The suave but simple music of this song was the work of Marco Cara (d. ca. 1525), one of the two
leading frottolists employed at the smallish court of Mantua in the north-central Italian area known as
Lombardy. The mistress of that court was the duchess Isabella d’Este, the daughter of Ercole I of Ferrara,
famous in music history as the patron whose name Josquin des Prez turned into a Mass tenor (see Ex. 14-
3 ). Isabella, who probably would have hired famous Flemings if she could have afforded them, instead
became the patroness who oversaw—through Cara and his colleague Bartolomeo Tromboncino (“the
little guy with the trombone”)—the rebirth of Italian song as a literate tradition.
Everything about Cara’s song, however, bespeaks its origin in oral practice. And that is the answer to
the famous question posed by the apparent gap between the late fourteenth-century ballata, obsolete by
1430, and the early sixteenth-century frottola. What happened to the fifteenth century, the quattrocento,
when Italian music seemed to disappear? The answer is that the frottola was a quattrocento genre that for
want of prestige and noble patronage had not managed to establish itself as a literate one. The sudden
explosion of frottola writing was just that: an explosion of writing (or writing down), stimulated by the
printing trade, not a sudden or unprecedented explosion of creativity.
Oral genres, as we have long since learned, are formulaic genres. The attractively lilting or dancelike
rhythms in Cara’s frottola are all stock formulas, common to dozens of barzellette, that were originally
devised for the musical recitation of poetry in the so-called ottonario, a popular eight-syllable trochaic
pattern favored by Italian court poets and musicians. The original rhyme scheme of the ottonario verse
(somewhat modified in Cara’s song) is abab/bcca; the music supplies three phrases—a, b, and c (plus a
decorative flourish for the end of the refrain)—keyed to the specific requirements of the rhyme scheme.
Each line or pair of lines takes the musical formula corresponding to its place in the rhyme scheme; and
each formula ends with a cadence, made emphatic by a pitch-repetition on the last trochee. The cadences
thus create a pattern of open and closed phrases that works tonally to define and project the poem’s
formal scheme. Such formulas were “popular” both in the sense that they were widely used and enjoyed
and in the sense that, compared with the lofty poetry of the trecento, they represented in their obvious and