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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.

An in-depth discussion on Renaissance composer Giaches de Wert's settings of poetry by Torquato Tasso to madrigals, is presented.

Generous funding for the conference was provided by the Dean of Humanities, the Department of Music, the Department of Italian Studies, the History of Art Department, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, and these sponsors should be thanked at the outset, for without their support, this remarkable gathering of scholars from across Europe and the United States would not have been possible. Alongside his invaluable teaching and mentoring, his contributions to the university include helping to found the Italian Studies Department in 1984; serving as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 1990 to 1998, when he saw the College of Letters and Sciences through a period of great transformation; and chairing both the Department of Music and the History of Art Department. The liberal gifts in support of the 2011 Italian Madrigal Conference are yet a further testament to the esteem in which he is held by the Berkeley faculty. Since 1965, when he made his rst long trip to Italy by boat to Le Havre and from there to Bologna by train, he has been an international scholarly gure himself, mentor to several academic generations of Italianists on both sides of the Atlantic and a most gracious emissary for American musicology abroad.

Although it has been clear since the nineteenth century that Giaches de Wert worked for the Gonzaga of Novellara during the 1550s, there was little documentation of this important and formative period in his life until the Archivio Comunale in the town became available to scholars during the 1990s. In consequence, new evidence, including thirty-eight previously unknown autograph letters, subsequently published and discussed by the author and others, has permitted fresh insights into Wert’s time at Novellara. Together with legal documents uncovered both there and in Reggio Emilia, these provide detailed information about Wert’s marriage and his economic and social position in the community, as well as his continuing contacts with the town and its rulers in later life following his appointment as maestro di cappella at the Basilica of Santa Barbara in Mantua. Based in part on the letters of Leandro Bracciolo, one of Wert’s intimates in Novellara, and in part on further archival research, the present article paints a picture of musical life at a small court in the Po Valley during the mid-sixteenth century, which reveals patterns of familial patronage and personal involvement in musical activity that mark it out from some of the better-known courts in the area including Mantua itself.

[...]New-Testament-based motets are not unprecedented in the Renaissance repertory; there are many other motets based on gospel passages by other sixteenth-century composers, but Wert stands apart for setting this kind of text so extensively, and for focusing so intently on their narrative possibilities.3 For present-day church musicians, this gives Wert's music a unique set of liturgical possibilities, making it possible to program a motet whose text is identical to the gospel or epistle that has been read as part of the liturgy, and presumably also expounded upon in the homily. Surviving manuscripts at Mantua, mostly unpublished, show that Wert wrote a large quantity of practical liturgical music for the court, including masses, magnificats, falsobordoni, and numerous settings of hymns for the office; all these works feature sections of polyphony alternating with chant, presumably reflecting the liturgical practice of the Mantuan court.4 Wert's three published books of motets-Motectorum liber primus (1566, 5 voices), Il secondo libro de motetti (1581, 5 voices), and Modulationum liber primus (1581, 6-8 voices)-were marketed to a broad audience outside of Mantua, although the inclusion of the six-voice motet Beata Barbara in honor of the basilica's patron saint provides one obvious link to Wert's home institution.5 Iain Fenlon suggests that Wert's motets based on New Testament texts might have been sung liturgically during the feast days on which the texts were to be read, perhaps as an accompaniment to the silent reading of the gospel or epistle in the sanctuary (a widespread practice at the time).6 While the exact liturgical use of these epistle and gospel motets can no longer be determined exactly, their expressive and dramatic text setting links them to the contemporary genre of the Italian madrigal, which was cultivated exten- sively at Mantua. [...]because of the many duplications between the three synoptic Gospels it is sometimes possible to match a motet on a gospel text with a similar narrative from a different gospel. [...]Wert's Cum intrasset Jesus sets a version of the narrative of the cleansing of the temple, from Matthew 21, that does not appear as a Sunday reading in either form of the Roman Rite. The version of the story set by Wert is in Luke 18:37-43, the appointed gospel for Quinquagesima (EF); however, the same episode appears in Mark 10:46-52, which is the gospel for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, year В (OF).9 As the work of Jennifer Thomas has shown, Transeúnte Domino is not only Wert's most popular motet but one of the most frequently copied motets of the entire sixteenth century; it ranks at number 39 on her list of the \"core repertory\" of sixteenth-century motets, with twenty-two extant manuscript and print sources.10

I won't pretend to know much about Renaissance vocal music, but I will say that encountering Divine Theatre: Sacred Motets by Giaches de Wert (Harmonia Mundi), the new album by veteran British vocal ensemble Stile Antico, certainly has me challenging my ignorance.

Petrarch’s sonnet »Se la mia vita da l’aspro tor-mento«, in which the poet is expressing the hope that advanced age will bring him the courage to admit to his lady his long suppressed feelings, is conceived as a single sentence. The three sixteenth-century composers whose settings are discussed - Pietro Vinci, Giaches de Wert and Luca Marenzio, approach their tasks differently. Vinci employs a reserved, motet-influenced style, Wert delights in responding to Petrarch’s suggestion of the waning beauty and advancing years with an ingenious symbolic scheme of cadential points, while Ma-renzio, reacting to the current fashion, opts for a texture in which singable phrases are shared by all four voices. In so doing, Marenzio slows down the pace of delivery and does not quite come up to the intensity with which Wert manages to rise to the challenges offered by Petrarch.