And yet the cadence can also be viewed as a typically trecento melodic pattern, found even in
monophonic Florentine ballate, like Donna l’altrui mirar (“O Lady, who belongest to another”) by
Gherardello da Firenze (d. 1363), where it seems to recall the “sigh-figure” of expressively descending
paired notes (Ex. 10-6). Gherardello, an older contemporary and countryman of Landini’s, was also the
author of the caccia Tosto che l’alba, sampled in Ex. 10-3. What Landini did was to give the “under-
third” cadence a home within the newly Frenchified polyphonic texture, thus making it exportable.
One of the ways we know that Landini’s ballata Non avràma’pietà was exceptionally popular is its
inclusion in the Faenza keyboard manuscript, put together about two decades after Landini’s death. We
first met this manuscript in chapter 9 as a source for the Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor and for a ballade by
Machaut. The mixed contents of the book is another indication that Italian and French styles were fast
interpenetrating by the end of the fourteenth century. When we remember that Landini was the foremost
organist in Italy, and that this had been his chief claim to contemporary fame, it is hard not to speculate on
the extent to which the keyboard arrangements in Faenza may reflect his improvisatory skills.
Like the arrangement of Machaut’s De toutes flours (Ex. 9-10), the arrangement of Non avrà ma’pietà
(of which the first section is given in Ex. 10-7) consists of a virtuoso filigree over the original tenor. The
filigree in this case conforms rather more to the outlines of the original cantus part than in the case of
Machaut’s piece; compare the notes marked “+” in Ex. 10-7 with the cantus of Ex. 10-5.
EX. 10-6 Gherardello da Firenze, Donna l’altrui mirar (monophonic ballata), cadences embellished with “Landini sixth”