Booklet (PDF 386 Kb) - Concerto Classics

Era di Maggio...
Italian music of the the 16th and 17th century
The compositions contained in this album constitute a wide and varied anthology of the vocal and instrumental
genres which flourished in Italy between the end of the 1400s and the first half of the 1600s. Alongside works by
musicians of great renown such as Tromboncino, Mainerio, Riccio, Kapsberger and Frescobaldi, you will find
pieces by composers who, although they produced less work, and of minor artistic value, nevertheless did make a
considerable contribution to the development of Renaissance and Baroque musical forms.
The period in which these works have their origin, namely the 16th and the 17th centuries, is extraordinarily important
in the history of Italian music. In parallel with emergence of a multitude of a profane vocal genres (the frottola,
villanesca, madrigal, canzone) whose evolution was to culminate, at the end of the 1600s, in the beginnings of
accompanied monody and opera (melodramma), instrumental music was creating a permanent place for itself
which, after centuries of predominance of vocal genres, meant that it developed a stylistic and formally original
repertory: beyond the transcription and elaboration for keyboard instruments or lute of vocal compositions (tablature)
and dance music (the salterello, pavana, gagliarda, etc.) other “purely” instrumental genres appeared, such as
the ricercare, the toccata, the bicinuim and the canzona da sonare.
1500s was the invention of printed music, which occurred at the beginning of the century, which was to bring about
a much wider diffusion and use of musica colta, or art music even in places outside those in which it was traditionally
performed (musical court chapels and cathedral scholae cantorum).
The genesis of the frottola, at the end of the 1400s, took place as a natural reaction against the dominance of the
Franco-Flemish style, which for over a century had profoundly conditioned the production of both sacred and profane
music in Italy and Europe. Initially the new genre was cultivated in and around the court of Mantua where,
under the aegis of Isabella Gonzaga, many Italian poets and musicians were active (the most important among
them were Serafino Aquilano, Niccolò da Correggio, Bartolomeo Tromboncino and Marchetto Cara), united in the
exquisitely “humanist” project of recreating the close relationship between poetry and music which seemed to have
been permanently lost in the complex and often artifice-laden polyphonic architecture of the Burgundian chanson.
With the birth of the frottola Italy emerged from a relatively long period of almost total music “silence”. With the
end of the golden age of the Ars Nova, the unchallenged monopoly of the polyphonists from beyond the Alps, who
had been active since the first part of the 1400s in all of the most important Italian musical chapels, had had the
effect of relegating national musical production to the minor genres of the lauda spirituale in sacred contexts, and
the canto carnascialesco and the villotta in those profane. Thus it is not surprising that the frottola met with such
immediate popularity and widespread diffusion in Italian musical circles, a success which is well-documented by
the numerous editions published of anthologies of such music during the first years of the 16th century: eleven in
Venice, between 1504 and 1514, printed for Petrucci, and many others published in Rome, Siena, Florence and
Naples. The term frottola stood for a wide rage of poetical compositions, on a variety of subjects: from the pastorallove
poems such as Un cavalier di Spagna and La pastorella si leva per tempo, to the naturalistic vein of Era di
Maggio, or religious themes like Vergine Bella, to popular songs like Pan de Miglio caldo caldo, as far as the
unabashedly bawdy Cigari simo and La Zotta. The metrical structure and pattern of the stanzas of the lyrics of the
frottola didn’t follow any single model: each stanza could contain a variable number of seven, eight or eleven syl-