depictions of the portative in fifteenth-century paintings, it was fingered 2–3–2–3, etc., which would make
a sequence of “sighs” virtually the easiest thing in the world to produce on it.)
But now a new irony, a new twist: Jacopo ostensibly eschewed virtuosity in his “wild bird” madrigal
only to indulge it to the hilt in another setting of the same poem, in which the text is spat out so quickly that
the first tercet (shown in Ex. 10-2b) takes only 12 measures in transcription. This version of Oselleto
salvagio is a caccia. Thewordbeing so clearly cognate to the French chace, we may expect a canon. And
a canon it is, albeit with a difference. For Italian poet-musicians the caccia was a type of madrigal
(which is why Jacopo could recycle a madrigal poem in writing one). That meant a form in two sections
(terzetti and ritornello), and it meant a texture consisting of a cantus (in this case running against itself in
canon) over a tenor. So the Italian caccia, unlike the French chace, always had a “free” part.
But of course it was not literally free, since it had to concord harmonically with the canon that it
accompanied. In fact it was more “bound,” which is to say constrained harmonically and contrapuntally,
than the canon itself. For obvious reasons, a voice accompanying a canon is generally written last. So the
caccia was, of all fourteenth century genres, the most necessarily and rigorously (and literally) “top-
down” in compositional or generative method. Unlike the tenors of madrigals, those of caccias never
carry the text. Does that mean that they were performed by instruments? The musicological jury is still out
on that one, but it is clear enough that assumptions are risky. There are many proven instances in which the
presence or absence of text is not a reliable indicator of performance medium. It is worth mentioning,
therefore, that literary references to the performance of madrigals or caccias never use any verb but
“sing.”
Like the word chace, the word caccia had a built-in “extramusical” association, and so its subject
matter frequently involved the hunt. (And like the chace, it frequently resorted to onomatopoeia, dog-
language, and the like; compare Ex. 9-19 with Ex. 10-3). So again, the standard definition of the genre
enabled a sophisticated composer like Jacopo to ring ironic changes on the genre’s implications. A “wild
bird” in the context of a caccia meant something different from what it meant in the context of a madrigal:
not song but prey. But here, too, the topic was appropriate and relevant, and so its instant metaphorization
is again suitably ironic.
Also ironic, of course, is the insistence on sweet, soft, and elegant singing, since the usual caccia text
(like the one tendentiously excerpted in Ex. 10-3, replete with quail, dogs, and hunter’s horn) contained so
many invitations to “loud shouting.” To sing the virtuosic music in Jacopo’s caccia smoothly and in
“lovely” fashion requires (as the poem warns) the ultimate in vocal control. Notice, too, that in the caccia
setting of Oselleto salvagio the octonaria semibreve (that is, one-eighth of a breve, represented in
transcription by a sixteenth note) gets to carry individual syllables of text. (In Giovanni de Cascia’s
madrigal, that level of duration was found only in melismas.) In its caccia guise, Jacopo’s song could
well have been a test for singers—or (as we have every reason to suspect) a contest piece.
BALLATA CULTURE
Besides motets and madrigals, Jacopo mentions a third musico-poetic genre in the Oselleto salvagio text
—the ballata, which gradually stole pride of place from the madrigal over the course of the century.
Ballata is the past participle of ballare, “to dance,” identifying the genre as a dance(d)-song with refrain,
thus associating it with the French chanson balladé or virelai. The French and Italian dance songs were
counterparts in every way, and there is good evidence that as an “art” genre the ballata was directly
influenced by the virelai.
Unlike the “learned” madrigal, cultivated in universities, the ballata began as a folk or popular genre,