Transition from Renaissance to Baroque in instrumental music
The transitions emanated from the cultural centers of Northern Italy, then spread to Rome, France, Germany, and Spain, and lastly reached England .
With the Baroque's emphasis on a soloist as virtuoso, the range of pitches and characteristic techniques formerly found only in virtuosic improvisation, as well as the first dynamic markings, were now written as the expected standard.
By the early Baroque, however, they had clearly found their way into writing when composers began specifying desired instrumentation, notably Claudio Monteverdi in his opera scores.
[4] Another crucial distinction between Renaissance and Baroque writing is its texture: the shift from contrapuntal polyphony, in which all voices are theoretically equal, to monody and treble-bass polarity, along with the development of basso continuo.
"[3] While Bardi's letter dealt with vocal music, the principle of a single, clear melody dominating a simple accompaniment easily carries over to the instrumental realm.
Furthermore, the new musical genres that appeared in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, especially the instrumental sonata, revealed a transition in ways of thinking about composition and performance, from a collaboration of equals to a soloist backed up by a relatively unimportant accompaniment.
In the realm of English ayres, for instance, this meant that composers such as John Dowland and Adrian Le Roy were already thinking of a dichotomous melody and bass, filled in not with counterpoint but with chords "planned for harmonic effect.
In his Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, Vincenzo Galilei, like Bardi, lauds the music of the Greeks, convinced that their music had "virtuous and wonderful effects" on listeners, while saying that modern composers did not know how to "express the conceptions of the mind [or] how to impress them with the greatest possible effectiveness on the minds of the listeners.
Entire families of instruments, such as racketts and shawms, were unsuited to carrying a solo melodic line with brilliance and expressiveness because they were incapable of dynamic variation, and fell into disuse or at best provided color in string-dominated ensembles.
[1] The cornett, which in the Renaissance tended to function as the soprano member of the sackbut family, survived in the early seventeenth century as a solo instrument, even having a large repertoire rivaling that of the violin, but eventually disappeared as well.
In the late sixteenth century, however, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli at St Mark's Basilica in Venice began experimenting with placing diverse group of performers – instrumental and vocal – in antiphonal locations around the vast interior of the church, in what became known as cori spezzati (divided choirs).
[7] Such music allowed for highly dramatic effects, with sudden shifts in volume, articulation, timbre and texture, for not all of the choirs were the same size, and could be made up of radically different combinations of voices and instruments.
