Transcript CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14
MUSIC IN FLORENCE,
1350-1450
THE EARLY RENAISSANCE
• Renaissance means rebirth in the sense of a
reawaking. Although the description of the Middle
Ages as a “dark” age is a great exaggeration, the
period of the early Renaissance (1350-1450) did
see a reawakening of interest in the art of classical
antiquity and a quickening of concern for the arts
and humanities generally—in poetry, painting,
sculpture, and music.
FLORENCE
Florence might fairly be
called the home of the
Italian Renaissance,
possessing, as it does,
more great art per square
foot than any city in the
world. Giotto, Donatello,
Masaccio, Brunelleschi,
Botticelli, Leonardo da
Vinci and Michelangelo all
graced Florence with their
art at various times
between 1320 and 1490.
Florence was a city-state
which by 1348 had a
population of about
100,000.
TRECENTO MUSIC AND THE
SQUARCIALUPI CODEX
• The period of the 1300s in Italy is called the
trecento. By far the largest collection of trecento
music is the Squarcialupi Codex, name after a
Florentine organist who once owned the
manuscript. Compiled in Florence about 1415, the
Squarcialupi Codex contains 354 compositions
and constitutes a retrospective anthology of all of
forms of trecento music.
ITALIAN FIXED FORMS
While the French had their fixed forms for secular vocal music in the
fourteenth century (ballade, rondeau, and virelai), so too did the
Italians, specifically the madrigal, caccia, and ballata. The trecento
madrigal possessed AAB form. The madrigal Non al suo amante of
Jacopo da Bologna (c1310-c1386) is typical of the madrigal around
1350 in that it is highly florid, but somewhat rigid rhythmically. The
poem here, by the early Renaissance humanist Frescesco Petrarch
(1304-1374), is exceptionally beautiful and, typical of Renaissance
poetry, is full of classical allusions.
The beginning of Jacopo da Bologna’s
two-voice madrigal Non al suo amante.
CACCIA AND BALLATA
• In Italian, caccia means hunt. A caccia is a
composition involving a musical canon in the
upper two voices supported by a slower moving
tenor. In a caccia one of the upper voices chases
after the other, and the Italian texts of many
caccias are about a hunt, either real or amatory
(of the beloved).
• The ballata was a dance song with a choral
refrain. Its music and poetic form is similar to the
French virelai: A (ripresa) b (piede) b (piede) a
(volta) A (ripresa). The terms piede (foot), volta
(turn), and ripresa (refrain) recall the origins of
the ballata as a monophonic dance.
FRANCESCO LANDINI
• Francesco Landini (c1325-1397) was the most
important composer of the trecento. Landini was a
blind organist who worked at the church of San
Lorenzo (St. Lawrence) in the center of Florence.
Surviving from his pen are 140 ballatas, thirteen
madrigals, but only one caccia.
• Landini’s ballata Or su, gentili spirti was said to
have been sung in 1389 in a garden party by two
women accompanied by a gentleman on the lowest
part. Landini’s music is characterized by flexible
rhythms, florid melody, abundant thirds and sixths,
and an idiosyncratic cadence, called the Landini
cadence in which the cantus voice drops from the
seventh degree to the sixth before jumping to the
8th and final degree.
The beginning of Landini’s ballata Or su, gentili spirti
revealing languid rhythms and a florid melody
The end of Landini’s ballata Or su, gentili
spirti showing a Landini cadence