Two-part didactic music in printed Italian collections of the ...

Chapter 2 27
‘O fonte de bellezze’ ‘E se per gelosia’
phrase 1 in A – bars 2-7 phrase 1a in A – bars 1-8
phrase 1b in D – bars 8-14
phrase 2 in D – bars 8-12 phrase 2 in D – bars 14-19
phrase 3 in A – bars 12-17 phrase 3a in A – bars 19-25
phrase 3b in A – bars 25-29
— phrase 4 in F - bars 29-34 55
phrase 5 in D – bars 18-24 phrase 5a in D – bars 34-39
phrase 5b in A – bars 39-46
phrase 5c in D – bars 46-54
all section 5 is repeated – bars 54conclusion
We know that Willaert’s duo is closely linked with other musical versions of the same
lyric, which are listed in App. F, 3, ‘Madrigals’. According to Haar, 56 Willaert composed this
duo far earlier than its publication in Gero (1541) – maybe around 1520. It is probably a
reduction of either all the previous polyphonic versions on the same text or of a lost model from
which all the other versions derive. Considering all we have said and seen, I think that also the
Oxford duos are reductions of either polyphonic models or early popular songs now lost.
We also find this short-phrase structure in other contemporary duos which are certainly
not derived from profane music. For example the anonymous duo ‘Recordare domine’ included
in Bologna MS Q16 is textless, and though every musical phrase bears a text incipit, is
probably not meant to be sung. The time signature is a , as we have seen in the Oxford duos; its
30 bars are divided into five sections by clear cadences, four on the tonic G and one on C, that
could be seen as the repercussio of the second mode transposed with a flat, 57 the mode in
which this duo seems to have been composed. 58
All these duos, perhaps together with Costanzo Festa’s ‘Amor che mi consigli?’, of
which we shall talk in more detail in chapter 2.4, could be the only and late surviving excerpts
from a wide-spread (didactic?) literature of duos that flourished towards the end of the fifteenth
century and that has been lost because it was hand-written. These would have been, together
55 Phrase No. 4 is the only one ending on an F cadence, that is the weakest cadence of this mode. Hence, it
is probably not by chance that this phrase is the only one not repeated.
56 ‘A Diatonic Duo by Willaert’, Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 21
(1969), 68-80.
57 Pietro Aron, Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni di canto figurato (Venice: Bernardino de
Vitali, 1525), Chap. 9, ‘Cadenze del primo e secondo tono’: ‘El secondo tuono havrà sei cadenze, cioè […] C fa
ut, D sol re, F fa ut, G sol re ut, A la mi re et A re, convenienti luoghi al tuon secondo’.
58 Concerning the difficulty of telling the authentic mode from its plagal, cf. Chap. 4.1.