What Is Early Music? A Guide to Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Performance

Early music is one of the most fascinating and immersive corners of the classical music world—but for many listeners, the term itself can feel unfamiliar. So what is early music, and why is it such an essential part of today’s musical life in New York City?

At Music Before 1800, the city’s longest-running early music concert series, audiences experience this repertoire as a living tradition—performed with historical insight, technical mastery, and expressive depth. (Music Before 1800)

What Does “Early Music” Mean?

In its most familiar usage, early music refers to European repertories spanning the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Yet this definition, while useful, is necessarily incomplete. Music before 1800 was never confined to a single tradition: it unfolded across interconnected global cultures, shaped by trade, migration, religious exchange, and empire.

At Music Before 1800, this broader perspective informs our programming: alongside canonical European works, early music includes repertoires from the Ottoman court, the Iberian world and its transatlantic networks, and diverse vocal and instrumental traditions that coexisted with, and influenced, what we now call Western classical music.

Historically informed performance provides a framework for engaging this repertoire. Rather than treating early music as a fixed artifact, historically informed performance reconstructs sound worlds through period instruments, historical tunings, and close study of primary sources. 

Medieval Music: The Origins of Western Tradition

Medieval music (c. 500–1400) preserves some of the earliest notated traditions in Europe, but it also reflects a much wider sonic environment shaped by oral transmission and intercultural contact.

Gregorian chant, with its fluid phrasing and modal clarity, forms one cornerstone of the repertory. Equally significant is the emergence of polyphony, or independent vocal lines that interact. This innovation would go on to shape centuries of musical thought.

At the same time, medieval Europe was in dialogue with neighboring cultures. Encounters with the Islamic world, particularly in regions such as Al-Andalus, contributed to shared instruments, melodic practices, and theoretical ideas that resonate across traditions.

Renaissance Music: The Rise of Polyphony

The Renaissance (c. 1400–1600) is often defined by its refinement of polyphony into balanced, interweaving lines that prioritize both structural clarity and textual expression. Sacred music and secular genres such as the madrigal also flourish, demonstrating a heightened sensitivity to language and rhetoric. Key attributes include:

• Balance between voices

• Text expression

• Vocal clarity

Music of this time is equally marked by expansion beyond Europe. The circulation of musicians and manuscripts, alongside colonial and mercantile networks, brought European musical practices into contact with the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the Iberian world, for example, liturgical and vernacular traditions intersected in ways that produced hybrid repertoires still being rediscovered today.

For modern performers, Renaissance music offers not only intellectual complexity but an extraordinary range of color, shaped by vocal timbre, tuning systems, and improvisatory practice.

Baroque Music: Drama and Virtuosity

The Baroque era (c. 1600–1750) marks a shift toward heightened contrast, ornamentation, and instrumental virtuosity. New forms—cantatas, sonatas, operas, and concertos—expand the expressive possibilities of music, while composers develop increasingly sophisticated approaches to harmony and rhythm.

Figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Claudio Monteverdi are central to this story, but the Baroque was also a period of intense cultural exchange. Ottoman military bands influenced European orchestral color; dance rhythms circulated across continents; and composers absorbed stylistic elements from beyond their immediate surroundings.

Understanding this repertoire on instruments such as the lute, viol, and harpsichord reveals a sonic palette that differs fundamentally from modern orchestral sound, emphasizing transparency, articulation, and rhetorical nuance.

What Is Historically Informed Performance?

A defining feature of early music today is historically informed performance. This approach seeks to recreate how music would have sounded at the time of its creation.

At Music Before 1800, performers use instruments such as:

• Lutes

• Viols

• Harpsichords

These instruments, combined with historically grounded techniques, produce a sound world that is distinct from modern orchestral performance. For experienced listeners, historically informed performance offers a way to hear familiar works anew: tempos shift, textures clarify, and ornamentation becomes integral rather than decorative. Just as importantly, historically informed performance  continues to expand its scope, incorporating non-European traditions and questioning long-held assumptions about style and interpretation.

Where to Hear Early Music in New York City

New York City’s musical landscape is vast, but early music occupies a distinctive place within it, valued for its intimacy, immediacy, and depth of scholarship.

For more than five decades, Music Before 1800 has presented internationally acclaimed artists in programs that combine historical insight with adventurous programming. In the resonant acoustic of Corpus Christi Church, these performances invite listeners into close engagement with repertoire that spans centuries and continents.

Experience Early Music Live

Early music is not simply a window into the past. It is a continually unfolding practice of rediscovery. Whether through the meditative line of chant, the intricate architecture of Renaissance polyphony, or the dramatic intensity of the Baroque, each performance offers a fresh perspective on how music communicates across time.

Explore our upcoming concerts and experience early music as it lives today.

Levantine Rhapsody: Sound Worlds in Dialogue

Levantine Rhapsody, presented by Music Before 1800 in collaboration with the World Music Institute on Sunday, May 31 at Corpus Christi Church, will be a program shaped by exchange, memory, and the persistent movement of sound across borders. Centered on the artistry of Turkish kanun virtuoso Didem Basar, this concert traces a musical language formed between traditions spanning Ottoman, European, and beyond.

Timed to coincide with the festival of Eid al-Adha, the program situates itself within a living cultural moment, while drawing on practices that long predate modern categories of genre or geography. 

A Continuum of Traditions

At the heart of the program is a dialogue between systems of sound.

Basar’s work moves fluidly between Turkish maqam, or modal frameworks that shape melodic development, and Western compositional structures. The result is not juxtaposition, but impressionistic integration. 

Improvisation plays a central role. Rather than ornamenting a fixed text, improv guides the listener through shifting tonal centers. For audiences familiar with early music’s reliance on unwritten practice, this approach will feel familiar.

Turkish Music and the Artistry of Didem Basar

Rooted in the classical traditions of Turkish music, Didem Basar’s work draws on the makam system—a nuanced framework of melodic development that shapes both composition and improvisation. For listeners attuned to early music, makam offers a compelling parallel to pre-tonal modal practices in Europe, while opening onto a distinct expressive vocabulary defined by microtonal inflection, rhythmic cycles (usul), and ornamentation as structure rather than embellishment. 

A leading kanun performer, composer, and educator, Basar has been widely recognized for her work bridging Turkish and Western musical traditions. She is a founding member of the ensemble Constantinople and serves on the faculty at the University of Toronto, where she directs the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble.

The Kanun and Its Sound World

The kanun, a plucked zither central to Ottoman and Middle Eastern traditions, anchors the ensemble’s sound. With its microtonal flexibility and percussive clarity, it allows for a rare level of nuance in pitch and articulation.

An Ensemble of Familiar Voices

Joining Basar is a quartet of artists well known to MB1800 audiences through the celebrated Constantinople programs: flutist Guy Pelletier, cellist Dominique Beauséjour-Ostiguy, and percussionist Patrick Graham. 

Early Music, Reframed

Levantine Rhapsody sits squarely within MB1800’s broader curatorial vision: to present early music not as a closed canon, but as a network of practices shaped by exchange.

Long before 1800, musical cultures across the Mediterranean and beyond were in sustained contact—through trade, diplomacy, migration, and empire. Modal systems, instruments, and repertories traveled alongside people, leaving traces that are still audible.

Hearing Across Time

“Continuum is the cry of all those who have died and been forgotten,” Basar writes—a line that resonates beyond the program itself. 

Join Music Before 1800 on Sunday, May 31 at Corpus Christi Church. Reserve tickets.