there is no indication that the “first part” is the one that actually ends the piece.
LATE-CENTURY FUSION
Landini’s hilarious little madrigal Sy dolce non sonò conlir’Orfeo offers an especially rich and witty
merger of French and Italian genres, all most inventively adapted to one another. Its distribution of voices,
with the part labeled “contratenor” sharing the range of the cantus rather than the tenor, harks back to the
texture of the motet rather than the virelai. And sure enough, a motet it is, albeit one with only a single
text. What makes it conceptually a motet is the fact that it is built up from a tenor that has been laid out,
foundation-wise, in advance. This we can tell even though the tenor quotes no cantus firmus, because it is
fully isorhythmic in the Ars Nova manner.
Yet for all its “Frenchness,” it is modeled exactly on, and illustrates, the structure of the Italian poem.
A madrigal, we recall, consists of a number of three-line strophes called tercets—in this case three—
followed by a contrasting ritornello. The tenor’s thrice-repeated 21 -measure color coincides with the
tercet, and within each color the thrice-repeated 7 -measure talea coincides with each of the tercet’s
constituent lines. The ritornello offers another surprise. It could also be viewed as isorhythmic in its tenor
layout, with a twice-repeated color and a twice-repeated talea that happen to coincide. But since a
coinciding color and talea amounts to plain repetition, we might also view the ritornello tenor as
parodying a pair of piedi from a ballata, especially since the colores actually differ very slightly at their
endings—one of them being “open” (cadence on G) and the other “shut” (cadence on F, the final). Ex. 10-
8 shows the third tercet and the ritornello.
Landini even manages to work a few jesting references to the chace into the ritornello. The first little
rash of texted minims in the tenor is mimicked in turn by the other two voices in successive measures.
And on the rash’s repetition, the other voices anticipate rather than follow the tenor, which now appears
to have the last of three imitative entrances. The text is also a spoof, joshing the high-flown rhetoric of the
early madrigalists, much given to classical and mythological allusions. Here no fewer than four
mythological musicians—Orpheus, the prototype of lyric poetry (that is, poetry sung to the lyre);
Philomel, the archetypal nightingale; Amphion, who could charm stones with his lyre; and the satyr
Marsyas, master of the flute—are invoked, only to be compared with the poet’s little red rooster who can
outsing them all. “Its effect,” the poet deadpans, “is the opposite of the Gorgon’s,” whose ugliness turned
men into stone. The concluding, rather Gorgonesque melisma, piling hockets atop snaking syncopations,
adds a final touch of satire.
EX. 10-8 Landini, Sy dolce non sonò (madrigal in motet style)