There were different types of lute in the baroque era, of which the theorbo was probably the most common. For the first time, composers wrote down how loud they wanted the musicians to play. There was no crescendo, this didn't appear until the classical period. Music therefore went suddenly to f then suddenly to p. This was called terrace dynamics .
Musical texture is difficult to define.
During the Renaissance period, music was mostly polyphonic . This means that each instrument or voice had its own melody and each melody interweaved with the others. Listen to these examples of homophonic and polyphonic music. This was fairly common in the baroque era. A melody appears on its own on an instrument or voice, and is then imitated in different voices.