— gravità (gravity or dignity) and piacevolezza (pleasingness or “charm”)—were to be realized
technically by the mechanics of the verse: phonology or sound-content, rhyme scheme, meter.
These theories were enormously stimulating to musicians; Bembo’s poems, and eventually those of
Petrarch himself, became a locus classicus—an endlessly returned-to source—for composers of
madrigals, who began to specialize in the expression of violent emotional contrasts that could be
effectively linked with musical contrasts—high/low, fast/slow, up/down, consonant/dissonant,
major/minor, diatonic/chromatic, homorhythmic/imitative—as bearers (or at least suggesters) of semantic
meaning. Musical tones all by themselves may not possess much in the way of semantic reference; in other
words, they may not denote objects or ideas with much precision. But antithetical relationships between
tones and tone-constructs can connote plenty. (We have already seen this, of course, in the predictable
“ascendit/descendit” contrasts in sixteenth-century Mass settings like Palestrina’s: this convention may
already have been a “madrigalism,” an extension of the “Petrarchian antithesis,” first exploited in
madrigals, to another textual realm.)
An ideal starting point for observing the growth of “literary music” through the madrigal, and its
growing antagonism to the impersonal universalism of the ars perfecta, would be Il bianco e dolce cigno
(“The white delightful swan,” Ex. 17-14), the first item in Arcadelt’s first book of madrigals (1539), the
most frequently reprinted music book of the whole sixteenth century (some 53 times, the last in 1642!). It
was possibly the sixteenth century’s most famous single piece of art music, surely the one that most people
knew by heart (as they did not and could not know a legendary but rarely heard work like the Missa
Papae Marcelli).
Like most madrigal poems, the text of Arcadelt’s swan song is inordinato, to use the contemporary
word: it consists of a single stanza in lines of varying length, without refrain or any other obvious formal
scheme, and the music does not impose one either. This is the most dramatic way in which the madrigal
differs from the other vernacular genres of the sixteenth century. Most of the others were in some sort of
fixed form, descended mainly from the ballata: to those already mentioned one could add the Spanish
villancico, a dance-descended song that enjoyed a big burst of polyphonic creativity under Ferdinand and
Isabella (whose main court composer, Juan del Encina, composed upwards of sixty). Even where the
poems were devoid of refrains or strophic repetitions, like many “new style” chansons, composers were
more observant of their forms, and certainly of their meters, than of their contents.
A madrigalist, by contrast, went after content and its maximal musical representation, and, as time
went on, was more and more willing to commit what offended humanists like Vincenzo Galilei called a
“laceramento della poesia”—mangling or trampling on the form of the poem—in order to get at that
content. Composers of Arcadelt’s generation, and especially oltremontani like Willaert and (later) Lasso,
tended to recite the poem fairly straightforwardly, aiming at a general mood of gravity or charm. Their
settings are mild compared to what came later. But even Arcadelt’s swan poem is built à la Petrarch
around an antithesis (the swan’s sad death, the poet’s happy “death” in love), and the composer gives two
vivid hints of the particularizing impulse that would later become such a fetish among madrigalists. Both
of them involve (implicit) antitheses.
The first high-powered affective word, piangendo (weeping), receives the first chromatic harmony
(Ex. 17-14a). There is nothing intrinsically weepy about the chord itself: it is just another major triad. But
in context it contrasts with the diatonic norm and is therefore, like the word with which it coincides, a
“marked” feature (to use a modern linguists’ term). As to the second hint, there could be nothing more
ordinary, or less particularly “expressive,” in music of the sixteenth century than a point of imitation
(although we should note that points of imitation were not common in Italian secular music before the
motet-writing oltremontani began putting them in.) Yet Arcadelt’s imitative setting of the thrice-repeated
last line (Ex. 17-14b), by standing out from the homorhythmic norm, becomes “marked,” and therefore