Middle Ages and Renaissance

Middle Ages and Renaissance
Name:
Institution:
Course:
Date:
In the period of the middle ages and the renaissance, music underwent a great transformation and took on new styles that ultimately shaped the content in music today. This paper seeks to compare and contrast music from the Middle Ages and the renaissance in order to shed more light on the structure of music in both periods. Both periods witnessed key transitions that even now influence the structure of Western music.
During the medieval ages, monophony characteristics of music changed into polyphony while, in the renaissance period, the shell harmony was replaced by true harmony in the texture of music (Snyder 372). Snyder observes that both the medieval and renaissance music were based on a set of eight scales, which were known as the church modes. He notes that while the church modes were exemplary aids in the creation of smooth melodies, they were, however unsuitable for the composition of harmonies that were beginning to become more popular towards the end of the renaissance period.
During the medieval ages, music was mostly sacred, set to Latin text, and sung unaccompanied by musical instruments (Wilson, 368). Wilson notes that in the periods commonly referred to as the dark ages; the musical works were organized into a church repertoire under Pope Gregory I and came to be known as the Gregorian chant. The Gregorian chant was the only music allowed in church and composers kept the melodies simple and pure. The Gregorian chants were monophonic vocal works, which were historically performed during the Roman Catholic ceremonies and events (Wilson, 373). He observes that the evolution of the polyphony addition to music began late into the Dark Ages when some of the musicians began to incorporate some of the Gregorian chants with a parallel melody line. He further explains that a fully developed system of incorporating polyphony into the music emerged in the later medieval period where each line of the music had an independent rhythm and pitch movement with the number of lines expanding. With increased complexity of polyphonic music, there was a need to develop another system of music to better deal with such complexities. Staff notation was developed whereby the melo...