cadences: pronounced and emphatic in the metrical psalm, artfully smoothed over in the Latin motet.
Indeed, there is no place where Ex. 15-3a, the opening of Qui consolabatur me, could have broken off
without interrupting something in progress.
The place chosen to break it off, the spot where the setting of the line “recessit a me” ends, is a
particularly vivid case in point. A cadence on B-flat is elaborately foreshadowed and contrapuntally
prepared to take place between the superius and the “quinta vox” in m. 23 and thus bring the first section
of the motet to a graceful conclusion. But the quinta fails to follow through with the expected B-flat,
leaping instead to E-flat. The superius, as if surprised, veers off into a little melisma to mark time till the
next available B-flat harmony. But the next point of imitation (its words—quaero quod volui, “I seek
what I desire”—almost seeming to mock the poor superius) has already got ten underway, introduced right
under the surprising tenor E-flat by the bass, and the superius finally trails off without full cadential
support.
This sort of thing was where the true art of “perfected” composition lay. As Richard Wagner would
put it many years later, the art of composition was the art of transition. Here is where Willaert was the
supreme technician, and that is why, for Zarlino and all who read his treatise, Willaert was the perfector
of music and the preceptor supreme.
In part, of course, Willaert owed his supremacy to the fact that in Zarlino he had what Josquin had in
Glareanus, namely an ardent propagandist. Partly, too, it was a matter of favorable location and business
acumen. Willaert lived and worked in Italy, at once the focal point of patronage and the center of the
burgeoning music business. He was lucky enough to find an admirer in Andrea Gritti, the doge (chief
magistrate) of republican Venice, who chose him, over several candidates with more seniority, for one of
the most prestigious and lucrative cathedral posts a musician could aspire to—maestro di cappella at the
splendid eleventh-century church of St. Mark’s, one of Europe’s architectural glories. He was installed in
1527, when he was in his middle thirties, and served until his death in 1562.
He also struck up a profitable relationship with the local music printers, Antonio Gardane and the
brothers Scotto, the undisputed captains of the sixteenth-century Italian music trade. Beginning in 1539,
Gardane and the Scottos brought out about two dozen volumes devoted to Willaert’s works, comprising
Masses, motets, and several genres of secular vocal and instrumental music. The man became a one-man
music industry.