or music that follows a nonmusical plan, was widely cultivated, leading to the development of the symphonic poem. The French composer Hector Berlioz and the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt became especially prominent in this genre. Poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries formed the basis of art songs in which the composer portrayed with music the imagery and moods of the texts. The German art song is known by its German name, lied. Many hundreds of lieder were composed in the 19th century, the most successful being written by Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and, late in the century, Richard Strauss.

The ideal 19th-century genre was opera. Here, all the arts were joined together to produce grand spectacles, highly charged emotional situations, and opportunities for spectacular singing. In France, Gasparo Spontini and Giacomo Meyerbeer established the style called grand opera. Another Frenchman, Jacques Offenbach, developed a comic-opera style called opéra bouffe. Other important French opera composers were Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet. In Italy, Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini continued the 18th-century Italian tradition of bel canto (Italian, “beautiful singing”). In Italy during the second half of the century, Giuseppe Verdi tempered the emphasis on bel canto by stressing the dramatic values inherent in human relationships. Sentimental love and violent emotions were stressed by Giacomo Puccini. In Germany, Richard Wagner created an opera style called music drama, in which all aspects of a work contributed to the central dramatic or philosophical purpose. Unlike Verdi, who stressed human values, Wagner was usually more concerned with legend, mythology, and such concepts as redemption. Wagner developed the use of short fragments of melody and harmony, called leitmotifs (German, “leading motives”), to represent people, objects, concepts, and so on. These fragments were repeated in the vocal or orchestral parts whenever the thing they represented recurred in the actions or thoughts of the characters.

During the 19th century a tradition of abstract, or nonrepresentational, music was maintained in symphonies and chamber music. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, and the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner were especially important in this regard. The Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote symphonic and chamber works as well as operas and program music. Works without programs but with freely devised forms were written for the piano by the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.

In all musical genres, a high value was placed on uniqueness of expression. This gave rise not only to widely differing personal styles of composition but to personality cults of virtuoso performers and conductors. Two of the best known were Liszt and the Italian violinist Nicolò Paganini. The Austrian conductor and composer Gustav Mahler wrote symphonies that incorporated references to his personal life.

By the end of the century the romantic style had modified the language of music in several ways. The taste for unusual chord progressions had brought about a disintegration of tonality. Composers, especially Wagner, made increasing use of chromaticism, a harmonic style with a high proportion of tones outside the prevailing key. Folk music idioms became widespread, particularly on the part of composers from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and Spain. Among these composers were the Russians Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov; the Czechs Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana; and Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian. Later composers who made use of folk elements included Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an American; Carl Nielsen, a Dane; Jean Sibelius, a Finn; and Manuel de Falla, a Spaniard.

These folk idioms, along with others discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, reintroduced into art music many older concepts of harmony and rhythm. The same effect resulted from systematic researches into the history of music, which were begun in the 19th century. With the disintegration of tonality, cohesion in a piece of music was less and less dependent on harmonic movement and more and more dependent on the ebb and flow of intensities and densities of sound. The use of sound as a structural element in music was one characteristic of the late romantic French style called impressionism, which was developed by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Other French composers worked in a more satirical style; these included Francis Poulenc and Erik Satie.

IX

The 20th Century

The high value placed on individuality and personal expression in the romantic era grew even more pronounced in the 20th century. This was partly the result of several features of 20th-century life. More people from more social and geographic backgrounds than ever before were able to study music and develop their aptitude for composition. An enormous range of tastes and skills thus became a feature of modern composition. Radios and recordings brought music from once-remote countries in South America and the Far East to the attention of musicians in all parts of the world. The speed of modern communications made it possible for listeners to evaluate innovations more quickly than ever before. The result of these features is that today originality is more highly valued than in any previous era, and that diversity and rapid change have become the most prominent general features of music.