(The occasional triplets were designated by special curlicues—they even look like floral fronds!—added
to the note-stems.) But look what happens in m. 17, when the text describes the ladies’ dance: the meter
changes (from .d. to .n. in the original notation), duodenaria (3 × 4) giving way to novenaria (3 × 3)—
motion by triplets (that is, alla gallica, “Frenchwise”). Even then “French” meant “fancy.”
THE “WILD BIRD” SONGS
Jacopo da Bologna’s madrigal Oselleto salvagio (“A wild bird”), of which the first tercet is shown in
Ex. 10-2a, is one of those music-about-music pieces that cast such a fascinating sidelight on the esthetics
of fourteenth-century art. One also gets from it a sense of what are sometimes called “the uses of
convention.”
Romantic esthetics (which we have inherited) tends to disparage conventions as being nothing but