They are accompanying a soprano voice moving in semibreves (whole notes) through perhaps the first
complete chromatic scale in the history of European art music. (The part ascends through fifteen semitonal
progressions, covering more than an octave, and descends through eight.) What better way to indicate
unpremeditated movement through deserted fields, parts unknown? The soprano’s half steps are
unpredictably treated as diatonic or chromatic, as sixteenth-century terminology would have it. In modern
terms, and perhaps somewhat oversimply, the diatonic semitone is the one that progresses from one scale
degree to another (every diatonic scale has two), and the chromatic semitone is the one that inflects a
single degree and (by definition) cannot be found in any diatonic scale.
Using chromatic semitones is obviously incompatible with modal integrity, though it would be a gross
overstatement to call madrigalistic chromaticism “atonal,” as some have done. Marenzio takes care to
bring things into tonal focus at the end of the couplet (making use, in fact, of techniques of tonal focusing
that were as new as his chromaticism) and by extending the last note long enough to sustain a normal
authentic cadence. But the new freedom of movement did play hob with modal theory—and even more so
with tuning systems: it was precisely this kind of harmony that made tempered tuning, which finally
eliminated the actual difference in size between the two kinds of semitone, a necessary invention.
The free intermixture of major and minor semitones was something the madrigalists pioneered,
because they were the first musicians to have need of such a device for their pictorializing purpose. They
had some predecessors in a certain crackpot brand of musical humanism that sought to recover the
nondiatonic modes of Greek music (the “chromatic genus,” which used minor semitones, and even the
“enharmonic genus,” which used quarter tones). A radical humanist named Nicola Vicentino built himself