You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic 14th, and I'm Cecilia Leskowitz from the Hildegard Collective,

a ministry for Catholic musicians. We're time traveling this week through musical history

in the Catholic Church,

and today we're picking up where we left off yesterday,

and we're going to go into the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

So yesterday we learned about music before the time of Christ in the early Christian church,

how St. Isidore and Guido of Arezzo created a way for everyone to read music,

and we met our friends St. Hildegard in Germany and Leonine and Peritin in France during the medieval era.

So during the 14th and 15th centuries, something new was happening in Europe.

Art and learning flourished, and this was called the Renaissance.

This was the time period when we had incredible artists like Michelangelo painting the

Sistine Chapel and sculpting the Pieta, a beautiful statue of Mary holding Jesus after his body is taken down from the cross.

When we look back at history, we can see that new things in music follow new things in art.

So the Renaissance and music happened a little later during the 15th and 16th centuries.

A lot was happening during this time.

Instruments began to look a lot like the instruments we know today, like the recorder,

and the early trombone, which was called the sackbut, and the harpsichord, which is like

the grandpa of the piano. Thanks to the work of our friends Leonine and Perrotin, with their

invention of that new kind of music called polyphony, music began to take on all kinds of new

forms. Chansons and motets were types of pieces sung by choirs, and you still might hear some

at Sunday Mass on occasion.

Many musical settings of the mass were written during this time period.

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