Chapter 20 - Popular Music in Florence, 1475-1540
The Late Renaissance Strictly speaking, the word renaissance means "rebirth " but it also connotes
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 Development of the expressive, indeed rhetorical, power of music as a result
of
o New interest in the text shown by the humanists
o Desire to intensify the meaning of the text through music generally Growing sense that music might not only be for religious solace and salvatior but also for personal enrichment and entertainment Invention of music printing, which allowed for the dissemination of music to
a much wider segment of the population
Shift in the perception of music as a discipline among the sciences to one among the fine arts 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 quattrocento (Italian for wha
we call "the 1400s"). Much of the learned polyphony (Masses, motets, and
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 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 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") 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/infamous writer of laude was Girolamo Savonarola (1452
1498). Savonarola was a fascinated Dominican monk who in 1497 had gained
control of the government of Florence. Savonarola was a religious purist who who insisted that all objects of worldly pleasure, including music books,
musical instrumen