FIG. 10-4 Francesco Landini wearing a laurel crown, from the Squarcialupi Codex. Although the piece that the portrait
illuminates, the three-voiced motetlike madrigal Musica son (“Music Am I”), is one of Landini’s most complex, the great
majority of his works were in the less venerable genre of the dance song (ballata).
Marchetto classified all the possible meters of music into varying divisions of the breve. The short–
long “Franconian” pairing of semibreves within a perfect breve Marchetto called “natural divisions”
(divisiones via naturae, “dividing things nature’s way”). Other divisions—long short, equal (imperfect),
and the like—were classified as divisiones via artis (“dividing things up by way of art”) or “artificial
divisions,” and were represented by modifying the “natural” note shapes with tails. A descending tail
doubled the length of a semibreve; an ascending tail halved it, producing the equivalent of a French
minim. When it came to grouping the minim-shaped notes, the basic distinction was between what the
French called major and minor prolation, what we call compound and simple meters, and what the users
of Marchetto’s system distinguished as gallica and ytalica—“French” and “Italian” styles.
When it came to varying the rhythms that occurred within a basic meter or divisio, the Italian system,
with its wide variety of tailed note shapes, was exceedingly supple and precise. At least one of these
special Italian note-shapes—the single eighth note with a “flag” (the unit value of the so-called octonaria
meter that divided the breve by eight)—has survived into modern notation. The rarer Italian shapes were
a major source for the novel signs used by ars subtilior composers—including, for example, the double-
stemmed notes called dragmas, which we encountered in Fig. 9-5. But of course many of the ars subtilior
composers (including Philippus de Caserta, their leading theorist) were Italians working in France. They
were actually drawing to a large extent upon their native traditions. So what used to be called the
“mannered” notation of the late fourteenth century was in fact a conflation of French and Italian practices
that widened the possibilities of both.
A NEW DISCANT STYLE
Giovanni de Cascia’s madrigal Appress’ un fiume (“Hard by a stream”) shows every distinctive feature