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• Performance
• Classical
• Renaissance

Most instrumental music of the Renaissance was written for small ensembles. At the time, the major distinction was between the consort and the broken consort. The former consisted of a set of instruments from the same family. The fact that recorders, shawms, viols, violins and many others existed not as single instruments but as a whole range ...

• Instruments
• Brass
• Electric & Electronic
• Keyboards
• Percussion
• Stringed
• Woodwind

prevalent, a uniform musical style, of a strong bass line and top line, less prominent inner parts and regular chord changes, gripped western music. The Renaissance consorts, based on equality, were unsuited to this type of music and disappeared, along with most of the instruments they contained. Wind instruments only stood a chance of ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

string orchestra is one of the oldest present-day classical ensembles. When the violin family started to expand in the sixteenth century, the string orchestra soon began to replace viol consorts for ensemble music, as it had greater projection, which made it far more effective at accompanying dancing. ‘Violin bands’ were favoured at the French court of the seventeenth ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Renaissance

The Renaissance recorder was played by blowing directly into a beak-shaped mouthpiece and the pitch was varied by changing the fingering on the holes – a set of seven on the front of the instrument and a single thumb-hole at the back. During this period the instrument was generally made of a single piece of wood, but today it usually ...

• Instruments
• Stringed

become ubiquitous in both amateur and professional circles. At its best in ensemble, the consort of viols formed a vital part of Renaissance music making; it was combined with consorts of other instruments and was also immensely popular on its own. Many households would have a ‘chest of viols’ containing at least one instrument of each standard size. Construction Although ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Baroque

1602–45 English composer William Lawes, like his brother Henry Lawes, was a musician at the court of the English King Charles I. Although he too composed songs and theatre music, his greater strength lay in consort music for viols or members of the violin family and it is for these that he is best remembered. Lawes’ consort music ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Renaissance

not banned from all singing, however: in the late Renaissance, virtuoso female sopranos were increasingly sought-after at courtly entertainments. Styles & Forms | Renaissance | Classical Performance | Consorts | Renaissance | Classical ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Renaissance

well-established pastime among amateurs too; many wealthy Elizabethan families owned a consort of viols. Composers such as Tallis, Byrd and Gibbons wrote fantasias, dances and In nomines for consorts as well as music for solo viol which was more virtuoso in style – full of ornaments and divisions (rapid embellishments on a melodic line). Viols were also used to ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Late Baroque

Modern writers refer to the mixed instrumental chamber ensembles of the Renaissance as broken consorts. Different kinds of instruments were brought together with choirs for special occasions, but there was no large ensemble encompassing different families of instruments and performing its own recognizable genres of music, until the Baroque period. The introduction by Monteverdi of string players into the ...