CHAPTER 10

“A Pleasant Place”: Music of the Trecento

ITALIAN MUSIC OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

VULGAR ELOQUENCE

As we know, the rise of European vernacular literatures began in Aquitaine, toward the end of the

eleventh century, with the troubadours. By the end of the twelfth century, there was a significant body of
vernacular poetry in French. By the end of the thirteenth century, the current had reached Germany. In all
cases, the rise of a vernacular literature was accompanied by the development of song genres as the
medium for its performance and dissemination.

Why then, with the marginal (that is, marginally literate) exception of the lauda, did Italy wait until the
fourteenth century before developing a vernacular literature with its attendant music? The answer seems
to be that for a long time the Italian aristocracy preferred their courtly songs in the “original”—that is,
Occitan (or, less precisely, Provençal), the language of southern France. Throughout the thirteenth century,
Aquitainian troubadours, some of them refugees from the Albigensian Crusades, were officially attached
to the feudal courts of northern Italy and to the royal court of Sicily down below, where their work was
imitated by local poets who took over not only their models’ subject matter and their forms but their
language as well. Even Dante, in his unfinished treatise De vulgari eloquentia (“On high style in the
vernacular”) of 1304–1306, tells us that, before making up his mind that it would after all be possible to
write poetry of profound intellectual substance in the Tuscan dialect of his native Florence, he, too, had at
first planned to use the time-honored and internationally prestigious Occitan tongue.

And yet Dante was also among the earliest writers to attempt a separation of poetry and music,
holding that for stylistically ornate, philosophically weighty “cantos” (canzoni) in high style, the
decorative addition of music would only be a distraction. He advocated the creation of special
“mediocre” (that is, “in-between”) genres of pastoral poesia per musica—bucolic, descriptive poetry
that would not be the main attraction, so to speak, but would furnish an elegant pretext for the creation of a
secular music that, unimpeded by great verse, might itself aim higher than ever. Thus the Italian song
genres, when they were at last established in the fourteenth century, gave rise from the beginning to a
predominantly polyphonic and exceptionally decorative repertory.

That repertory had its own notation and its own generic forms, related by a common ancestry to those
of contemporary France, but nevertheless distinctive and in some ways mysterious. It has been likened to
a meteor or even a nova, “suddenly flaming into existence against an obscure background and, its
fireworks spent, disappearing just as abruptly,” in the words of its leading recent historian, Michael P.
Long.^1 Thanks to Long’s own research and that of several other scholars, that background is no longer
quite as obscure as it once seemed.

The characteristic song-poem of “trecento” music—so-called after the Italian word for the fourteenth
century (the “[one-thousand-and-]three hundreds”) to distinguish it from contemporary French “ars nova”
developments—was called the madrigale (in English, madrigal). The name evidently descends from the
Latin matrix (womb), the root of the Italian word for “mother-tongue” (matricale, whence cantus
matricalis, “a song in the mother tongue”), and thus simply means a poem in the vernacular. It consisted of
two or more three-line stanzas called terzetti (tercets), which are sung to the same music, and a single