Chapter 14 - Music in Florence, 1350-1450
The Early Renaissance
Renaissance means rebirth in the sense of a reawakening. 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.
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 & 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
beautiful, and typical of Renaissance poetry, is full of classical allusions.
Caccia and Ballata
In Italian, caccia means hunt. A caccia is a composition involving a musical
canon in the upper voices supported chases after the other, and the Italiar texts of many caccias are above a hunt, either real or amatory (of the beloved). The ballata was a dance song with a choral refrain. Its music and poetic
A (ripresa). The terms piede (foot), vo/ta (turn), and ripresa (refrain) recall the origins of the ballata as a monophonic dance.
Francesco Landini . Francesco (1325-1397) 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 spirtiwas said to have been sung in 1389 in a
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
Chapter 15 - Music at the Cathedral of Florence
Music for the Dedication - March 25th 1436
The dedication of the cathedral of Florence was celebrated by Pope
Eugenius IV and the papal chapel, both then resident in Florence. The pope's magister capellae (master, or leader, of the chapel) was then Guillaume
Du