proclaimed by the Camerata (and by Caccini) and older madrigalian techniques. A residual interest in
counterpoint peeps through almost immediately, when the singer’s opening phrase, full of “hard” intervals
and harmonies as befits the bleak general mood of the poem, is taken up by the bass in imitation (Ex. 19-
3a). Galilei probably would not have approved of Gagliano’s “serpentine” melisma on the word serpenti
(“snakes”): this is old-fashioned madrigalism (Ex. 19-3b). But the unprepared dissonances on pianto
eterno (“eternal weeping”) a few lines later was the kind of thing monody was made for—harmonic
effects (apparently) liberated from contrapuntal voice-leading (Ex. 19-3c).
Sigismondo d’India (1582–1629) and Claudio Saracini (1586–ca. 1649) were both noble amateurs.
That puts them in Gesualdo’s line, and indeed, when writing “passionate” madrigals rather than strophic
songs they show the same gift for harmonic affectation as their polyphonic forebear. The beginning of
d’India’s Piange, madonna (“Weep, O My Lady,” to a poem by Giovanni Battista Marino), from d’India’s
Primo libro di musiche of 1609, is a study in what Shakespeare (a contemporary) called “sweet sorrow,”
and a real slap in the face of “rules.” It goes Gesualdo one better in containing a triadic progression in
which all three pitches are inflected chromatically—except that one of the chromatic passes is merely
implied by the bass (as part of its unnotated but conventional harmonic realization) rather than expressed
in counterpoint. The two notated voices, meanwhile, make their chromatic pass in the first measure
through the baldest parallel fifths imaginable, the octave displacement in the bass notwithstanding (Ex.
19-4a). The first four lines of the poem are repeated (as Caccini had repeated the last four in Amarilli)
and d’India writes out the gorgia (or at least some of it), putting in writing what Caccini had left to the
performer’s tasteful discretion (Ex. 19-4b). It is likely that d’India transgressed the boundaries of what
Caccini would have deemed tasteful (or, in his vocabulary, properly “negligent”).
EX. 19-3A Marco da Gagliano, Valli profonde, mm. 1–8EX. 19-3B Marco da Gagliano, Valli profonde, mm. 38–45