Renaissance harmony embraced thirds medieval ears called rough
Music historians usually date Renaissance music to Europe’s fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—later than Renaissance painting timelines. Early style tracks Guillaume Du Fay’s cantilena world; the middle high point is Franco-Flemish four-part writing under Ockeghem and Josquin; late Counter-Reformation counterpoint peaks with Palestrina.
Textures thickened: four or more independent lines weaving polyphony became a hallmark, with blended rather than sharply contrasted voices and smoother chordal flow. Medieval theory had treated thirds and sixths as dissonances and prized perfect fourths, fifths, octaves, and unisons; early Renaissance art music leaned harder on those milder intervals. Modal practice only later yielded to tonal habits as root motions of fifths and fourths multiplied.
Printing after 1439 cheapened scores and treatises, feeding a bourgeois appetite for amateur music-making. Liturgical staples remained masses and motets; cantus firmus masses stretch a borrowed chant, often in the tenor, in longer values. Secular output—madrigals, chansons, dances—survives in bulk partly because print preserved what medieval popular song lost. Instrumental toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, and dances such as the pavane and galliard filled consorts of recorders or viols.
Humanism, recovered antiquity, commerce, and Reformation politics reshaped patronage and expression. Composers chased text painting and personal voice while counterpoint rules on dissonance tightened. Precursor forms of violin, guitar, lute, keyboard, bassoon, and trombone answered new ensemble needs. Late-twentieth-century early-music groups revived this repertoire for modern ears still startled that yesterday’s “sweet” third was once suspect. Late in the era, monody, the madrigal comedy and the intermedio pointed the way toward opera. Notation itself was looser than ours: pieces were copied only as separate parts, full scores were very rare, bar lines were absent and note values ran larger than modern ones, so that, as Margaret Bent warns, a modern transcription imposes precision the original never had. Church composers also began borrowing secular forms, turning the madrigal toward devotion in the madrigale spirituale alongside the laude.
Source: Renaissance music
