Music of the trecento - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Trecento

The Trecento refers to the 14th century in Italian cultural history.Commonly the Trecento is considered to be the beginning of the Renaissance in art history...

was a period of vigorous activity in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music. The music of the Trecento paralleled the achievements in the other arts in many ways, for example, in pioneering new forms of expression, especially in secular song in the vernacular language, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

. In these regards, the music of the Trecento may seem more to be a Renaissance

Renaissance music

Renaissance music is European music written during the Renaissance. Defining the beginning of the musical era is difficult, given that its defining characteristics were adopted only gradually; musicologists have placed its beginnings from as early as 1300 to as late as the 1470s.Literally meaning...

phenomenon; however, the predominant musical language was more closely related to that of the late Middle Ages

Medieval music

Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century...

, and musicologists generally classify the Trecento as the end of the medieval era. Trecento means "three hundred" in Italian but is usually used to refer to the 1300s. However, the greatest flowering of music in the Trecento happened late in the century, and the period is usually extended to include music up to around 1420.

Background and Early History (to 1330)

Very little Italian music remains from the 13th century, so the immediate antecedents of the music of the Trecento must largely be inferred. The music of the troubadors, who brought their lyrical, secular song into northern Italy in the early 13th century after they fled their home regions—principally Provence—during the Albigensian Crusade

Albigensian Crusade

The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Catholic Church to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc...

, was a strong influence, and perhaps a decisive one; many of the Trecento musical forms are closely related to those of the troubadours of more than a century before. Another influence on Trecento music was the conductus

Conductus

In medieval music, conductus is a type of sacred, but non-liturgical vocal composition for one or more voices. The word derives from Latin conducere , and the conductus was most likely sung while the lectionary was carried from its place of safekeeping to the place from which it was to be read...

, a type of polyphonic sacred music which had the same text sung in all parts; texturally, Trecento secular music is more like the conductus than anything else that came before, although the differences are also striking, and some scholars (for example, Hoppin) have argued that the influence of the conductus has been overstated.

Some of the poetry of Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

(1265–1321) was set to music at the time it was written, but none of the music has survived. One of the musicians to set Dante's poetry was his friend Casella (died 1299 or 1300), memorialized in Canto II of Purgatorio
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature, and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature...

. Poems of Dante set by others included canzoni and ballate; if they were similar to the other earliest ballate, they would have been monophonic

Texture (music)

In music, texture is the way the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition , thus determining the overall quality of sound of a piece...

.

Though the pioneering music theory of Marchetto da Padova

Marchetto da Padova

Marchetto da Padova was an Italian music theorist and composer of the late medieval era. His innovations in notation of time-values were fundamental to the music of the Italian ars nova, as was his work on defining the modes and refining tuning...

was written in this early period, the influence of his treatise on notation, the Pomerium, is largely seen in the manuscripts of the succeeding generations.

The Birth of the Trecento Style (1330-1360)

Much of the earliest polyphonic

Polyphony

In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....

secular vocal music of the Trecento to survive is found in the Rossi Codex

Rossi Codex

The Rossi Codex is a music manuscript collection of the 14th century. The manuscript is presently divided into two sections, one in the Vatican Library and another, smaller section in the Northern Italian town of Ostiglia. The codex contains 37 secular works including madrigals, cacce and,...

and includes music by the first generation of composers to craft a uniquely Italian style. Though many works of this generation are anonymous, many works are attributed to one Maestro Piero

Maestro Piero

Maestro Piero was an Italian composer of the late medieval era. He was one of the first composers of the Trecento who is known by name, and probably one of the oldest...

and Giovanni da Cascia

Giovanni da Cascia

Giovanni da Cascia, also Jovannes de Cascia, Johannes de Florentia, Maestro Giovanni da Firenze, was an Italian composer of the medieval era, active in the middle of the fourteenth century....

. Other composers of the first generation include Vincenzo da Rimini

Vincenzo da Rimini

Vincenzo da Rimini, also Magister Dominus Abbas de Arimino, L’abate Vincençio da Imola, Frate Vincenço, was an Italian composer of the medieval era, active in the middle of the 14th century....

and Jacopo da Bologna

Jacopo da Bologna

Jacopo da Bologna was an Italian composer of the Trecento, the period sometimes known as the Italian ars nova. He was one of the first composers of this group, making him a contemporary of Gherardello da Firenze and Giovanni da Firenze...

, though they may be somewhat later end of this generation. All of these composers were associated with aristocratic courts in the north of Italy, especially Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

and Verona

Verona

Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...

. Some extremely obscure names survive in later sources, such as Bartolo da Firenze (fl.

Floruit

Floruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...

1330–1360), who may have been the first Italian composer to write a polyphonic mass

Mass (music)

The Mass, a form of sacred musical composition, is a choral composition that sets the invariable portions of the Eucharistic liturgy to music...

movement in Trecento style: a setting of the Credo

Credo

A credo |Latin]] for "I Believe") is a statement of belief, commonly used for religious belief, such as the Apostles' Creed. The term especially refers to the use of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in the Mass, either as text, Gregorian chant, or other musical settings of the...

.

The two most common forms of early Trecento secular music were the two-voice madrigal

Madrigal (Trecento)

The Madrigal is an Italian musical form of the 14th century. The form flourished ca. 1300 – 1370 with a short revival near 1400. It was a composition for two voices, sometimes on a pastoral subject...

and monophonic ballata. Some three-voice madrigals survive from the earlier periods, but the form most associated with three-voice writing was the rarer caccia

Caccia

Caccia can refer to:* The painter Guglielmo Caccia, known as "il Moncalvo"* The painter Orsola Caccia, daughter of Guglielmo* Caccia , an Italian poetic and musical genre of the 14th and 15th centuries...

, a canonic

Canon (music)

In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition that employs a melody with one or more imitations of the melody played after a given duration . The initial melody is called the leader , while the imitative melody, which is played in a different voice, is called the follower...

form with onomatopoeic exclamations and texts that make reference to hunting or feasting. While some of their music was still monophonic in the manner of the preceding century, much was for two voices, and Jacopo da Bologna wrote a few madrigals for three voices. Jacopo wrote one motet

Motet

In classical music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions.-Etymology:The name comes either from the Latin movere, or a Latinized version of Old French mot, "word" or "verbal utterance." The Medieval Latin for "motet" is motectum, and the Italian...

which has survived.

Florentine Music in the Mid-to-Late Fourteenth Century (1350-1390)

The center of musical activity moved south in mid-century, to Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, which was the cultural center of the early Renaissance. Characteristic of the next generation of composers, most of them Florentine, was a preference for the ballata

Ballata

The ballata is an Italian poetic and musical form, which was in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musical structure AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the French musical 'forme fixe' virelai...

, a form which seems to have exploded into popularity around mid-century. Like the closely related to the French virelai

Virelai

A virelai is a form of medieval French verse used often in poetry and music. It is one of the three formes fixes and was one of the most common verse forms set to music in Europe from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.A virelai is similar to a rondeau...

, the ballata has two sections and the form AbbaA. In the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...

tells how in 1348, the year the Black Death

Black Death

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Of several competing theories, the dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Thought to have...

ravaged Florence, members of a group of friends gathered to tell stories and sing ballate to instrumental accompaniment. While Boccaccio mentioned no composers by name, many of the Florentine musicians whose names have come down to us were in their early careers at this time.

By far the most famous composer of the entire Trecento, Francesco Landini (b. ca. 1325-35. d. 1397), is generally considered a member of this generation, even if there are evidences that he was already active during the precedent generation, and that was very close to Petrarch

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...

. Landini wrote 141 surviving ballate, but only 12 madrigals; his compositions appear in every corner of the Italian peninsula. Other composers of this group besides Landini included Gherardello da Firenze

Gherardello da Firenze

Gherardello da Firenze was an Italian composer of the Trecento...

, Lorenzo da Firenze

Lorenzo da Firenze

Lorenzo da Firenze was an Italian composer and music teacher of the Trecento. He was closely associated with Francesco Landini in Florence, and was one of the composers of the period known as the Italian ars nova.Little is known about his life, but some details can be inferred from the music...

, and Donato da Cascia

Donato da Cascia

Donato da Cascia was an Italian composer of the Trecento. All of his surviving music is secular, and the largest single source is the Squarcialupi Codex...

. Also by this generation of composers, the influence of French music was becoming apparent in the secular work of the native Italians. Greater independence of voices was characteristic of the music of this generation, and points of imitation are common; in addition, the uppermost voice is often highly ornamented. Landini's music was particularly admired for its lyricism and expressive intensity: his fame has endured for six hundred years, and numerous modern recordings exist of his work.

Trecento music during the Great Schism (1378-1417)

The last generation of composers of the era included Niccolò da Perugia

Niccolò da Perugia

Niccolò da Perugia was an Italian composer of the Trecento, the musical period also known as the "Italian ars nova". He was a contemporary of Francesco Landini, and apparently was most active in Florence.Little is known for certain about his life; only a few biographical details are verifiable...

, Bartolino da Padova

Bartolino da Padova

Bartolino da Padova was an Italian composer of the late 14th century...

, Andrea da Firenze

Andrea da Firenze

Andrea da Firenze was an Italian composer and organist of the late medieval era. Along with Francesco Landini and Paolo da Firenze, he was a leading representative of the Italian ars nova style of the Trecento, and was a prolific composer of secular songs, principally ballate.-Life:Since Andrea...

, Paolo da Firenze

Paolo da Firenze

Paolo da Firenze was an Italian composer and music theorist of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the transition from the musical Medieval era to the Renaissance...

, Matteo da Perugia

Matteo da Perugia

Matteo da Perugia was a Medieval Italian composer, presumably from Perugia. From 1402 to 1407 he was the first magister cappellae of the Milan Cathedral; his duties included being cantor and teaching three boys selected by the Cathedral deputies. Little is known about his life apart from this...

, and Johannes Ciconia

Johannes Ciconia

Johannes Ciconia was a late medieval composer and music theorist who worked most of his adult life in Italy, particularly in the service of the Papal Chapels and at the cathedral of Padua....

, the first member of the group who was not a native Italian. Though the principal form remained the ballata, a resurgence of the madrigal shows an interest in earlier music. This interest is accompanied by renewed interest in purely Italian notation. In many works by the newest generation the ornamentation of the parts is considerably less than in the music of the preceding group of composers, while other compositions are as ornamented as any in the earlier Trecento. Text-painting is evident in some of their music: for example, some of their programmatic

Program music

Program music or programme music is a type of art music that attempts to musically render an extra-musical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music...

compositions include frank imitations of bird calls or various dramatic effects.

Ciconia, as a Netherlander, was one of the first of the group which was to dominate European music for the next two hundred years; early in his life, he spent time in Italy learning the lyrical secular styles. Ciconia was also a composer of sacred music and represents a link with the Burgundian school, the first generation of Netherlanders which dominated the early and middle 15th century. Ciconia spent most of his Italian years in cities of northern Italy, particularly Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

, where he died in 1412.

Another late 14th-century composer, probably active in Rome, Abruzzo

Abruzzo

Abruzzo is a region in Italy, its western border lying less than due east of Rome. Abruzzo borders the region of Marche to the north, Lazio to the west and south-west, Molise to the south-east, and the Adriatic Sea to the east...

, and Teramo

Teramo

Teramo is a city and comune in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, the capital of the province of Teramo.The city, from Rome, is situated between the highest mountains of the Apennines and the Adriatic coast...

, was Antonio Zachara da Teramo

Zacara da Teramo

Antonio Zacara da Teramo was an Italian composer, singer, and papal secretary of the late Trecento and early 15th century...

. While a chronology of his music is yet to be established, it seems that his earlier music, surviving in the Squarcialupi Codex

Squarcialupi Codex

The Squarcialupi Codex is an illuminated manuscript compiled in Florence, Italy in the early 15th century...

, is related to the style of Landini and Jacopo da Bologna

Jacopo da Bologna

; his later music borrows from the style of the Avignon

Avignon

Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...

-centered Ars subtilior
Ars subtilior
Ars subtilior is a musical style characterized by rhythmic and notational complexity, centered around Paris, Avignon in southern France, also in northern Spain at the end of the fourteenth century. The style also is found in the French Cypriot repertory...

, and indeed, he seems to have supported the antipope

Antipope

An antipope is a person who opposes a legitimately elected or sitting Pope and makes a significantly accepted competing claim to be the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and leader of the Roman Catholic Church. At times between the 3rd and mid-15th century, antipopes were typically those supported by a...

s during the split of the papacy after the end of the century, going to Bologna around 1408.

The late Trecento also saw the rising importance of sacred music, particularly polyphonic Mass movements and Latin motet

Motet

s (both sacred and dedicatory). Though it was long thought that sacred music's role in the Trecento was small, thanks to many new discoveries over the past forty years, it now represents a significant percentage of the total output of the Trecento. Ciconia and Zachara play dominant roles in Mass composition, and their sacred music reached England, Spain, and Poland.

The end of the period of the Schism also marked the end of the dominance of Florence over Italian music; while it always maintained an active musical life, it would be replaced by Venice (and other centers in the Veneto), Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, Ferrara

Ferrara

Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...

and other cities in the coming centuries and never again regained the pre-eminent position it attained in the 14th century.

Instrumental music

Instrumental music was widespread, but relatively few notated examples have survived. Indeed, while contemporary depictions of singers often show them performing from books or scrolls, paintings and miniatures of instrumentalists never show written music. The main keyboard collection is the Faenza Codex (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, ms. 117). Other small sources of keyboard music appear in codices in Padua (Archivio di Stato 553), Assisi (Biblioteca Comunale 187), and in one section of the Reina Codex (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, n. a. fr. 6771). The typical keyboard style of the time seems to have placed the tenor of a secular song or a melody from plainchant in equal tones in the bass while a fast-moving line was written above it for the right hand. The surviving sources are likely among the few witnesses of a largely improvised tradition.

Other instrumental traditions are hinted at by the monophonic, untexted dances in a manuscript now in London (British Library, add. 29987) and in imitations of instrumental style in sung madrigals

Madrigal (Trecento)

and cacce

Caccia

such as Dappoi che'l sole.

Instruments used during the Trecento included the vielle

Vielle

The vielle is a European bowed stringed instrument used in the Medieval period, similar to a modern violin but with a somewhat longer and deeper body, five gut strings, and a leaf-shaped pegbox with frontal tuning pegs. The instrument was also known as a fidel or a viuola, although the French...

, lute

Lute

Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....

, psaltery

Psaltery

A psaltery is a stringed musical instrument of the harp or the zither family. The psaltery of Ancient Greece dates from at least 2800 BC, when it was a harp-like instrument...

, flute

Flute

The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

, and organetto

Organetto

Organetto refers to two distinct instruments. The medieval organetto was a portable pipe instrument, while the modern organetto is a popular Italian folk instrument allied to the accordion....

(portative organ: Landini is holding one in the illustration). Trumpets, drums (especially paired drums called nakers), and shawm

Shawm

The shawm was a medieval and Renaissance musical instrument of the woodwind family made in Europe from the 12th century until the 17th century. It was developed from the oriental zurna and is the predecessor of the modern oboe. The body of the shawm was usually turned from a single piece of wood,...

s were important military instruments.

Overall musical characteristics of the era

Music of the Trecento retained some characteristics of the preceding age and began to foreshadow the Renaissance in others.

Consonances

Consonance and dissonance

In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...

were unison

Interval (music)

In music theory, an interval is a combination of two notes, or the ratio between their frequencies. Two-note combinations are also called dyads...

, fifth and octave, just as in the ars antiqua
Ars antiqua
Ars antiqua, also called ars veterum or ars vetus, refers to the music of Europe of the late Middle Ages between approximately 1170 and 1310, covering the period of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet...

, and the interval of a third was usually treated as a dissonance, especially earlier in the period. Parallel motion in unison, fifths, octaves, thirds, and occasionally fourths was used in moderation. Composers used passing tones to avoid parallel intervals, creating brief harsher dissonances, foreshadowing the style of counterpoint

Counterpoint

In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

developed in the Renaissance. After 1350, there was increased use of triads in three-part writing, giving the music, to a modern ear, a tonal feeling. Accidentals occurred more frequently in music of the Trecento than in music of earlier eras; in particular, there was use of F, C, G, B, and E. One A occurs in the works of Landini.

The Landini cadence

Landini cadence

A Landini cadence , or under-third cadence, is a type of cadence, a technique in music composition, named after Francesco Landini , a blind Florentine organist, in honor of his extensive use of the technique...

or under-third cadence, is a cadence involving the melodic drop from the seventh to the sixth before going up again to the octave. It was named after Landini because of its frequent use in his music. It can be found in most of the music of the period, especially after him.

Music sources

Most of the manuscript sources of Trecento music are from late in the fourteenth or early in the 15th century: some time removed from the composition of the works themselves. The earliest substantial manuscript source of Trecento music is the Rossi Codex

Rossi Codex

, which was compiled sometime between 1350 and 1370 and contains music from the earlier portion of the era. However, other small manuscript sources have been found that expand our knowledge of earlier Trecento repertories. These include the Mischiati fragments of Reggio Emilia, which contain several unique cacce

Caccia

. Other early sources contain sacred repertories. Two folios of Oxford Canon. Misc. 112 preserve a motet

Motet

by Marchetto da Padova

Marchetto da Padova

. Further motets are found on the fragment at Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, San Giorgio Maggiore

San Giorgio Maggiore

San Giorgio Maggiore is one of the islands of Venice, northern Italy, lying east of the Giudecca and south of the main island group. The isle is surrounded by Canale della Grazia, Canale della Giudecca, Saint Mark Basin, Canale di San Marco and the southern lagoon...

.
The source Perugia Bib. Univ. Inv. 15755 N.F. was claimed to be from 1349-1354 according to its discoverers, but this date has been strongly disputed, and scholarly consensus is building that the manuscript is no earlier than other sources commonly dated to the 1390s. Still, this episode reflects the difficulties and uncertainties of dating all Trecento sources.

Most of the later large sources stem from the area around Florence

Florence

. Probably the oldest of the larger sources is the Panciatichi Codex, no. 26. The largest and most beautiful Trecento source is undoubtedly the brilliantly illuminated Squarcialupi Codex

Squarcialupi Codex

The Squarcialupi Codex is an illuminated manuscript compiled in Florence, Italy in the early 15th century...

, compiled in the early 15th century, which, with 352 compositions (including 145 by Landini), is one of the largest music sources of the time from any region.

Substantial fragmentary manuscript sources from Padua

Padua

, Cividale del Friuli

Cividale del Friuli

-External links:*...

, and from the area around Milan

Milan

point to these areas as substantial areas of manuscript production as well.

Background and Early History (to 1330)

The Birth of the Trecento Style (1330-1360)

Florentine Music in the Mid-to-Late Fourteenth Century (1350-1390)

Trecento music during the Great Schism (1378-1417)

Instrumental music

Overall musical characteristics of the era

Music sources

Media

Further reading