Of all trecento composers Landini has by far the largest surviving body of works—though it is hard to
say whether that fact reflects his greater productivity or the greater zeal with which his compositions
were preserved. Out of more than 150 compositions by him that have come down to us, only fifteen
(twelve madrigals, a caccia, and a couple of miscellaneous songs, one in French) are anything but
polyphonic ballate. Of the ballate, about forty, or one-third, have the French three-part texture.
This enormous emphasis on what was originally the humblest and least literary of the trecento genres
reflects a changed social setting. Where the early madrigalists had competed for laurels at the courts of
the northern Italian nobility, Landini and his Florentine contemporaries made music for the Florentine
ruling class, which was an urban mercantile and industrial elite. (As Dante noted sadly, there was no
central court or noble residence in Florence; it was a republican city-state.) Landini’s Frenchified ballata
style may have reflected the tastes of that class, which maintained a lively commerce with their French
counterparts. Florentine businessmen spent much of their time in French-speaking centers to the north and
west, and learned the French language as a matter of business necessity. The later fourteenth century was a
period during which the Tuscan vernacular language itself, to say nothing of the local art-music, suffered a
great influx of gallicisms.
EX. 10-4 Lorenzo Masini, Non so qual i’ mi voglia (ballata; text by Boccaccio)Like many of the troubadours, Landini was born into the artisan class, which in Florence was no
impediment to social prominence. His father had been a church painter, and he himself earned his living
(and much of his local fame) as an organ technician. So it is not surprising that the works of an artisan
musician within an urban industrial community should have differed greatly from those composed by