Tag: #Renaissance

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P is for Polyphony

Jan Van Eyck, madrigals in the Ghent altarpiece. Close-up photo from wikimedia.

The Renaissance brought opportunities for new trade goods, new ideas, new things to look at. Domes! Linear perspective! Oil paintings you could only see through a magnifier! While other arts were exploding in complexity and innovation, music also took a few baby steps.

One Note at a Time in Church

Once upon a time, in the 13th century, there was secular music and liturgical music, and never the twain shall meet. A bard could wander around with a lute, singing in the dim banquet hall of the baron for his supper … see Xena, The Witcher, Galavant… No duets; no big sound.

Meanwhile, in the churches, there were plenty of choruses. But those monks–or nuns–only sang one note at a time. This was plainchant. As wikipedia explains:

Harmony was considered frivolous, impious, lascivious, and an obstruction to the audibility of the words. Instruments, as well tain modes, were actually forbidden in the church because of their association with secular music and pagan rites.

“Polyphony”
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O is for Ottoman

The signature of Suleiman the Magnificent, 1512. From wikipedia.

The Renaissance seems to involve a lot of maps.

For some reason, ignorance being the most likely explanation, I always thought the Ottomans were Arabs. They were not; they were Muslims, but mixing up Ottoman and Arab is like mixing up French and German. Just because they share a religion didn’t make them the same. Different language, different customs, different leaders, entirely different culture.

The Ottomans were a major power during the Renaissance, controlling access to trade and threatening the Mediterranean and Western Europe. They held some of the most venerated cities: Constantinople, Athens, Baghdad, and Damascus. They were deadly serious about conquest, and they didn’t particularly have respect for the classics. Unlike the Arabs at their cultural peak, the Ottomans burned libraries. They were the reason Philip the Navigator went looking for trade routes to India going west.

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N is for Navigators

1400 map of the Atlantic, from Treaty of Tordesillas. Photo by kajmeister in Lisbon.

Have you ever wondered why the Brazilians speak Portuguese? All of South and Central America were overrun with Spanish colonizers–except for Brazil.

The pope brokered a deal with the countries on the Iberian Peninsula to split the world in two halves. The Portuguese got everything to the east, and the Spanish got everything to the west. Easy peasy. The Treaty of Tordesillas.

The Royal Bastard of Fond Memory

Portugal is the stubborn left arm of land on the Iberian Peninsula, never willing to be absorbed. They have their own language, distinctive music, and naval heroes. They timed their independence well, coming together as a country when Spain was still a shattered group of provinces. It helped to have a royal bastard who reigned for nearly half a century.

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