Art-Song Reworkings: An Overview

Abstract

Broadly speaking, we can divide Renaissance polyphony into five groups: works not using any pre-existent material, and pieces based on sacred monophony, secular monophony, sacred polyphony or secular polyphony. This is not the common way to classify Renaissance compositions. The more normal breakdown is by the technique applied to the pre-existent material – cantus firmus, paraphrase, parody – regardless of what that material was. Yet much is to be gained by starting with the original material, and that was, after all, what the composer probably did at least some of the time.