Prologue: The culture of Renaissance instrumental music

In Renaissance courts and cities, instrumental music was deeply woven into the fabric and function of everyday life, and was accessible to a wide, demographically diverse swath of the populace. Domestic entertainment, civic and village events, courtly ritual, and the functional, clockwork activities of a city, court, or militia, all demanded the contributions of instrumentalists. The wide diversity of these events involved players of an extraordinary range of backgrounds and training. This set of variables – a heterogeneous talent pool of players with a wide stylistic bandwith – has proved challenging for music historians seeking to present a cohesive history of this sprawling repertory. As opposed to vocal music of the Renaissance, which was a predominantly notated tradition that circulated in print and in manuscript, instrumental music was executed and transmitted through more diverse means and techniques. To be sure, much of the sixteenth-century lute, ensemble, and keyboard repertory is preserved in printed books and, to a lesser degree, in manuscript. However, this is balanced by an incalculable unwritten body of music that instrumentalists improvised, executed from memory, or adapted ex tempore from preexisting vocal works and melodies. The result was a transitory and highly volatile repertory, which in turn led to its neglect in modern historical commentary. This neglect would have seemed unthinkable for those who experienced the soundscape of the time. The clamor and calm of instruments during the Renaissance – what Kendrick has called “The sonic articulation of urban space” – were both widely public and inescapable, marking off virtually all important social events: civic wind players announced the hours of work and rest; trumpeters – probably the most frequently mentioned performers in any sampling of source documents – proclaimed the arrival of visitors into the gates, or signaled from ships or castle and city towers; lutes and viols performed during intervals at banquets and were the preferred instruments in the home; drums could be heard leading military formations, and along with shawms and sackbuts also charted the progress of the innumerable civic processions. Of course,