‘Renaissance’ is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’. It has been used since the nineteenth century to describe the period between c. 1300 and 1600. Three hundred years is a long time for a single historical or cultural period, and the strain shows in any attempt to define the term ‘Renaissance’. The cultural phenomenon central to the Renaissance was a revival of interest in the literature, philosophy and architecture of classical antiquity. ...
Among the earliest humanist projects was the recovery and study of classical architecture. Many buildings from the Roman period still stood (some stand today); others were in ruins from which the originals could just be discerned. Study of these remains with reference to recently recovered classical architectural treatises led to a new school of architecture. The leader of this school was Filippo Brunelleschi. A native Florentine, Bruneschelli travelled to Rome ...
One of the best-known Renaissance music manuscripts, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, was compiled by the musician Francis Tregian (1574–1619) during his imprisonment in London for recusancy from 1609 until his death. The manuscript contains an unusually wide-ranging collection of nearly 300 keyboard pieces by English composers (many of them also known for their Catholic sympathies), including Tallis, Byrd and Bull. Continental musicians such as Sweelinck are also represented and there ...
Once hailed by the Pope as ‘Defender of the Faith’ against Martin Luther, Henry VIII made an about-face when he declared himself primate of the Church of England in order to grant himself a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The political, religious and social results of Henry’s action are well-known; the impact on music was also far-reaching. In the century leading up to 1536, England had established ...
Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (‘The Book of the Courtier’) was published in 1528 and became the most influential book of manners of its time. It was still being reprinted well into the eighteenth century and was translated into many languages. The Courtier presents a series of evening conversations purported to have taken place at the court of Urbino, some 20 years before the book’s publication, in 1506–07, during ...
Although types of lute can be found in many societies, both ancient and modern, the structure and indeed name of the Renaissance lute derived from an Arabic instrument, al-ud (‘the ud’). Like the Western Renaissance lute, the ud consisted of a large curved soundbox, a short neck ending in a peg box and a series of strings to be plucked. As the Spanish-Portuguese peninsula consisted of a patchwork of Christian ...
Cantus firmus technique, in which a pre-existent melody forms the basis of a new composition, lends itself well to musical homage, and it is likely that the selection of cantus firmi was often influenced by the dedicatee or patron. This might mean the choice of a favourite song, or a section of plainchant whose text held some personal meaning for the dedicatee. In the case of Josquin’s Missa Hercules Dux ...
The archlute had two peg boxes, one at the end of the neck and one just under half way up. The strings to be stopped ran to the lower one and were plucked by the fingernails of the right hand. One-and-a-half times as long, the unstopped strings ran to the higher one and were not touched by the player – they simply resonated in sympathy with the plucked notes. The ...
The cittern was a plucked stringed instrument of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was strung with wire and played not with the right fingers but by using a quill plectrum, rather like the cittole and gittern of the medieval era. The body was flat both back and front, with a pear-shaped face. The fingerboard lay on the front of a short neck ending in a peg box, usually carved. ...
The playing mechanism of the clavichord was quite different from that of the harpsichord family. It was a simpler lever system, working like a seesaw. As the player’s fingers landed on the key, its other end rose and struck the string from below. In sound production, the clavichord was thus similar to the dulcimer and the piano. But, unlike on the piano, performers could keep the hammer in touch with ...
Instantly recognizable, the crumhorn (also known as the krummhorn or cromorne) was made out of wood – usually boxwood – that had been bent rather than carved. The bell turned dramatically upwards like a hook, and the narrow cylindrical body flared only slightly, making the instrument lower in pitch than one with a conical bore of the same length. Like the recorder, there was a thumb-hole at the back of ...
During the sixteenth century the harp was in danger of falling into disuse as chromatic keyboards raised composers’ expectations of what plucked strings could achieve. But in the third quarter of the century, instrument-builders began to experiment with the double harp, constructed with a second row of strings running next to the first. Arrangements of strings varied as makers attempted to discover how to distribute them between the two rows ...
Between medieval and Renaissance times, the harp underwent some simple developments: it grew a little larger and the number of strings increased to 24. Other than that, it was made and played in the same way as it had been in the Middle Ages. An open triangle supported a sounding box on the side against the player’s body and the player could reach the strings from both sides. There were ...
Most famous of all the early keyboard instruments, the harpsichord was first mentioned in 1397, and the earliest representation to have survived dates from 1425. The harpsichord rose to prominence in the sixteenth century and flourished for a while before its harmonic limitations caused its gradual displacement by the piano in the eighteenth century. The harpsichord consisted of a wooden frame on which a series of metal strings were mounted, starting ...
The Renaissance lute had a flat front and a rounded back made out of a series of curved strips of wood (usually yew or sycamore) fitted together. At the centre of the front was the soundhole, called the ‘rose’, which was round and intricately decorated. The instrument’s neck was glued and nailed to the top block of the body, a thick lump of wood. The strings ran from where they ...
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