Introduction. Defining the Renaissance in Music

[Début de l'article] The concept of the Renaissance as a period in the history of music does not appear, in a strict sense, until relatively late in writings on music by comparison with those on general history or art history. In 1868 A.W. Ambros gave the third volume of his encyclopaedic history of music the title "Geschichte der Musik im Zeitalter der Renaissance bis zu Palestrina" (Leipzig, 1862-1878). Even if the awareness of a renaissance had emerged as early as the end of the fifteenth century and the first musicologists had not neglected to treat the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sometimes in great depth, it was only with Ambros that a name was finally given to a period that by and large covers two centuries of music history in the West. However, the Renaissance is not synonymous with the idea of a "renaissance", and it is this difficulty of admitting the non-coincidence of the two concepts - the one historical, the other cultural - that were to lead to more than a hundred years of interminable debates and passionate enquiries, as well as some idle disputes. It is the vicissitudes of this history that will be retraced here