Transition From Renaissance To Baroque in Instrumental Music - Instrument Use and Aesthetics

Instrument Use and Aesthetics

A third major difference between Renaissance and Baroque music lies in which instruments were favored and used in performance. This is directly related to a larger shift in musical aesthetics, again stemming chiefly from the Florentine Camerata. In his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, Vincenzo Galilei, like Bardi, lauds the music of the Greeks, convinced that their music had "virtuous and wonderful effects" on listeners, while saying that modern composers did not know how to "express the conceptions of the mind how to impress them with the greatest possible effectiveness on the minds of the listeners." The idea that music could and ought to move or impress listeners and provoke certain archetypal emotional states evidenced a change in thinking about music. This went hand-in-hand with the transition from polyphony to monody discussed above, for a solo instrument or pair of instruments would ideally be not only be the sole melodic vehicle but also be capable of "impressing with the greatest possible effectiveness."

This necessarily led to a change in the types of instruments that were preferred by composers, for many instruments of the Renaissance were greatly limited in pitch range, being designed only to play a discreet role in a consort, as well as in dynamic scope. Entire families of instruments, such as racketts and shawms, were unsuited to carrying a solo melodic line with brilliance and expressivity because they were incapable of dynamic variation, and fell into disuse or at best provided color in string-dominated ensembles. The low instruments of the woodwind consorts were all but abandoned. Even in the string family, members of the viol family – except for the bass viol, which provided the necessary basso continuo – were gradually replaced by the new and highly virtuosic violin. The lute and viola da gamba continued being written for in an accompanimental role but could not compete with the violin in volume. The shawm was replaced by the oboe, which had a more refined sound and was capable of dynamic nuance. The cornett, which in the Renaissance tended to function as the soprano member of the sackbut family, survived in the early seventeenth century as a solo instrument, even having a large repertoire rivaling that of the violin, but eventually disappeared as well. However, Renaissance instruments did not vanish from use quickly; contemporary references indicate such instruments survived in chamber or military contexts well throughout the seventeenth century and even into the eighteenth.

As a general rule, however, one can see in the Baroque an overwhelming preference for those instruments that were capable of carrying a melodic line alone: those that were louder and higher, that could achieve a variety of dynamics, and that lent themselves to virtuosic display and emotional expression, none of which the Renaissance instruments were designed to do. Lower-pitched instruments, those that could not vary dynamics, or those that were cumbersome, were deprecated. Thus, the supremacy of melody in the Baroque mind had wide-reaching consequences in the instrumental choices made by composers and makers.