THE LITERARY REVOLUTION AND THE RETURN OF THE
MADRIGAL
The extremity of style represented by Lasso’s sibyls, while eerily astonishing as befits the subject, is not
unintelligible in musical terms, relying as it does on harmonies and progressions that, taken singly, were
part of ordinary musical language. (The progressions are not even “chromatic” to any huge extent, as the
sixteenth century defined the term, since even where accidentals are involved, the voices usually move by
half step from one scale degree to another—the definition of diatonic motion—rather than by inflecting
single scale degrees.) It is in the aggregate that they overwhelm. Still, although musically intelligible, such
a style is not easily explained on purely musical grounds: that is, it would be hard to account for Lasso’s
musical decisions or their motivation without taking the text into consideration. Are the motivations then
“extra-musical”? Is the result “literary”? Do such motivations or such results make the product artistically