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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).
The organistrum had a single melody string and two drone strings, which ran over a common bridge, and a relatively small wheel. Due to its size, the organistrum was played by two people, one of whom turned the crank while the other pulled the keys upward. Pulling keys upward is cumbersome, so only slow tunes could be played on the organistrum. [4]
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 ...
On bowed instruments, the need to play strings individually with the bow also limits the number of strings to about six or seven; with more strings, it would be impossible to select individual strings to bow. (Bowed strings can also play two bowed notes on two different strings at the same time, a technique called a double stop.)
The cittern is one of the few metal-strung instruments known from the Renaissance period. It generally has four courses of strings (single, pairs or threes depending on design or regional variation), one or more courses being usually tuned in octaves, though instruments with more or fewer courses were made.
Generally, it had seven strings, five of them tuned like a violin with a low d added to the bottom (that is, d–g–d'–a'–e'') with two strings off the fingerboard which served as drones and were usually tuned in octaves. [3] Michael Praetorius shows the instrument with frets, although he is the only one to do so (see image at right). The ...
Chordophones – Instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings. Bowed string instruments – Instruments that are played by a bow rubbing the strings. Double bass • Cello • Viola • Violin. Plucked string instruments – Instruments that are played by plucking (pulling and releasing) the strings. Guitar • Harp • Lute ...
Soft consorts generally included the viols, flutes, recorders, krummhorns and other of the quieter instruments. Renaissance lute, detail of a Hans Holbein the Younger painting (1533) Instruments of the 16th century could be broken down into four main types: string, wind, percussion, and keyboard. The lute was the most popular stringed ...