Jacopo’s poem begins as if setting the expected pastoral scene. The wild (or forest) songbird is a
standard ingredient of “pleasant places.” But having introduced the bird, the poet immediately turns it into
a metaphor for song and proceeds to deliver a little sermon on the art of singing—an entirely
nonconventional use of a conventional genre, but one that is tied intelligibly to the convention that is being
“bent” or “sent up.” By being the medium for a discourse on good singing, Jacopo’s music thus becomes
“exemplary.” It must demonstrate the sweetness and moderation it proclaims.
Therefore it eschews the kind of “florid” virtuosity we saw in Giovanni’s madrigal. It is cast in a
meter—senaria perfecta, as Italian theorists would have called it—that characteristically moves exactly
twice as slowly as Giovanni’s duodenaria. In Jacopo’s very lyrical setting, the fixed breve is divided
into six semibreves grouped in pairs (rather than twelve grouped by four), hence eighth notes within 34
time in transcription. One particular melodic feature that is especially characteristic of trecento music
arises directly out of the senaria perfecta division. Note how frequently the paired notes take the form of
descending seconds in the cantus part, cast in sequences (or, to revert to the familiar analogy, strung in
garlands) with the first note in each pair repeating the second note of its predecessor in a sort of stutter.
(The first instance is the delightfully syncopated initial “clump” of words in m. 5; compare it with the
rhythmically more straightforward and typical clump in m. 23.)
This type of melodic motion may have been considered symbolically expressive; in later music it is
called a “sigh-figure,” which puts it in the category of “iconic” representation. That is, it symbolizes
emotion by mimicking the behavior of a person responding to emotion. The idea that art expresses through
imitation is an old Greek idea (hence the word mimic itself, one of several English words that come from
the Greek mimesis, “imitation”; others are “mime,” “mimetic,” even “[m]imitation,” which lost its initial
m by being filtered through Latin). But it does not contradict the imitation theory in the slightest if we also
notice that the sigh-figure falls very naturally under the hand of somebody playing on an organetto, a tiny
“portative” (portable) organ held perpendicular to the body and played with one hand on the keyboard,
the other on the bellows. To judge from the illuminations in the Squarcialupi Codex (including two given
here as illustrations), rare was the trecento composer who did not play it. (To judge by the more detailed