The ten ballate inset within Boccaccio’s narrative consist of strophic stanzas with a refrain that either
frames the lot or comes between each stanza and the next. (As usual, the oral tradition is not fully known
to history.) One of them (Io me son giovinetta, “A girl am I [and gladly do rejoice at springtime]”),
became a “classic,” widely set by composers of a later age (beginning in the sixteenth century), when
ballate were no longer used for actual dancing, and when (therefore) their form as such was no longer
heeded by composers who set them to music.
Only one ballata by Boccaccio (not in the Decameron) was set by a contemporary: Non so qual i’ mi
voglia (“I know not which I would”; Ex. 10-4), with music by a Florentine composer who went by the
name of Lorenzo Masini (“Lawrence, son of Thomas,” d. 1372 or 1373). Like the virelai as practiced by
Machaut, the ballata remained at first a largely monophonic genre even when written down by artistically
trained composers.
Non so qual i’ mi voglia resembles the ballate in the Decameron, and thus might be thought of as the
“purebred” Italian ballata. But it was precisely Lorenzo’s generation of trecento composers that began
showing symptoms of musical Francophilia (as a credential, perhaps, of literacy and learnedness).
Lorenzo wrote a famous caccia called A poste messe (“After Mass”) in three parts, all of them canonic—
in other words (but for the language of the text and the form of the poem) a chace. He also wrote a
madrigal over an isorhythmic tenor in which each phrase is immediately followed by a syncopated
rhythmic diminution—in other words, a madrigal-motet. And he even wrote a ballata to a French text—in
other words a virelai.
LANDINI
Nevertheless, it is not until the next (last) generation of trecento composers that we begin to find ballate
in a truly gallicized style—that is, ballate with their form adapted to the French manner by means of a
“contained” refrain (or, to put it another way, with a “turnaround” or volta consisting of a new verse sung
to the refrain melody), with open-and-shut cadences for the inner verses, and a three-part texture that
included a contratenor. Such ballate could be called Italian virelais, and their great master—regarded by
all his contemporaries as the greatest musician of the trecento—was a blind Florentine organist named
Francesco Landini (1325–97).