commercial presses of Petrucci, including (to give an idea of his fertility) no fewer than six instrumental
arrangements of De tous biens plaine. Agricola also wrote carmina in the more modern imitative style,
free (as far as anyone knows) of borrowed material.
Ex. 13-19 shows the beginnings of two late fifteenth-century carmina of the latter type—original
carmina without known prototype. Both have significant titles. La Alfonsina (13-19a), from Petrucci’s
Odhecaton, was the work of Johannes Ghiselin (alias Verbonnet), a Picard or northern French composer
who worked in Italy alongside Obrecht and Josquin at the court of Ferrara. The title translates as
“Alfonso’s little piece,” after the composer’s patron, Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (and husband of
the notorious Lucrezia Borgia).
A similar piece by Josquin in Petrucci’s Canti C is called La Bernardina (“Bernardo’s little piece”).
Giving carmina the names of people was a handy way of getting around the problem of what to call a
piece in this “purposeless” genre, and could be applied to producers as well as consumers. One of
Martini’s best-disseminated pieces of this kind (found in a dozen manuscripts, including the Glogauer
Liederbuch) was called La Martinella (“Martini’s little piece”). Somewhat later, Ludwig Sennfl (ca.
1486–ca. 1543), a Swiss-German pupil of Isaac, identified a few of his carmina by naming their finals:
Carmen in la (“Song in A”), Carmen in re (“Song in D”), and the like, anticipating the practice of
identifying abstract or “functionless” instrumental music by naming its key (“Sonata in A major,”
“Symphony in D minor”).
La Alfonsina and other pieces of its type were in essence a kind of souped-up version of (or “answer”
to) Isaac’s Benedictus. The opening point of imitation in La Alfonsina is a veritable rewrite of Isaac’s,
disguised (or rather, displayed) by reversing the order of its constituent phrases. The brisk minim motion
that came in the middle of Isaac’s opening “theme” now comes at the beginning, and it is carried through
the entire rising octave for additional virtuoso verve. The attractive passage near the end of the
Benedictus in which the tenor sings florid sequences against the sustained parallel tenths of the outer
voices is mirrored in Ghiselin’s piece near the middle: two parts cast in imitative sequences against one
part, the superius, cast in descending dotted longs that crosscut the prevailing meter. Ghiselin adroitly
tightens things up into a pair of strettos (points of imitation at a reduced time lag and with overlapping
entries) in conclusion. It is a brilliant little piece.
Ile fantazies de Joskin (Ex. 13-19b) is found in a manuscript thought to contain the repertoire of the
ducal wind band (or alta, “loud ensemble”) at Ferrara. Like most pieces of its type (or of its parent types)
it fluctuates between pervasive and structural imitation, with fanfare-like strettos reflecting the probable
medium of performance (sackbuts or trombones and double-reed instruments called shawms or bombards,
depending on range).
EX. 13-19A Johannes Ghiselin, La Alfonsina, mm. 1–19