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I
TALY POSSESSED a thriving and distinctive musical culture
during the fourteenth century. By the early 1400s, however,
Italian listeners had become deeply interested in the music
of French and northern European composers. This recording
explores the contrast between the two repertories—the native
Italian and the borrowed French.
Tracks 1 to 9 reveal the vigour and independence of
the Italian tradition in the century of Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Our title is taken from the monophonic ballata Amor mi fa
cantar a la Francesca 6, meaning ‘Love makes me sing to
Francesca’ but also ‘Love makes me sing in the French style’.
This beguiling piece may represent the kind of music which the
well born young men and women of Boccaccio’s Decameron
sang and played in their Tuscan villas during the time of plague
in 1348. It is preserved in the Vatican manuscript Rossi 215, a
source which derives from the musical circle around Alberto
della Scala in Padua during the 1330s and 1340s, and after
1337 in Verona. This manuscript is also the earliest extant
collection of Italian secular polyphony. Among its polyphonic
items is Quando i oselli canta 3, a piece which shows
important aspects of trecento polyphonic style in their pristine
state. It is a madrígal, a distinctively Italian form (not to be
confused with its Renaissance counterpart) which usually
comprises two or three stanzas of three lines each (terzetti)
followed by a ritornello. In conventional practice the music for
each of the terzetti was identical, while the ritornello had its
own music. All of these formal features are displayed by
Quando i oselli canta and, like the great majority of trecento
madrigals and ballate (but in sharp contrast to the greater part
of the fourteenth-century French repertory), Quando i oselli
canta is a two-part composition. The upper voice has a florid
and mildly virtuosic character, while the lower one moves in
longer note values, displaying a deliberate rhythmic plainness
and a preference for stepwise motion. At times, the contrast
between the two parts is very marked indeed, and we begin
to understand why the Paduan theorist Antonio da Tempo
(Trattato delle rime volgari, 1332) regarded ‘rustic sections’
(partes rusticales) as a characteristic trait of the madrígal;
there is undeniably something of the bagpipe in the pedal-point
effect where the composer sets the words ‘La pasturele’ in the
first terzetto of Quando i oselli canta. It is quite possible
indeed that the two-part style of the trecento began as a form
of improvized homophonic singing whose origins may well
be popular and vocal / instrumental. The ritornello of Quando
i oselli canta, for example, is little more than a series of
parallel fifths with a few passing notes here and there and
the occasional octave added to mark key structural points in
the music.
This two-part style, found in so much Italian music of the
trecento, has often been described as one in which the lower
voice ‘accompanies’ the upper, but in practice the artistic
relationship of the parts is more complex. Once again Quando
i oselli canta is a telling piece, for its lower part has the
melodic form ABA (not counting the ritornello). The upper part
does not share this melodic shape, however, and might
therefore be described as a decoration of the ‘tune’ in the lower
voice. Throughout the trecento repertory, indeed, there is a
danger that we will direct our attention to the wrong part.
Even in a florid piece like Quando la stella 5, a madrígal
by Giovanni da Cascia (Johannes de Florentia), we should
perhaps be focusing our attention upon the text as it is plainly
and boldly declaimed by the melody in the lower part.
To illustrate the later phases of northern Italian polyphony
we have drawn upon the instrumental music of the Franco-
Italian repertoire contained in the Faenza codex 4 and 7, and
upon the ballate of two Florentine composers: the celebrated
Francesco Landini 8 and 9 and his remarkable but littleknown
colleague Andreas de Florentia 1 and 2. (Johannes
Ciconia, whose music would readily find a place in the scheme
of this disc, deserves a recording project to himself.) The items
presented here are all polyphonic ballate in accordance with
the growing importance of that genre from the 1360s onwards.
As with most medieval forms of vernacular lyric poetry set to
polyphonic music, the ballata is obedient to two fundamental
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