Transition From Renaissance To Baroque in Instrumental Music - Texture

Texture

Another crucial distinction between Renaissance and Baroque writing is its texture: the shift from contrapuntal polyphony, in which all voices are theoretically equal, to monody and treble-bass polarity, along with the development of basso continuo. In this new style of writing, solo melody and bass line accompaniment were now the important lines, with the inner voices filling in harmonies.

The application of this principle to instrumental writing was partly an extension of the forces of change in vocal writing stemming from the Florentine Camerata and their head Count Giovanni de' Bardi, who deliberately sought to change the way music was written, and adopted an overarching goal of a music renascence. In a c. 1580 letter to Giulio Caccini, a composer and member of the Camerata, Bardi decried counterpoint's obscuring of the text in vocal settings and advocates a return to the music of the ancient Greeks, which he believed consisted of a single singing line and simple accompaniment, allowing direct, intelligible expression of the text. He instructed Caccini to "make it your chief aim to arrange the verse well and to declaim the words as intelligibly as you can." While Bardi's letter dealt with vocal music, the principle of a single, clear melody dominating a simple accompaniment easily carries over to the instrumental realm. This is seen in the proliferation of hitherto unknown solo instrumental sonatas beginning shortly after Caccini's Le Nuove Musiche in 1601.

The rise of instrumental monody did not have its roots exclusively in vocal music. In part, it was based on the extant sixteenth-century practice of performing polyphonic madrigals with one voice singing the treble line, while the others were played by instruments or by a single keyboard instrument. Thus, while all voices were still theoretically equal in these polyphonic compositions, in practice the listener would have heard one voice as being a melody and the others as accompaniment. Furthermore, the new musical genres that appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, especially the instrumental sonata, revealed a transition in ways of thinking about composition and performance, from a collaboration of equals to a soloist backed up by a relatively unimportant accompaniment. In addition, even in the mid sixteenth century, most works for voice and lute were conceived specifically as such. In the realm of English ayres, for instance, this meant that composers such as John Dowland and Adrian LeRoy were already thinking of a dichotomous melody and bass, filled in not with counterpoint but with chords "planned for harmonic effect."