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One of the most pronounced features of early Renaissance European art music was the increasing reliance on the interval of the third and its inversion, the sixth (in the Middle Ages, thirds and sixths had been considered dissonances, and only perfect intervals were treated as consonances: the perfect fourth the perfect fifth, the octave, and the unison).
Invention – Short composition in two-part counterpoint, usually for a keyboard instrument. Lament – Song expressing grief or sorrow. Mass – Sacred musical composition of the Eucharistic liturgy. Motet – Polyphonic choral composition based on a sacred text. Opera – Dramatic work in one or more acts, set to music for singers and ...
Metre – recurring pattern of beats providing a structured framework, while rhythm is the arrangement of notes and rests within this framework, creating the distinctive flow and character of a piece. Rhythm (in music) – variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds. Often reinforced with percussion instrumentation.
Date ranges of classical music eras are therefore somewhat arbitrary, and are only intended as approximate guides. Scholars of music history do not agree on the start and end dates, and in many cases disagree whether particular years should be chosen at all. The 20th century has exact dates, but is strictly a calendar based unit of time.
The compositional character of the motet changed entirely during the transition from medieval to Renaissance music, as most composers abandoned the use of a repeated figure as a cantus firmus. Guillaume Dufay was a transitional figure in this regard, writing one of the last important motets in the medieval, isorhythmic style, Nuper rosarum ...
Renaissance – cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era , but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe, this is a general use of the term.
The recorder family, one of the many consorts of instruments available to Renaissance composers. One key distinction between Renaissance and Baroque instrumental music is in instrumentation; that is, the ways in which instruments are used or not used in a particular work. Closely tied to this concept is the idea of idiomatic writing, for if ...
Early music generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1750). Originating in Europe, early music is a broad musical era for the beginning of Western classical music .