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CHAPTER 20
POPULAR MUSIC IN FLORENCE,
1475-1540
THE LATE RENAISSANCE
• Strictly speaking, the word renaissance means
“rebirth,” but it also connotes “recovery” and
“rediscovery. Nineteenth-century historians
invented the term to describe the great flowering
of intellectual and artistic activity that occurred first
in Italy and then elsewhere in Europe during the
years 1350-1600. What we in music call the “late
Renaissance” occupied the years 1475-1600.
CHARACTERISTICS OF LATE
RENAISSANCE MUSIC
1. development of the expressive, indeed rhetorical, power of
music, as a result of
a. new interest in the text shown by the humanists
b. desire to intensify the meaning of the text through music
generally
2. growing sense that music might not only be for religious
solace and salvation but also for personal enrichment and
entertainment
3. invention of music printing, which allowed for the
dissemination of music to a much wider segment of the
population
4. shift in the perception of music as a discipline among the
sciences to one among the fine arts
5. growing perception of the composer as a special sort of
human being—an artist—one worthy of special honors and
financial rewards
ART MUSIC AND POPULAR MUSIC
• Historians dub the fifteenth century in Italy the
quattrocento (Italian for what we call “the
1400s”). Much of the learned polyphony (Masses,
motets, and chansons)—what we might call “high
art music”-- written in Italy during the quattrocento
was composed by northerners, many from the
Burgundian lands. Native Italians, however,
cultivated musical forms and styles that
approximated what we might call “popular music.”
Much of this music was not written down in
complicated, learned notation, but improvised on
spot according to long-standing oral traditions.
THE CARNIVAL SONG
• In Florence during carnival season (immediately
before Lent) masked groups of men and boys
would go through the streets singing a type of
song appropriate for these revels, specifically called
a carnival song (canto carnascialesco). Often the
text of the carnival song was full of sexually explicit
references. Once such song is the Canto de’
profumieri (Song of the Perfume Sellers), the text
of which is by Lorenzo de’ Medici (the
Magnificent) who controlled Florence from 1469
until his death in 1492.
The beginning of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s
Canto de’ profumieri
Typical of the carnival song, the music is homorhythmic and thus
homophonic. The chords are almost all what we would call “root
position” triads, likely a clue that this piece was originally an
improvised bit of street singing that only later came to be
preserved in written notation.
THE LAUDA
• The secular carnival song had its sacred
counterpart in the lauda. A lauda (Italian for “a
song of praise”; pl., laude) was a simple, popular
sacred song written, not in church Latin, but in the
local dialect of Italian. The lauda was usually sung
by members of a confraternity, a society of
laymen devoted to one or another aspect of
Christian faith.
SAVONAROLA
• The most famous, or infamous, writer of laude was
Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). Savonarola
was a fanatical Dominican monk who, by 1497,
had gained control of the government of Florence.
Savonarola was a religious purist who insisted that
all objects of worldly pleasure, including music
books, musical instruments, cards, dice,
chessboards perfumes, pictures, and the like, were
rounded up and burned in what came to be called
a bonfire of the vanities. Ultimately, after he
lost control of the government, Savonarola himself
was burned in a bonfire in central Florence.
The beginning of Giesù sommo conforto
with text by Girolamo Savonarola
Like the carnival song Sian galanti di Valenza, this lauda is comprised
exclusively of what we would call root position triads, perhaps a
suggestion that the music for it was originally improvised.
Savonarola instituted the “bonfire of the vanities” to rid the city of
objects of personal adornment and enjoyment. Eventually, the
citizens of Florence rid themselves of Savonarola by subjecting him
to the same fate. This anonymous painting shows the burning of
Savonarola and two of his followers in 1498.
THE FROTTOLA
• The term frottola (pl., frottole) was a catch-all
word used to describe a polyphonic setting of a
wide variety of strophic Italian poetry. The frottola
began life as poetry sung to an improvised string
accompaniment most often played on a lira da
braccio. It flourished in Italy between the years
1470 and 1530. Like the carnival song and the
lauda, the frottola usually consists of several
stanzas of verse in Italian.
An Italian lyra da braccio of 1563
now preserved in Vermillion, South Dakota
It has five strings and two
drone strings off the
fingerboard. Instruments such
as this were used to
accompany singers of the
frottola.
JOSQUIN’S EL GRILLO
• Perhaps the best known of all frottole today is El
grillo (The Cricket; c1500) by Josquin des Prez. It
is primarily homophonic and comprised of root
position triads. As to the meaning of the text,
perhaps it alludes to sexual activity in the heat of
summer, perhaps to the singer Carlo Grillo, or
perhaps it is simply a fun song about a cricket.
The beginning of Josquin des Prez’s frottola
El grillo consists entirely of root position chords
The text of Josquin’s El Grillo
El grillo è bon cantore
Che tiene longo verso.
Dale beve grilo canta.
El grillo è bon cantore.
The cricket is a good singer
Who has a long cry.
The cricket sings of drinking.
The cricket is a good singer.
Ma non fa come gli altri ucelli,
Come li han cantata un poco,
Van’ de fatto in altro loco,
Sempre el grillo sta pur saldo.
Quando là maggior el caldo
Alhor canta sol per amore.
But he is not, like other birds,
When they have sung a little,
Go off elsewhere,
The cricket stays still.
When the weather is hotter
Then he sings for love.
El grillo è bon cantore
Che tiene longo verso.
Dale beve grillo canta.
El grillo è bon cantore.
The cricket is a good singer
Who has a long cry.
The cricket sings of drinking.
The cricket is a good singer.
THE EARLY MADRIGAL IN FLORENCE
• In the sixteenth century the madrigal, like the
frottola, was a catch-all term used to describe
settings of Italin verse. The sixteenth-century
madrigal is invariably through composed (new
music for every line of text), rather than strophic—
each line and phrase of text must receive its own
special musical setting, something not possible with
strophic form. The madrigal was generally chosen
to be the recipient of a more lofty style of poetry
than the frottola; indeed the madrigalists took their
texts from the finest poets in the Italian language,
their favorite being Francesco Petrarch.
TEXT EXPRESSION IN THE MADRIGAL
• The chief aim of the madrigal was to express the
poem as vividly and intensely as possible. Madrigal
composers engaged in text painting in music; the
music overtly sounds out that meaning of the text,
almost word by word. Text painting (also called
word painting) became all the rage with madrigal
composers in Italy and later in England. Even
today such musical clichés as sighs and
dissonances for “harsh” words are called
madrigalisms.
JACQUES ARCADELT’S
IL BIANCO E DOLCE CIGNO
• Jacques Archadelt (c1505-1568) composed the first
important collection of madrigals when he
published his Primo libro di madrigali d’ Archadelt
(First Book of Madrigals by Arcadelt) in 1538 or
1539, which was reprinted more than fifty times by
the end of the century. Opening Arcadelt’s Primo
libro di madrigali is his Il bianco e dolce cigno (The
gentle white swan). It has moments of text
painting in music, among them the sudden chord
shift on “weeping” (“piangendo”) and the
seemingly endless imitation on “a thousand deaths
a day” (“di mille morti il dì”).
ORAZIO VECCHI’S
IL BIANCO E DOLCE CIGNO
• Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605) paid homage to, or
perhaps parodied, Arcadelt’s famous madrigal with
his own setting of Il bianco e dolce cigno (1589).
Here there are so many instances of word painting
that the madrigal almost becomes an example of
“cartoon music,” using an extreme expressive
device to convey the meaning of nearly every
poetic image.
The beginning of Orazio Vecchi’s madrigal Il bianco e dolce cigno,
which exhibits a clear instance of text painting: on the word
“cantando” the upper two voices break into florid singing.