[Radio script by Carl B. Compton] Page: 7 of 12
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4
a period of development.
The Renaissance came to music as to other arts but even yet, instrumental music was not
developed into the form that we know it now, It continued to be pretty largely an accomp-
animent of the human voice. We know that there were instruments for Titian painted the
lute in one of his paintings, Cellini tells of being forced by his father to study music,
and Leonardo devised musical instruments for the court of Milan. But the orchestra, the
band, and even individual solo instruments were as yet unknown.
But the linking of music and the human voice produced a hew art form. New, that is for
Europe. The Greeks had developed much the same form fifteen hundred years before, but that
was so long ago that most people knew nothing about it. Just how much this new art form
the oratorio, and later the opera, was duQ to the revived interest in the arts of the g
Greeks, I am not prepared to say. It may have developed naturally from the madrigals, and
the songs of the wandering minstrels, just as the Greek form had done in its day. The im-
portant thing to note is that opera did develop in the Renaissance.
And in the development of the opera there was a great controversy. The people whose in-
terest was the drama, that is the writers and actors, believed quite naturally that in. the
opera the drama was the most important. The musicians, equally naturally, believed that
the drama part of the opera was only an excuse for the music. So there were long and bitter
quarrels as to which should be supreme. Like most other controversies, this was finally
settled by compromise, and opera took somewhat the form we have today. But this didn't
occur until the seventeenth century, when the great achievements of the Renaissance were
almost over in other lines.
As for instrumental-music for its own sake, this too, started to be written in the late
Renaissance, Strange as it may seem to us today, .instrumental music as we know it is only
about three hundred years old.Until the first years of the seventeenth century, instruN
mental music only accompanied the voice in songs. When the composers took up the question
of composing for instruments without the voice they found a lot of difficulty. The words
of the song had served to hold the music together-before, but it was another matter to
Rake the music hold itself together, All the-music for band, and orchestra, and violin
and the like that we have now'has developed since the Renaissance.
In the sculpture of the Renaissance we have much the same condition that we have in the
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Compton, Carl Benton. [Radio script by Carl B. Compton], script, February 24, 1936, 9:00 p.m.; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1164770/m1/7/?q=%22History%22: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.