of the budding trecento style (Ex. 10-1). The opening stanzas (tercets) enumerate a veritable shopping list
of the ingredients that went into defining the bucolic scene—the “pleasant place” (in Latin, locus
amoenus) inherited from the classical authors of’ “idylls” and “eclogues” like Virgil and Theocritus—
within which all pastoral lyrics were set: a stream, a shade tree, flowers in bloom. It is the setting
familiar from paintings and tapestries of noble outings, the same noble villas and their grounds where
these agreeable songs were generally performed. The human ingredients are likewise idyllic: a beautiful
lady, her graceful dance, her sweet song. In the ritornello the lady—Anna, of course—is secretly named
within the word “fall in love” (an[n]amorar).
The setting is for two supple men’s voices whose ranges lie about a fifth apart, with a common fifth in
the middle that enables them to make cadences by occursus—that is, to the unison. Two-part discant
counterpoint with occursus is something we have not seen in France since the twelfth century, and never
in secular music. It is the characteristic madrigal texture. But it is no throwback. Everything else about the
style is so new and fresh that the texture, too, is best seen in context as an Italian innovation—or, if you
like, a reinvented wheel.
The way in which the music clothes the text is likewise characteristic. It is descriptive on several
levels. Every line of the poem starts with a small melismatic flourish on the first accented syllable and
ends with a large one on the last accented syllable, with most of the words occurring midway, in a clump.
The words and music thus “alternate,” so that the melismatic singing does not unduly interfere with verbal
comprehension. We habitually call such singing “florid,” perhaps without even realizing that the word
derives from flos (plural flores), Latin for flower. The fourteenth-century Italians were in no doubt about
this. Their word for “florid” singing was (and is)fioritura, “putting forth flowers,” and Michael Long is
surely (and illuminatingly) right to compare the obligatory melismas to “audible projections of the
flowery landscapes of madrigal poetry,” and to suggest that “the music of the madrigal was draped across
its text like the floral garlands of which poets and theorists were so fond.”^4
It was to accommodate this kind of floral music that Italian musicians developed their lengthiest and
most elaborate meters. Appress’ un fiume is composed in what Marchetto and his followers called
duodenaria—division by twelve. In transcription the breve is represented by the full measure (dotted half
note) and the most characteristic melismatic motion is by sixteenths grouped in fours, making twelve to a
bar in all.
EX. 10-1 Giovanni de Cascia, Appress’ un fiume (madrigal)