music traveled faster, farther, and in greater volume than before. Particularly was this true of Attaingnant’s
aggressively marketed editions and those of his competitors in Paris and Lyons, the other main French
publishing center, who did a booming international business, particularly in northern Italy. As we shall
see, this ease of travel led to some surprising hybrid styles and genres.
VERNACULAR SONG GENRES: ITALY
And what were the songs like that the early printers printed, the early collectors collected, and the early
consumers consumed? They differed markedly, like their languages, from country to country, in contrast to
the sacred lingua franca of the ars perfecta. At first they all reflected the earlier courtly fixed forms in
their poetry, but their novel musical textures reflected the new conditions of trade.
The Italian part-song or frottola as published by Petrucci in the early years of the century was a
lightweight affair; the name was derived from the Latin frocta, meaning a motley group of trifling objects.
A whiff of that slightly pejorative nuance clung to the genre. The best translation of frottola might be “a
trifling song.” Formally speaking, it was very much like the last Italian vernacular genre we encountered,
several chapters back, in the late years of the fourteenth century. That was the ballata, the “dance song,”
which (like the French virelai) consisted of a number of strophic ballade-like stanzas (aab) and a ripresa
or refrain with music corresponding to the “b” of the stanza. As noted in chapter 4, a representation of the
form that truly reflected its structure would be B aab B, but since convention requires that the first letter in
any representation of a formal scheme be an A, the scheme usually given is A bba A.
With the frottola—or, to be a little more precise, the barzelletta (possibly named after the French
bergerette), the most popular refrain form of several—the scheme is actually a little simpler, since the
refrain now takes in all the music of the stanza. Thus the barzelletta can be straightforwardly represented
as AB aab AB, which begins to look a little like the old French rondeau. If it helps, then, one could think
of the barzelletta as a modified ballata or a hybrid virelai/rondeau. As that old-fashioned pedigree attests,
of all sixteenth-century vernacular genres the frottola was the most aristocratic. As a sample, Ex. 17-1
contains a barzelletta from Petrucci’s seventh book of frottole (1507).
EX. 17-1 Marco Cara, Mal un muta per effecto