Certain features of the florid part in this setting have struck some commentators as unidiomatic for the
keyboard. One is the tendency of the parts to cross, or to occupy the same note (= key). Another is the use
of rapid repeated notes, as in the first cadence of the first part. These features would seem less
problematical, the same writers have suggested, if the piece were re-imagined as a duet for two lutes,
played (as was then the custom) with quills or plectrums. But if this is a notated lute duet, it is a
completely isolated specimen. Nor are lutenists ever shown reading from sheet music in pictures before
the sixteenth century.
At any rate, we may have here a kind of chance aural snapshot of the kind of music-making for which
Landini was especially distinguished in his daily life as a musician, which was ineluctably “oral,” not
literate. (For one very obvious physical reason Landini could not have read any music, not even his own,
from this or any book; it is worth mentioning, too, that he was only the first of many famous blind
organists in the history of European music—the line extends right up to the twentieth century, with the
organists Helmut Walcha and Jean Langlais, the latter also a noted composer.) But of course there is no
reason to assume that this particular intabulation is a transcription of Landini’s actual performances. On
the contrary, the intabulator seems not even to have known that the work in question was a ballata: the
sections after the first main cadence are marked “second part of the first part” and “second main part”;