Renaissance instrumental

Instrumental music throughout the Renaissance was closely associated with vocal music. Only at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and at a few other chapels with choirs of competent singers, was polyphonic church music consistently sung unaccompanied. Elsewhere the organ, lute, viols, or other instruments accompanied, doubled, or substituted for voices, and organists developed a huge repertory of music for use in church services, including preludes, interludes, and arrangements of liturgical melodies. In secular music, the lute remained popular both for solos and in ensembles; clavier instruments were coming into wider use, and hundreds of pieces were written for chamber music ensembles.