The Madrigal
Tracking the genre’s development throughout the 16th Century
I’ve decided to submit essays from my past studies as writing samples. If you would like receive a list of resources, please reach out to me on twitter (@trevormolag) or elsewhere. This is one of the essays from my time at the University of Lethbridge. (2012)
The madrigal was a secular polyphonic compositional style that originated in the early sixteenth century.
Generally for three to six voices, it grew out of the idealisms of the cultural movement if the Renaissance: humanism, an interest in the classics, and a desire for the perfection of expression. Like the Renaissance, the madrigal’s beginnings lay in Italy and spread throughout Europe, becoming popular in England and Germany. By exploring the origins of the madrigal, as well as looking to musical examples for indications, the development of the madrigal is quite traceable as it changed during the 16th century.
While the madrigal did not have a singular precursor, there were several genres of music that came before it that had many similarities, and it is not difficult to relate them to the madrigal.
The lauda, for example, was a devotional song that was established in the fourteenth century, but became popular in the sixteenth. Like the madrigal, it was not liturgical. Other features of the lauda include polyphonic variety, a borrowed folk melody in the uppermost voice, and a bass voice supporting the melody. Another genre, the frottola, was also a significant precursor to the madrigal. This genre was composed mainly by native Italian composers, and bore the melody in the top voice. It was a strophic genre with simple syllabic rhythms, 4 bar phrasing structures, and a musical structure that mirrored the poetic structure of the text. It was often homorhythmic, and was not particularly complicated contrapuntally. Popular just before the madrigal, it was also a clear predecessor to musical styles of the Baroque era, such as monody. The madrigal did not rise exclusively from the lauda and the frottola, but also from the influences of both the motet and the chanson, popularized by the composers of Franco-Flemish origin that traveled to Italy. While there are several differences between the madrigal and these genres, (the madrigal, for instance, was through — composed and generally unaccompanied), it is easy to identify the similarities between it and its predecessors.
The madrigal was certainly developed from its precursors as a result of a changing cultural climate; including the Petrarchan movement and an increased focus on text expression.
The sixteenth century was a time of great development for the people of Europe; advancements such as the printing press and gunpowder began to forever change society, religious reformation and counter-reformation was occurring, and the ideals of the Renaissance were being applied to all forms of human expression. Rhetoric and humanism were replacing purely scholastic modes of thinking, and ancient classics from Greece and Rome were being revived .The Petrarchan movement, led by Cardinal Pietro Bembo, was a revitalization of the works of Francesco Petrarca, a fourteenth century Italian poet. Petrarca, in addition to being a poet, was an academic and an early humanist who studied law before moving on to literature. As an ambassador of royal courts, he travelled widely throughout Europe for personal enjoyment, while writing and investing time in recovering classic works from Greece and Rome. He is most well-known for his Italian poetry, in particular his sonnets; found in collections such as the Canzoniere and the Trifoni. Despite Petrarch’s best-known works being in Italian, he also wrote extensively in Latin — many books, letters, and poems, of a pensive nature. In the early 1500s, more than a century after Petrarch’s death, Cardinal Bembo wrote several papers addressed to poets and composers in praise of Petrarch, advising them to emulate Petrarch’s compositional style in their own creations. These had great influence, and partly a result of Bembo’s sponsorship of Petrarch, musicians began to pay careful attention to their composition’s text as Petrarch did. This increased importance of text expression was also spurred on by the growing use of rhetoric in all art forms during the Renaissance. In the first half of the sixteenth century, early examples of text expression began to show up; this included devices such as rhythmic and melodic settings of words so that they could be sung naturally.
The bulk of the madrigal’s development occurred in three phases over the course of the sixteenth century; each, including the first, had distinguishing characteristics that can be found by examining composers of the time.
Among the most active composers of the early sixteenth century was Adrian Willaert. One of the first composers of madrigals, he was appointed choirmaster of St Mark’s in Venice, and taught many young musicians who went on to be great composers in their own right. His earlier style was characterized by “syllabic declamation, regular phrasing with a cadence marking the end of each verse, and prevailingly homorhythmic textures, which often [incorporated] dance-like passages in triple time.”[1] This is the typical style of early Florentine madrigal compositions — Florence was indeed the birthplace of the madrigal. Another example of the first generation madrigal is Jacques Arcadelt’s popular piece, Il bianco e dolce cigno. The poem featured in this madrigal is very typical; interchanging lines of seven and eleven syllables had become the standard as a result of Bembo’s writings. Written in 1538, this composition has two most prominent musical features, both examples of early text expression. Before examining these, however, it is important to briefly examine the poem’s subject matter. The text employs a play on traditional beliefs — that the only time a swan sings is at their death, and that events of sexual release are also represented by “little deaths”. So, the text tells us that the poet weeps at his “death”, and the swan sings at its own, though they are experiencing different kinds of deaths. The first, most evident example of text expression occurs at “Et io piangendo/And I weeping” in the poem, where Arcadelt moves an F major triad to an E flat major triad, opting to move components of the chord up, with the exception of the bass voice, which moves down to support the other voices. This deviation demonstrates the contrast between the swan’s song and the lover’s tears.
The second example occurs at the end of piece, when the poet is describing his desire for “a thousand deaths a day/di mille mort”. At this point, Il bianco e dolce cigno breaks from its homophonic nature, and expands into many repetitive, cascading entries, which are representative of both the large number of “deaths” the poet wishes upon himself, as well as the pleasured unraveling that these deaths would entail.
As the sixteenth Century progressed, a new set of characteristics began to also define the madrigal; after 1550, composers began to experiment with the options available to them in their composition.
They began to expand and change their use of the text — using a wider range of poets, while distinctly handling each stanza of their chosen text. There became a focus on developing text declamation and prosity, and having the poem’s textures interact with the poem. The most significant composer of second generation madrigals was the Flemish Cipriano de Rore. De Rore, who was Adrian Willaert’s successor as maestro at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, was a highly influential composer who developed his own style after following in the footsteps of his predecessor. His later madrigals broke from his dark settings of Petrarch and turned to contemporary poets, as he tightened his focus on using contrast to express strong feelings. These contrasts were in texture, rhythm, and harmony, often by way of chromaticism. Chromaticism was used in many more applications than it had been earlier, and was experimented with later on by many composers, including Rore, but as well as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. As the sixteenth century came to a close, and the seventeenth began, madrigals reached their apex in complexity, extravagancy, and difficulty: they became more expressive than ever before, in ways that were much different from their predecessors. One such composer who would often get quite experimental and use a large variety of methods to achieve his compositional goal was Carlo Gesualdo. Notorious for the murders of his wife and her lover, Gesualdo wrote in a contrapuntal complexity that was well above the level of his fellow composers. A good example of his work, and indeed the second generation of madrigal development, is his five-voice piece entitled Languisce al Fin. Itself filled with chromatic experimentations, often to the point of creating prominent dissonance, the piece tells of a lover who must leave his other, and so embraces death. As such, this madrigal is an interesting juxtaposition to another piece of Gesualdo’s — Io Parto — in which a lover, forced to leave, chooses instead to live on, though in pain. Published in 1613, the music of Languisce al Fin is extremely expressive of its subject matter. Its lack of tonal clarity is a defining feature — Gesualdo’s use of chromaticism allows him to make jumps of major and minor intervals, constantly discarding “the tonal implications of the preceding phrase, to create a state of tortured suspense [and] to refuse the searching mind any place to rest”.[2] Relying on this “tonal instability”[3] is what allows him to express the absolute anguish of the lover’s situation. This piece contains examples of madrigalisms, or the setting of words musically so that the meaning of the word is represented by the music. The best example of a madrigalism occurs midway through the piece, at bar 21, when Gesualdo mentions his “sweetest love”. At this point, the harmony becomes much richer and more sonorous than at any other point in the piece, obviously a device used to romanticize his feelings for his sweetest love, especially in contrast to the lament of death.
Rhythmically, the piece is fairly consistent throughout, until (at bars 37 and 41) he reaches the word lascio (I leave) in the text. At this, each voice acts on its own, falling quickly in assorted, occasionally dissonant means. Following this is a relatively extensive repetition, extending and drawing out this last line of text — it is almost as if the poet is indeed succumbing to death (another madrigalism). This unsettling ending is compounded by the final cadence, an E-Major triad; this tonality was used previously in the piece, but not near the cadence, adding to the strange resolution.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the traditional madrigal began to give way to a whole new approach towards composition known as the “seconda pratica”; this was not without controversy.
With the advent of the opera and the increasing influence of monody, the beginning of the 1600s was a time of musical change. At this time, a spirited debate was carried out over a series of letters, books, and prefaces between Claudio Monteverdi, proponent of the second practice, and Giovanni Artusi, defender of the sixteenth century style. The key difference between the two practices was the issue of which was more important: the text or the music. Music of the Renaissance had traditionally been held together with strict rules, and the words of the text were bent to serve the music. As the Baroque era began, however, a shift began so that the music was made to serve the text, focusing on the affects and the meaning of the text. The issue over the two practices became quite heated, with insults being flung in both directions. Artusi started the debate by publishing a treatise entitled “Of the Imperfections of Modern Music”, a tongue in cheek criticism of the emerging style; including (implied) the works of Monteverdi, in the form of a dialogue: (Vario) Signor Luca, you bring me new things which astonish me not a little. It pleases me, at my age, to see a new method of composing, though it would please me much more if I saw that these passages were founded upon some reason which could satisfy the intellect.[4] Artusi then received anonymous letters defending the works presented in his treatise for a length of time; he responded with another book defending the sixteenth century style. Eventually, Monteverdi would respond publically to Artusi, in the preface to his fifth book of madrigals. Monteverdi’s brother also became involved. Artusi did respond to Monteverdi’s preface under an alias, but this response has not been recovered. Records of their debate last only until 1608. From before the beginning of the sixteenth century to the early seventeenth, the madrigal experienced strong development as the most prominent secular genre of its time. Rising from other genres such as the lauda and the frotolla, the madrigal developed from a simply accurate setting of a poem to an experimental exploration in text expression and declamation. The madrigal went through three phases of increasing sensitivity and complexity defined by the composers who composed them; including Willaert, Arcadelt, De Rore, Gesualdo and Monteverdi. Eventually, the madrigal would give way to the popularity of opera and the aria, but stayed as a genre in England well into the 17th century.
[1] Michelle Fromson, “Secular vocal works,” Grove Music Online, under “Willaert, Adrian,” http://0-www.oxfordmusiconline.com.darius.uleth.ca/subscriber/article/grove/music/40122 (accessed February 12, 2012).
[2] Edward E. Lowinsky, Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth Century Music (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1961), 43.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Giovanni Artusi, L’Artusi, ovvero Delle imperfezioni della moderna musica, tr. Oliver Strunk, in Source Readings in Music History. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1950.)
