F that is also a dissonance: two sins at a single stroke. What Artusi left out of his discussion, however, is
the very thing that motivated the trespasses, and that alone can explain them—namely the text. This
testifies either to a devious strategy on the author’s part or, more likely, to his inability to comprehend the
literary basis of the new style or admit that musical procedures could legitimately rest on textual, rather
than musical grounds. In this position he has had successors in every subsequent century, right up to the
present.
EX. 17-18A Claudio Monteverdi, A un giro sol, mm. 16–27The all-determining text of Cruda Amarilli (“Cruel Amaryllis”), like those of countless other
madrigals, is an excerpt from Il Pastor Fido (“The faithful shepherd”), a play by the contemporary
courtly poet Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538–1612). A classic of the “pastoral” mode, in which the purity
and simplicity of shepherd life is implicitly contrasted with the corruption and the artificiality of court
and city, Guarini’s “tragicomic” play (i.e., a play about the sufferings of “low” characters) was one of the
most famous Italian poems of the sixteenth century. In a fashion that may recall the competitive or
emulative practices of the early generations of Mass composers, Guarini’s play attracted more than one
hundred composers great and small. That spirit of competition—to achieve the most accurate depiction of
the poem’s emotional content or (to give the same idea a more ordinary human twist) simply to come up