In the broadest sense, medieval music or the music of the Middle Ages encompasses the music of the Western Europe during the Middle Ages, from approximately the 6th to 15th centuries. It is the first and longest era of Western classical music and followed by the Renaissance music; the two eras comprise what musicologists term as early music, proceeding the common practice period. Following the traditional division of the Middle Ages, medieval music can be divided into early (500–1150), high (1000–1300), and late (1300–1400) medieval music.
Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as it is understood in other disciplines.
Orlande de Lassus was a composer of the late Renaissance, chief representative of the mature polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school, and considered to be one of the three most famous and influential musicians in Europe at the end of the 16th century.
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance and early Baroque (1600–1750) eras. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varied between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets. Unlike the verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals were through-composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being sung.
Jacques Arcadelt was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era. In addition to his work as a madrigalist, and distinguishing him from the other prominent early composers of madrigals – Philippe Verdelot and Costanzo Festa – he was equally prolific and adept at composing chansons, particularly late in his career when he lived in Paris.
Costanzo Festa was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. While he is best known for his madrigals, he also wrote sacred vocal music. He was the first native Italian polyphonist of international renown, and with Philippe Verdelot, one of the first to write madrigals, in the infancy of that most popular of all sixteenth-century Italian musical forms.
Claudio Maria Veggio was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, principally of secular music.
In music notation, a note value indicates the relative duration of a note, using the texture or shape of the notehead, the presence or absence of a stem, and the presence or absence of flags/beams/hooks/tails. Unmodified note values are fractional powers of two, for example one, one-half, one fourth, etc.
Petrus de Cruce was active as a cleric, composer and music theorist in the late part of the 13th century. His main contribution was to the notational system.
Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for European vocal polyphonic music from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measured rhythmic durations in terms of numerical proportions between note values. Its modern name is inspired by the terminology of medieval theorists, who used terms like musica mensurata or cantus mensurabilis to refer to the rhythmically defined polyphonic music of their age, as opposed to musica plana or musica choralis, i.e., Gregorian plainchant. Mensural notation was employed principally for compositions in the tradition of vocal polyphony, whereas plainchant retained its own, older system of neume notation throughout the period. Besides these, some purely instrumental music could be written in various forms of instrument-specific tablature notation.
The Trecento was a period of vigorous activity in Italy in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music. The music of the Trecento paralleled the achievements in the other arts in many ways, for example, in pioneering new forms of expression, especially in secular song in the vernacular language, Italian. In these regards, the music of the Trecento may seem more to be a Renaissance phenomenon; however, the predominant musical language was more closely related to that of the late Middle Ages, and musicologists generally classify the Trecento as the end of the medieval era. Trecento means "three hundred" in Italian but is usually used to refer to the 1300s. However, the greatest flowering of music in the Trecento happened late in the century, and the period is usually extended to include music up to around 1420.
Girolamo Montesardo was an Italian singer and composer.
Francesco Corteccia was an Italian composer, organist, and teacher of the Renaissance. Not only was he one of the best known of the early composers of madrigals, and an important native Italian composer during a period of domination by composers from the Low Countries, but he was the most prominent musician in Florence for several decades during the reign of Cosimo I de' Medici.
Hubert Naich was a composer of the Renaissance, probably of Flemish origin, principally active in Rome. He was mainly a composer of madrigals, some in the note nere style.
Jhan Gero was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, apparently active mainly in Italy, particularly Venice. He was a practitioner of the note nere madrigal style during its period of popularity in the 1540s, and also wrote didactic music, probably intended for teaching beginning singers.
Hoste da Reggio was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, active in Milan and elsewhere in northern Italy. He was well known for his madrigals, which were published in several collections in Venice.
Perissone Cambio was a Franco-Flemish composer and singer of the Renaissance, active in Venice. He was one of the most prominent students and colleagues of Adrian Willaert during the formative years of the Venetian School, and published several books of madrigals in the 1540s.
Domenico Maria Ferrabosco (Ferabosco) was an Italian composer and singer of the Renaissance, and the eldest musician in a large prominent family from Bologna. He spent his career both in Bologna and Rome. His surviving music is all vocal, consisting of madrigals and motets, although he is principally known for his madrigals, which musicologist Alfred Einstein compared favorably to those of his renowned contemporary Cipriano de Rore.
Giandomenico Martoretta was an Italian Renaissance composer. Little is known of his life, but the style of the dedication of the "master of theology" Giovanfrancesco di Chara in the second book indicates that Martoretta may have been minor gentry or member of an academy. But the preface to the third book of madrigals reveals that he had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and stayed in Cyprus as guest of a certain noble cavaliere, Piero Singlitico. His first book of madrigals was written in the rapid note nere, black note, style introduced by Constanzo Festa. Theodor Kroyer (1902) believed that Martoretta's madrigals demonstrated chromatic keys.
De arte canendi is an important musical treatise by Sebald Heyden, produced in three installments between 1532 and 1540. The first installment was produced in 1532 in 26 pages, the second in 1537 grew to 115 pages and the third in 1540 to 163 pages. The third and final edition completed in Nuremberg in 1540, is said to have "had a greater impact on modern scholarship than any other writing on mensuration and tactus from the 15th or 16th century." A collection of secular songs, it has been described as a "treatise on singing technique aimed at the growing number of amateur musicians who wished to improve their skills." In the third installment, Heyden confessed to being an admirer of Josquin des Prez and his contemporaries, transcribing Josquin's Missa L'homme armé sexti toni (Benedictus), amongst others. Notably, Heyden is said to have "adopted a horror fusae position at a time when Italian musicians were writing pieces a note nere under the signature of C." Indeed, the treatise is said to have "influenced many twentieth-century scholars to believe that the tactus of the sixteenth century represented an unvarying beat."
rather than 
(now the sign for alla breve). Pietro Aron, in his Lucidario (1545), states what would appear evident - that shorter black notes in 