How Did Adrian Willaert Contribute To Change?

When thinking of great composers, many think of the later composers such as Bach of the Baroque period or Mozart from the Classical period. The music phenomenon actually began during the Medieval period over a century beforehand. During the Renaissance, men like Adrian Willaert paved the way for composers of the future to make their great works (Classical Composers, 2016). Adrian Willaert’s compositions commanded a change in both concert and sacred music.
Adrian Willaert was a Flemish composer, born in 1490, whose ideas and composing had changed music, however, he had not always thought about music. He originally was going to school for law at the University of Paris, until he had changed his area of study to music (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016). He then, from 1509 to 1512, studied with Jean Mounton, a composer for the French royal chapel. Willaert worked in Italy at the basilica of
While composing, Willaert made several breakthroughs in working with psalms, hymns, and madrigals, as well as interval affect (McKinney, 2010, p. 3). One of his musical contributions was in polyphony. Willaert had composed pieces that were set to two groups with four-part harmonies that would sing at different times, however they would eventually meet at a certain point and have eight voices on different notes. Willaert is also one of the first recorded composers to write for pieces that did not involve singing, but were for instruments only (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2016). Another great musical achievement of his was within his madrigals. Madrigals are a short poem in fixed form. When sung, they are a secular piece of music that is polyphonic (Merriam-Webster, 2016).Willaert had written twenty-five of them and put them now known as Musica Nova, or new music. By doing this, and putting them in a fixed pattern he began the creation of interval affect. (McKinney, 2010, p.