Renaissance music is the art of intricate polyphony, in which four, six, or eight voices interweave like threads in a luxurious tapestry. Composers Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, and William Byrd raised choral singing to peaks that remain exemplary today.
Genres include the mass, motet, and madrigal (a secular vocal form of Italian origin). The first instrumental forms appeared — ricercar, canzona, variations on dance themes. In Ukraine, the Renaissance tradition flourished in Lviv and Kyiv — in brotherhood schools, where partes polyphony arose (which later prepared the ground for the Classical-era choral concertos of Bortniansky and Vedel).
