literati (university-trained clerics) for dynastic courts. Landini’s ballate do not so much evoke bountiful
pastoral surroundings or extol voluptuary pleasures or narrate venereal conquests as communicate
personal feeling—often the conventionalized love-longing of the troubadours (by the fourteenth century
more a “bourgeois” affectation than a noble sentiment). Therein lay the difference between the “madrigal
culture” of the noble north and the “ballata culture” of the Tuscan trading centers.
The three-voiced, thus presumably later Non avrà ma’pietà (“She’ll never pity me,” Ex. 10-5) was
one of Landini’s most popular ballate, and it is one of the most thoroughly gallicized as well. The texture,
with a single texted cantus accompanied by an untexted tenor and contratenor, is indistinguishable from
that of a virelai. The open and shut cadences of the middle verses or piedi (first on the “supertonic,” then
on the final) are reminiscent of Machaut. Besides the language of the text, only the “clumping” of the
poem’s syllables between melismas at the beginnings and ends of lines remains characteristically Italian.
And yet Landini’s fingerprint is unmistakable, owing to the use of a cadential ornament originally so
peculiar to him as to bear his name, though it eventually became a stylistic commonplace in the thoroughly
internationalized music of the fifteenth century. Every one of the three standard “double leading-tone”
cadences in the ripresa (refrain or “A” section) of Non avrà ma’pietà (mm. 10–11, 16–17, 28–29), and
the final cadences (both open and shut) in the piedi show the same melodic progression to the final, in
which the subtonium (or note-below-the-final) proceeds down an additional scale step (from the seventh
degree above the final to the sixth) before leaping up to the ending note, its behavior resembling what we
would now call an “escape tone.” (Besides the structural cadences as noted, one can see the ornament in
mm. 3–4 and 46–47 as well; all occurrences of it are bracketed in Ex. 10-5.)
This 7–6–1 cadence, sometimes called the “under-third” cadence, is more commonly called the
“Landini cadence” or “Landini sixth.” As the counterpoint in Non avrà ma’ pietà shows, moreover, it is
often allied with a hemiola pattern ( in the cantus against in the tenor and contratenor) that produces a
characteristic precadential syncopation. (The syncopation, too, would become a standard feature of
fifteenth century counterpoint, eventually emphasized by a characteristic dissonance that we now call a
suspension.) For once the personalized term is not a misnomer. “Gregorian chant” may not have much to
do with Gregory, nor the “Guidonian Hand” with Guido, but the Landini cadence is fairly associated with
Landini, whose ballate were, as Michael Long has put it, “the first body of polyphonic works in which it
appears with systematic regularity and structural weight”^5 —structural because the cadences it decorates
are typically, though not exclusively, those that correspond to the ends of verse lines.
EX. 10-5 Francesco Landini, Non avràma’pietà (ballata)