1. Secular Song, National Styles, and Instrumental Music in the Sixteenth Century

2. Spain Ferdinand and Isabella encouraged music
Villancico is derived from the word for peasant
Was the national style for Spain
Audience was the elite class, but the texts were rustic and popular in style
Music was short, strophic, syllabic, and mostly homophonic
Often published for voice with lute
Juan Del Encina ( )
Oy comamos y bebemos
Text uses crude language to exhort listeners to eat, drink, and sing the day before Lent begins
Melody and harmony are simple
Rhythms are dance-like with frequent hemiolas

3. Italy Frottola A national style in Italy
Four-part strophic song set syllabically and homophonically
Melody is in the upper voice
Simple harmony
Marked rhythmic patterns
Composed for the amusement of the courtly elite
Petrucci published 13 collections between
Performed by solo voice with lute

4. Italy continued Italian Madrigal
Most important secular genre of the 16th century
Form
Single stanza with no refrains or repeated lines
Music is through-composed
Through-composed means there is new music for every line of poetry
Poetry
Often chose texts by major poets
Topics included love songs and pastoral scenes
Final lines were often epigrammatic

5. Italian Madrigal cont. Music All voices played an equal role
Earliest madrigals (c ) were for four voices
By midcentury, madrigals were composed for 5+ voices
Performance could be vocal, or some parts played on instruments

6. Early Madrigal Composers
Pillipe Verdelot (c. 1480/85-c. 1530)
Four-voice madrigals are mostly homophonic
Madrigals for 5+ voices are motet-like
Jacques Arcadelt (c )
Il bianco e dolce cigno
Published in 1538, it is one of the most famous early madrigals
String of imitative entrances portrays words

7. Early Composers cont. Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547)
Poet and scholar
Led movement to revive sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch
Identified qualities of pleasingness (piacevolezza) and severity (gravita) in the sounds of Petrarch’s poems
Giosetto Zarlino
Le institutioni armoniche (The Harmonic Foundations)
Rules for composition that follow the Petrarchian ideals