It’s been a while since I posted, but I have been diligently listening and exploring the works of Renaissance composers and I have a lot to share! First, it never dawned on me that the work of these composers would be almost exclusively sacred Christian music. In thinking about it, and considering the historical context, it’s embarrassingly obvious that the subject matter for these composers would be religious in nature. Here’s a list of who I’ve been spending my time with:

John Dunstable, Guillaume DuFay, Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, John Taverner, and Thomas Tallis

What has stood out (apart from what I just mentioned above) is how much evolution can come from music that sounds so similar if listened to casually. When I first began listening to this era, it was vaguely familiar. There was lots of chanting, and it sounded like something from a movie set in the 15th or 16th century. It also sounded mostly the same. I remember thinking that this was going to be a slog to get through because it had what I thought might be the first case of same song syndrome ever!

Then I began to really listen. Suddenly, the nuances of the music phrases and motifs started to emerge. When listening to the earlier work of Dunstable, I was really excited to hear how raw it sounded. I got a sense of what would be the building blocks of what would come later from composers like Ockeghem and desPrez. But what really blew me away was how much more complex the music became with the works of Taverner and Tallis! I started to hear counterpoint melodies and interwoven themes that weren’t present in what I heard from Dunstable and Dufay.

Then what happened this morning was really striking. I was listening to a much more modern collection of music (Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz album), and heard the first of what I hope will be dozens upon dozens of connections across genres and time. The song Revelation Mother Earth was playing and Randy Rhoads‘ solo came up (5:12) and although the tempo was much faster, I could hear Rhoads’ melodic guitar lines echoing what I’ve been listening to from the Renaissance! I think what stood out most how the ascending lines wove with the chord progression in a way that mimicked Tallis’ compositions from my listening this week. It’s no secret that Randy Rhoads was a champion of neo-classical metal guitar, but this really stood out to my ears. I may have heard Revelation Mother Earth close to a thousand times over the past 35+ years and it was like I was hearing it for the first time.