self-accompanied vocal soloist, if not an improviser.
The conclusion is virtually inescapable that frottole were originally and primarily solo songs for
virtuoso singers to lute or other instrumental accompaniment; that Bossinensis, far from arranging Cara’s
and Tromboncino’s part-songs for a secondary medium, was in fact returning them from a printer’s all-
purpose adaptation to their original medium for the benefit of amateurs—parvenus who could not
“intabulate” by ear or at sight like professionals (or true aristocrats); and that this soloistic mode of
performance was a standard option throughout the century. (From which it will follow that the “monodic
revolution” of the early seventeenth century that, as we shall soon see, ushered in the “Baroque era” was
no revolution at all, and that “Baroque” singing styles—“improvised” ornaments and all—were perfectly
familiar and available to “Renaissance” musicians.)
EX. 17-2 “Modo di cantar sonetti” from Ottaviano Petrucci, Strambotti, ode, frottole, sonetti. Et modo de cantar versi latini e
capituli. Libro quarto (1505)The frottola was the first literate musical genre since the fourteenth century to be produced by Italians
for Italians. Its style was so different from that of the oltremontani, the northerners (from “over the
mountains”) in Italy who furnished the wealthier Italian courts and churches with polyphonic music, that
one senses a deliberate opposition of taste, one that was maintained all through the quattrocento when, as
Haar has observed, “one expected the polyphonists to be oltremontani, the improvisatory music makers
to be Italian.”^5 Only in the sixteenth century did crossovers begin to occur. The Italian pupils of Willaert
and others of their generation eventually took over the ars perfecta genres, as we have seen. Crossover in