When the Middle Ages ended in 1450, it was the Renaissance that picked up where we left off. In the 50 years remaining that century, the Gutenberg Bible was created and Christopher Columbus discovered America. Between 1500 and 1600, there was a reformation and William Shakespeare came out with his romantic tale of forbidden love: Romeo and Juliet.
In this era, there was a rebirth of human creativity, exploration, adventure, curiosity, and a sense of individualism; it was known for its humanism, and people back then were mesmerized by the Greek and Roman cultures and focused on terrestrial life and its winnings rather than life after death. That was a big difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Religion. The Middle Ages focused in on being a religious society, all citizens having unquestioning faith in God, and focused on the afterlife. In the
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Music was still more vocal than instrumental, in fact, this was considered the “Golden Age of a cappella”. Sacred music was called “motet”, which is a polyphonic choral work that is not part of the mass, but is similar in that it was in sacred Latin text. The only difference between mass and motet was the text; in mass, there was ordinary and there was proper, but in motet, there was simply “non-mass text”. There was another type of music that almost completely differed from both mass and motet, called “madrigal”. The Madrigal was known for being vernacular and composed of several solo voices set to a short love poem. Where motet was choral, sacred, Latin, and composed of “non-mass texts”, The Madrigal was composed of solo voices, was secular, vernacular, and set to love poems. These differences are what made it a completely separate type of music from mass and motet. In much of the music back then, detailed text painting was used to tell a story through the musical representation of poetic