14 - Instrumental performance in the Renaissance

Summary

Between 1430 and 1600 performance practice for instrumental musicians turned on its head. The watershed development for players (and of course for music in general) was the arrival of a compositional approach which was based on the notion of through imitation as the basic texture. This took place just before 1500, and after this the ground rules for performers changed fundamentally. The purpose here will be to trace the course of how these changes played out. With the key date of 1500 providing the frame of reference, this study will divide into two parts. The first considers the development of the instruments, ensembles and performance techniques of the fifteenth century. This span in essence may be viewed as a culmination of medieval traditions. The second takes up what followed in the sixteenth century, a period in which tradition and innovation time and again came into sharp conflict.

Instrumental practices c. 1430–1500

Instrumentalists in the fifteenth century performed almost entirely without written music. Because they worked without music, their practices have remained veiled – but other sources, iconographical, theoretical and archival, tell us a great deal. We know that in the fifteenth century the tradition of the distinction of two categories of instruments (haut and bas, or loud and soft) held sway. The soft instruments were those with gentler timbres, the most important being the fiddle, the lute, the harp and the portative organ.