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As a composer of secular music, Giovanni Maria Nanino seems to have published only three books of madrigals and one of canzonettas, yet he contributed numerous pieces to anthologies, and his madrigals were often reprinted. Scarcely an important anthology appeared in these years without a contribution by him. Indeed in the fifteen years before the death of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in 1594, Nanino rivaled him as the most esteemed of Roman composers; in the decade after Palestrina’s death, Nanino was the undisputed head of the large and important Roman school. By certain measures Nanino was the most often represented composer in anthologies printed between 1570 and 1620. In this area he surpasses not only Palestrina, but also Luca Marenzio, Philippe de Monte, and Alessandro Striggio. Despite Nanino’s immense prestige among his contemporaries, in modern histories his secular music is scarcely discussed, with just a passing mention in Alfred Einstein’s voluminous The Italian Madrigal. This article establishes Nanino’s leadership in defining the new Roman style of madrigal in the late sixteenth century, outlines its musical characteristics, and suggests paths for future research into this as yet little studied school.

Starting from the narrative and affective shape of the text from the Gospel, this essay explores what analytical approaches best bring out the power and effectiveness of Nicolas Gombert’s setting of Domine, si tu es. It stresses that Gombert’s goal is not to deliver or declaim the text in a recitational manner, but rather to embody its affective climaxes and the tension and relaxation of its overall narrative structure in parallel musical structures. Gombert is shown to be a master musical rhetorician.

Starting from the narrative and affective shape of the text from the Gospel, this essay explores what analytical approaches best bring out the power and effectiveness of Nicolas Gombert’s setting of Domine, si tu es. It stresses that Gombert’s goal is not to deliver or declaim the text in a recitational manner, but rather to embody its affective climaxes and the tension and relaxation of its overall narrative structure in parallel musical structures. Gombert is shown to be a master musical rhetorician.

The first edition of the First Book for five voices of Giovanni Maria Nanino has been lost, and with it its dedication. A close reading of several of the texts in the book offers clues to the date of that first edition and the circle or circles of patronage that may have nourished the book’s origin. This study is concerned principally with the final group of four “occasional” texts in the book—texts apparently referring to particular persons or occasions—and the much-set amorous lyric in the center of the book. I propose that these five madrigals are connected to a circle of patronage in the late 1560s in Florence and Rome, and that the patrons are Isabella de’ Medici, her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini, and his distant relative Cardinal Flavio Orsini. In addition to Nanino I discuss the composers Stefano Rossetti, Filippo di Monte, and Maddalena Casulana.

In a seminal article of some forty years ago, Don Harrán identified a style of free madrigal poetry that showed some elements of fourteenth-century forms. He called it the ballata-madrigal. In scholarship since that time, however, it has not been fully recognized that the ballata-madrigal by no means disappeared from the poetic repertoire in the second half of the century, as has commonly been believed. In fact, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the poetic and musical madrigal continued to be heavily influenced by elements of the poetic form of the fourteenth-century ballata. This article looks first at the shape of poetic madrigals in numerous literary publications of the second half of the century, in order to assert that the ballata-madrigal was recognized by many of the most important poets of the time—including Giovanni Battista Pigna, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanni Battista Guarini—as a separate and important subgenre of themadrigale libero. It then looks at musical settings of ballata-madrigals across the last four decades of the century in order to assert that many of the most important composers of the time—Giaches de Wert, Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Luca Marenzio, and Claudio Monteverdi—recognized and reacted to the distinctive formal aspects of this particular poetic genre. Various hypotheses for further testing of the importance and range of this poetic and musical genre are put forward at the close of the article.

This article examines the Ferrarese cultural context surrounding the virtually unprecedented choice of a text from Dante's Commedia for setting in Luzzaschi's Second Book of Madrigals of 1576. A particular focus is the quarrel in literary criticism of the early years of the 1570s over the place of Dante in the Italian literary firmament, and the position of the influential Modenese critic and philologist Lodovico Castelvetro in this quarrel. I speculate that Castelvetro, a subject of the duke of Ferrara, may have had a role in the choice of text. I also speculate that the disastrous Ferrarese earthquakes of the early years of the decade may have resounded for Ferrarese culture in the particular lines from the Commedia. Finally, I propose that the musical style chosen by Luzzaschi for this setting was an extraordinary and retrospective homage to the late style of his teacher Cipriano de Rore, another artistic figure intimately connected with the Este court. Both Rore and Castelvetro may be seen as icons of Ferrarese cultural prestige in the ongoing battle for precedence between the Este and the Medici.

I mutamenti occorsi nella notazione musicale intorno al 1600, indotti dall'adozione di nuovi formati e nuove tecniche di stampa, hanno di rimando influenzato il significato e l'autorità del testo scritto nonché lo stile della musica composta e notata. Il presente articolo esamina 0 fenomeno da due punti di vista: l'evoluzione del ricercare strumentale del Cinquecento, e la musica vocale profana di scuola romana composta nell'ultimo quarto dello stesso secolo. L'attenzione è concentrata sulla musica scritta, letta e apprezzata sulla pagina, intesa quindi non tanto come evento sonoro ma come rappresentazione visiva e testuale di destrezza nel maneggio artificioso del contrappunto. Questo modo di considerare la musica si ricollega all'uso viepiù diffuso della partitura come veicolo efficace nel presentare l'intrico polifonico delle parti; a sua volta quest'uso ha stimolato intorno al 1600 l'insorgere di un nuovo stile (o di nuovi sottogeneri) del ricercare e del madrigale, e di riflesso ha alimentato tra gli intenditori dell'élite coeva nuove forme di apprezzamento del sapere tecnico-musicale. A suffragio di tale tesi, l'articolo reca in appendice numerose testimonianze coeve.

This essay examines the attitude of the German musical culture in the mid-and late-nineteenth century toward the borrowing of melodic material from the work of other composers in the art music tradition of the preceding half century. Considerable documentation is reviewed in order to come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that this culture viewed such borrowing as in any sense a positive factor in assessing the value of a composition or a composer. This is in distinction to some recent criticism that has viewed it as an intentional form of homage or emulation on the part of the borrowing composers. Careful distinctions need to be made between quotation, allusion, and intertextuality, and between general formal or structural modelling, which is quite permissible, and the borrowing of distinctive melodic material.