This principle was deduced from the study of the new found learning, being spread throughout Italy by Greek refugees, and the consequent awakened interest with which people regarded the remains of ancient architecture, sculpture and other art forms, constantly being unearthed in their own country.
With the adoption of the classical principle of truth to nature, naturally came the adoption of a second, that of the study of the antique as the true path to excellence in art or letters. We cannot fail to recognise these twin principles at work in the writings of the masters of the musical Renaissance.
A parallel to that truth to nature, which the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance proper acquired from the study of Greek art, may be traced in the efforts of the composers of the Renaissance, to make their music more and more flexible and responsive to the varied play of human sentiment.
Musicians as well as sculptors and painters studied antique art. Although for musicians not as profitable, the lessons to be learned from antiquity by musicians were not for educational purposes but more for inspiration and creativity.
Palestrina has already been mentioned as typifying the culmination of the musical development of the early ages, and now, in taking up the consideration of a new period, we have, in the first place, to concern ourselves with a man who was already forty eight years old when Palestrina was born. The Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, chapel master of St. Mark's at Venice.
Willaert may be considered as belonging at the same time to the old order and the new, for while, in common with his fellow citizen, Orlando di Lasso, some may say he was one of the last and greatest of the Flemish masters. At the same time, he must be reckoned as a forerunner of the musical reformers of the Renaissance.
Willaert, although he did not create any new forms in music, was one of the first to give musical expression to that love of colour, movement, and general spirit of nature, which are the outstanding characteristics of the Renaissance period.
The forms he employed were those used by his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. The Mass, Psalm, Motet, and Madrigal. However, in them all his colour sense was very strong, comparatively speaking, that is, for that tonal splendour, which led the Venetians in their enthusiasm to term the works of their cherished "Messer Adriano" aurum fotabik or "drinkable gold" might not be so readily apparent to a modern audience.
Although to a musician, instituting a comparison between the works of Willaert and those of earlier writers, the effects gained through the use of broadly contrasting harmonies by the Flemish master cannot fail to appear strikingly original.
While dealing with Venetian music mention must be made of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrielli, uncle and nephew, who represent a later development of the style of Willaert. Giovanni Gabrielli (1557-1612) carried his experiments in tone colour into the region of pure instrumental music; and his "Symphonic Sacrse," the first volume of which was published at Venice in 1597, entitles him to rank as one of the earliest of writers for the orchestra.
In the first volume of this work, there are sixteen pieces for from eight to sixteen instruments, and in the second volume, there are canzonets for as many as twenty-two instruments. These compositions are written for violins, cornets (not the cornets of modern times, but wooden instruments), and trombones.
After the time of Willaert and the Venetians, were the actual workers in the Renaissance of music, and the first of their achievements, the invention of the Music Drama or Opera.
Musical instruments are divided into three categories instruments of percussion, wind instruments, and stringed instruments. Very simple forms of these are known to every tribe on the earth, and in their simplest form may be said to lie ready to the hand of the savage. Thus almost any hard substance will furnish him with an instrument of the drum kind; the wind instrument is merely the stem of a reed or the horn of some animal; and the sonorousness of a cord or fibre in a state of tension could hardly escape observation in any land whose people numbered bows and arrows among their weapons, and the violin is no more than a surpassing development of the principle that a tightly-stretched cord can be made to produce sound by being set in vibration.
These, then, are the simplest forms in the production of music-the voice; the stretched cord; the reed-pipe or horn; and the drum, clapper, or rattle, these last being but varying applications of the same principle of percussion. These primary means of producing sound are known to all the primitive peoples of the world, and by most have been carried to a varying degree of development. Thus the ideas of solo singer or narrator alternating with a chorus, and of one body of voices alternating with another, are to found almost everywhere.
The knowledge that varying-sized sonorous bodies produce varying tones is also common to early man in general, and many tribes have, from slabs of wood or stone of a specially sonorous quality, devised an instrument of the harmonicon kind. The same principle of combination has also been widely applied to the wind instru?ment; and pipes of varying size, double-pipes, pandean pipes (the syrinx of the ancients), and pipes with finger holes, are to be found in all countries. A further step has been taken in cases where there has been what might be called a cross application of the fundamental principles of the different types of musical instrument. For instance, the discovery that the volume of sound produced from a stringed instrument can be increased by the addition of some contrivance of the sounding-board order, belongs to an early stage of development.
Such are the general types of musical instruments in use among uncivilised races. They are doubtless things of age-long use; but many centuries would appear to have affected their development very little and in the same way that we are accustomed to regard the races who use them as standing but on the threshold of human life. Therefore, we may perhaps, regard these simple instruments of to-day, and the vague musical systems with which they are allied, as presenting a parallel illustration of the state of matters from which the musical art of the earliest civilisation was evolved.
It should be noted that in the above statement we cannot include electronic organs and electric keyboards, common to the twenty first century. When we guess at the type of musical instruments that were used by early man, we can be sure that there was no Yamaha electone organs or Roland G70 and Ketron Audya arranger keyboards. Anyway, these modern keyboards would have been useless because they hadn't invented electricity yet.
Thus it is not very difficult to imagine what music may have been like in the earliest ages of the world; but of its history in those times we know nothing; and the earliest records extant give us but brief, disconnected glimpses of an art already of high antiquity. Our oldest sources of information upon the subject of music are to be found in the sculpture work of the Assyrians, the carvings and wall-paintings of the Egyptians, the Old Testament, and Homer. From these four sources, we can obtain a great amount of information, information, however, which it is impossible to present in any certain chronological sequence.
All that we can be sure of is that we see music as existing among four distinct races, and in each case, in a state of high development. But whether the musical systems of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Israelites, and Greeks were developed separately, or whether they were varying developments of a common inheritance derived from some still earlier civilisation, or whether each race had carried on a purely independent process of evolution from the beginning of time, are questions that may never be answered. All that we know is that music undoubtedly existed among these ancient nations, and existed in a state of high development; beyond that, we can only deal in guesswork.
Mike Shaw has sinced written about articles on various topics from Arts, Keyboard Synthesizer and Guide Guitar. Michael Shaw is an organ and keyboard teacher and sells sheet music and tutor books at his websites