Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

2. Early secular music.

Information concerning secular music is scant until the 12th century, and even then it consists of descriptions of performances and texts of songs, but no music; the few exceptions (some historical complaints, a vigil song of Modenese sentries and the well-known pilgrim song O Roma nobilis, to the simple tune of which the more profane O admirabile Veneris ydolum was also sung) all belong to the 9th century and to ecclesiastical circles, to which they owe their survival. Among the earliest documents of poetry in the vulgar tongue, some jongleur songs addressed to bishops show that the traditional condemnation of jongleurs and mimes had subsided by the 12th century. Dance-songs in a popular vein and in ballata form (often entitled danze) survive in notarial acts of the 13th century and early 14th century; the way in which they were sung in alternation between a leader and the chorus of dancers is described in a Latin epistle by the grammarian Giovanni del Virgilio. Ballata form was also used for solo songs unconnected with dancing.

Troubadour lyrics were performed and composed during the 13th century at the courts of feudal lords in northern Italy, in bourgeois circles in Bologna and Tuscany and at the court of the Emperor Frederic II (1197–1250; King of Sicily, often engaged in wars throughout the peninsula) both by visiting troubadours and by local poets also using the Provençal language; among the latter were Sordello da Goito (c1200–c1270) and the Genoese Lanfranco Cigala (d c1274) and Bonifacio Calvo (d after 1274). In this regard it is worth noting that most extant sources of troubadour poetry are of Italian origin; they seldom contain any music, however, and it is hard to say whether this is due to the compilers’ exclusive interest in the texts or to the fact that the melodies were usually transmitted orally. The same applies to the vernacular poetry of the so-called Sicilian and Tuscan schools, the former centred on Frederic II and his sons, the latter with Guittone of Arezzo (c1225–c1294) as its main representative. For the later dolce stil nuovo it can only be surmised that the increasing length and the philosophical bent of its poems conflicted with a increasing floridity of the settings. Dante (1265–1325) had some of his canzoni and ballatas set by musician friends (e.g. Casella); yet he asserted (De vulgari eloquentia, ii, 8) the self-contained verbal musicality of the canzone and argued that music would better suit the ‘mediocre’ style of the ballata. After him there was a split: because of the feeling that profound poetic thoughts had little to gain from the ornament of music, canzoni and the most sophisticated ballatas were no longer set to music, while shorter ballatas, madrigals and cacce began to be written specifically as poesia per musica.

Frequent references to the singing of ballatas persist during the 14th century, indicating a widespread use of this most versatile form as a dance-song, aristocratic or popular, and as a vehicle for lyrical expression. Music survives, however, only for the religious counterpart of the ballata, the lauda; and even then, only two lavishly decorated laudari contain music, while many simpler ones are without it, suggesting that notation (which did not, anyway, show the rhythm of the songs) was more an ornament than the answer to a real need. The penitential singing of laude spread from Franciscan Umbria around 1260 and became a devotional custom practised by lay fraternities all over Italy, a practice which survived well into the 18th century, often through the adaptation of secular melodies and folktunes to texts of devotional character, thus continuing the medieval practice of contrafactum. The alternation of soloist and chorus, involving all those present in the singing of the choral refrain, had been borrowed from the dance-song. An early 14th-century manuscript of Umbrian origin (I-CT 91) contains simple melodies of touching directness, while a slightly later Florentine repertory (I-Fn Magl.I.I.122) already shows a pronounced tendency towards florid vocalization.

Notation is a natural need of a polyphonic art and explains the impressive array of manuscripts containing music of the Italian Ars Nova, which, however, was the expression of only a small minority and had a much more limited diffusion than monophonic music. It is thus deceptive to see it as representative of Trecento music. Polyphonic singing, probably taken over from the private entertainment of ecclesiastics, began to be fashionable at the courts of the Scaligeri and Visconti, in Padua, Verona and Milan during the early 14th century; later it also gained favour in literary circles in Florence. Accordingly, its composers, most of them ecclesiastics or lawyers, divide into a northern group, whose main figures are Jacopo da Bologna and, later, Bartolino da Padova (both significantly from places with famous universities), and a larger Florentine group, including Francesco Landini (d 1397). The role of lesser places, such as Perugia, Rimini, Caserta, Teramo and Lucca, is unclear. Over 600 extant works, datable from about 1335 to about 1420, include madrigals, ballatas, a small number of cacce and a scattering of motets. The madrigal and caccia were the oldest forms, apparently created by polyphonists from both the musical and the literary point of view. The madrigal’s short, descriptive, epigrammatic or celebratory texts (some of them by Petrarch, Boccaccio and Franco Sacchetti) were set for two, seldom three, texted parts, with effusive figuration in the upper one, often to mark the beginning or end of a poetic line or verse. Madrigals set in canon were called ‘cacce’, but that musical term (a musical synonym of the later fuga) soon suggested longer, metrically irregular descriptions of open-air scenes (hunting, fishing, marketing etc.), whose onomatopoeic animation, rendered by the voices in canon, often required the support of a third, non-canonic instrumental part. Ballatas were at first set monophonically even by polyphonists (two manuscripts contain a small number of such settings), but began to be set for two or three parts after 1360; as the lyricism of their upper voice-parts (often supported by lower, instrumental parts) appealed to somewhat larger audiences, they gradually supplanted madrigals and cacce. This explains the particular renown enjoyed by Landini, whose works are mainly ballatas.

With its special forms and special system of notation, codified in the 1320s by Marchetto da Padova (himself a composer), Italian secular polyphony was related to, yet independent from, the contemporary French Ars Nova. Its learned supporters, however, began gradually to indulge in subtilitas, mostly identifying it with the imitation of French contemporary models; in time, and particularly during the great schism following the return of the popes from Avignon to Rome, various artists were induced to embrace a French style. As a counterpart, some foreign composers who were active in Italy, among them Johannes Ciconia (d 1412) and later Du Fay, set Italian texts and showed their appreciation of the original flavour of the Italian polyphonic style. A distinguishing feature of 14th-century Italian polyphony was the motet celebrating a state or religious occasion, whose text (always in Latin) mentions not only the event itself but also the personalities involved and, in some cases, the composer.

Italy, §I: Art music