The very word Caccini chose for one of them—esclamazione (exclamation), described as “the foundation
of passion”—shows the directness with which the emotions were to be physically portrayed.^8 It consists
of a gradual loudening of the voice on long notes into an outcry, made more artful by first diminishing the
volume before beginning the increase—“reversed hair pins,” musicians familiar with modern
crescendo/descrescendo marks would say. (Where the harmony permits, an esclamazione can also be
executed by starting a third lower than the actual pitch and gradually sliding up; this, Caccini warns, is not
for beginners.) Clearly, the esclamazione is the likeness of a sigh.
Caccini then proceeds to the likenesses of unsteady speech—tremblings and catchings of the throat.
The artfully simulated vocal tremble or shake, involving the rapid alternation of contiguous notes of the
scale, he calls the gruppo or “note-group.” We of course would call it a trill. Caccini’s trillo is something
else: it is the rapid, controlled repetition of a single pitch. (For Caccini’s examples of trillo and gruppo,
see Fig. 19-6.) What it sounded like, whether (for example) the repetitions were entirely detached or
whether the trillo was more a kind of amplitude vibrato, his words do not convey. He recognizes this
lack, inviting the reader to listen to his wife’s singing for a perfect illustration. Modern would-be
performers of monodies have had to content themselves with the author’s words and their own
experiments.
Finally, Caccini lists some “graces,” ways of modifying a melodic line to heighten the effect of
“speaking in harmony” and “neglecting the music.” They mainly involve little rhythmic liberties that put
the singer “out of sync” with the bass. In this respect, monody singing seems to have a lot in common with
“crooning”—a manner of soft, subtle, highly inflected and embellished singing with intimately expressive
intent that was adopted during the 1920s by male nightclub singers in response to the invention of the
electric microphone. The word is said to be of Old Scandinavian derivation (krauna means “murmur” in
modern Icelandic), but the singing style was pioneered and maintained in large part by singers of Italian
extraction—Russ Columbo, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett (Anthony Benedetto). Imagining
how one of these singers would have sung the repeated strain in Caccini’s Amarilli might give a better
idea of how such a song was actually put over than any verbal description of gorgia, even Caccini’s own.
Beginning in 1602, then, madrigals existed—and were available for purchase—in two forms.
Traditional polyphonic madrigals remained popular; they continued to be published and reprinted until the
1630s. Continuo madrigals like Caccini’s, and eventually “concerted” madrigals with instrumental parts,
gradually gained on the older type, outstripping it in numbers of new publications in the 1620s. (The word
musiche, incidentally, became standard for continuo songs, further belying the programmatic significance
that is often read into the title of Caccini’s publication.) The genre produced a line of specialists in
Caccini’s footsteps. Marco da Gagliano (1582–1643) was perhaps the consummate Florentine musician
of the early seventeenth century: a churchman of distinction, he was by 1615 (his thirty-third year) a high
official of the church of San Lorenzo, the chief court musician to the Medicis, the maestro di cappella of
the Florence cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore (celebrated by Du Fay—see chapter 8), and the founder and
focal point of a musical Academy, the Accademia degli Elevati, which comprised “the city’s finest
composers, instrumentalists and singers,” as well as the poets whose verses the musicians set and
performed.^9
Gagliano’s most famous monody, Valli profonde (“Deep valleys,” Ex. 19-3), was published in 1615,
the year of his ecclesiastical elevation, in a volume of modern-style Musiche that appeared after Gagliano
had already published five books of conventional polyphonic madrigals. The poem, a sonnet by the
famous sixteenth-century Petrarchist Luigi Tansillo, belongs to the recognized subgenre of “hermit songs”
(compare Petrarch’s own Solo e pensoso as set by Marenzio in Ex. 17-16). Such a song was a natural for
monody, because crazed loneliness in the wild was monody’s most “natural” subject.
Gagliano’s setting shows some reconciliation between the ascetically neoclassical musica recitativa