Maróti Gábor

Early Renaissance Church Music on the Border of Two Style Periods

The development of musical literature in time and space generally did not occur in one place and at the same time. Since the 20th century, it has become generally characteristic that anyone can recall a composition demonstratively and with tools, regardless of style and place of origin.

Today, within a short time, we can listen to an American popular Christian hymn and an early motet belonging to the 13th century Flemish Gregorian style ars antiqua circle of authors. In the roughly 700 years between the development of sound recordings and the development of sound notation, a person could typically only hear any music if they sang or knew how to play an instrument (if they had one); and if they listened to the music of others, which most often required financial sacrifice, so it can be stated that most people could only come into contact with any musical phenomenon in church or in folk forums typical of the region.

Looking back within the framework of music historical categories, any kind of reception-historical evaluation of the transition between musical style changes only becomes perceptible, since the person of the time came into contact with music within a static style application framework: he heard it there and in the era where and when he lived. Meanwhile, musical style changes took place in regional processes of influence; that is, the composer socializing in a given region, during a study trip or work, traveled to another region, where he encountered completely different (new) technical solutions for him, which influenced his previous technical reflections. From these regional and personal variations, those musical literary highlights developed, which, linked to the person and work of an outstanding composer, led to the creation of paradigm-changing works.

Most people living on the border of stylistic periods (e.g., the Middle Ages-Renaissance) could not perceive the actual changes of the musical imperial age, since both vocal and instrumental music were tied to static musical communities (choirs, orchestras), and these groups generally did not change regions due to the public safety and other factors characteristic of the era. This is why, while church music in northern France in the mid-1400s still followed the medieval musical technical regularities of the ars nova and the isorhythmic arrangement, in Italy those present at cathedral and papal masses could already listen to the mature and stylistically defining works of early Renaissance church music. At that time, this perceptible difference in musical languages did not cause a break in style or any disapproval of taste on the part of either the leaders of the liturgy or the participating faithful. The Baroque style period was the first cultural historical environment to use a homogeneous musical language, in which most European musical regions expressed themselves in the same stylistic language. The reason for the acceptance-sociological aversions that occur among today's reflections on church music styles is generally not musical, but ideological; since the harmonic and structural formulas of the applied musical language do not justify the difficulties in recognizing the musical values expressed, neither from a stylistic theory nor from a formalistic point of view.