Answer:
A wealth of dance music published during the sixteenth century has survived.
Explanation:
Renaissance composers became interested in secular music (non-religious music). However, the greatest musical treasures were composed for the church (sacred music). These composers pay much more attention to harmony. And the counter points that existed in medieval music were much more developed.
The style of Renaissance music is polyphonic, where several melodies were played or sung at the same time, and the polychoral style without accompaniment of instruments reveals a high degree of complexity and sophistication of harmonic combinations.
One of the most striking differences between medieval and Renaissance styles is the musical texture - the way the composer works the fabric of his music. While the middle-aged musician looks for a game of contrasts, building his plot with threads arranged against each other, the Renaissance aims at a fabric with wires all combined. Instead of a layered texture, he works the piece, catering to all vocal parts at the same time to obtain a continuous polyphonic mesh.
The key element in this type of tessitura is called imitation, ie the introduction of a melodic passage, which immediately afterwards will be repeated or copied by another voice.
At that time the composers had the idea of composing pieces for more than one choir, called polychorals. In these polychoral plays there were two groups, where a voice from the left choir was answered by a voice from the right choir and vice versa.
Before the 16th century instruments were used only to accompany singing. During the sixteenth century, however, composers became increasingly interested in writing music only for instruments. The instruments used in Renaissance music are about the same as those of the Middle Ages, apart from the flutes, lutes and violas, keyboard instruments began to gain popularity, which could be a small organ, a clavichord or a virginal, for which most English composers wrote plays.
