Fire and Ice
Love Songs from 16th Century Venice

Musica Antiqua
directed by Philip Thorby

with Clare Wilkinson, Mezzo-Soprano

Programme Notes

In the late 15th century Italy was less a unified country than a federation of sovereign city-states. The independence of the mighty Venetian Republic on the one hand, and tiny Dukedoms such as Ferrara and Mantua on the other, had its impact not only on politics and finance but also on the arts. No less than architecture and the visual arts, music and literature were patronised by the ruling classes both for their intrinsic worth and as statements of power and local identity.

When it came to music, a sense of such local or even broader 'Italian'‹identity was difficult to argue. By the end of the 15th century Italy had been for almost one hundred years the happy victim of a sort of cultural imperialism: nowhere else had the educated elite a more insatiable appetite for the music of the great Burgundian and Netherland masters. The perfunctory Italianisation of names (Josquin d'Ascanio, Anrigo Isaac) did not disguise the fact that the most revered composers and maestri di capelle were from Northern Europe, and that the style of their music (and indeed the secular texts which they set) had nothing to do with 'Italian' culture. Rich patrons might advertise their status by acquiring the services of a foreign master such as Obrecht, Josquin or Isaac, but they were not able to demonstrate that native 'Italian' music could compete with the ubiquitous exports of the Low Countries. In verse, too, there was discontent: although the poetry of Dante and Petrarch was internationally renowned, lyric verse by Italian writers had little place in the rondeaux and ballades of the Burgundian masters.

Something had to be done to base at least secular music in the culture of the courts where it was performed. In Florence, Lorenzo de Medici identified the lowly canto carnivalesco (carnival song) as being the authentic voice of his State. He commissioned the poet Poliziani to write 'art' verses based on this form (and wrote some himself) and had them set by local composers (and even by his own great imported maestro Isaac!). The results were no more authentically 'popular' than the village-greenery of Elizabethan madrigals, or the gilded pastoral idyll of Louis XIV but they were, and are still, just as evocative of the spirit of the place.

In the north of Italy, the rulers of the comparatively small cities of Mantua and Ferrara were not attracted to the carnival song as the foundation for a vernacular musical culture. An educated classicist, Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua, looked instead to a surviving tradition of declamation to instrumental accompaniment a form as old as Orpheus, but which was still alive in Florence as late as 1539. Classically, both spoken text and instrumental accompaniment (usually a single fiddle, or 'lyra') were improvised. Set the text to an artfully simple melody, following speech rhythms, and write down the accompaniment for two or three instruments and the result is the frottola. Just as Lorenzo's carnival songs remained essentially a capella vocal works because of their roots, so Isabella's frottole were conceived as solo songs with accompaniment and specifically string accompaniment because of theirs.

The main characteristics of the frottola (form, rhythm, part-writing) are a result of both nature and nurture that is to say they are influenced both by the general musical ambience of renaissance Italy, and by the conscious allusion
to the Classical origins of this type of song.

Form was dictated by poetic form itself referential to Classical models. Generally strophic (through-composed works such as 'Aspicias' [track 24] are unusual), they typically include a refrain, verse and coda, with the exact form dictated by the rhyme-scheme of the verse. Sometimes, to emphasise its vernacular status, the refrain will be a popular song (e.g. 'Donde ne vienstu bella' [track 7] and 'Nel tempo che riveste' [track 9]), frequently introduced with elegance and skill.

Inevitably, rhythm in song also derives from the natural rhythms of language, exaggerated by its arrangement into verse. In the frottola this is particularly apparent. Its origins in declamation mean that 'melisma' (the setting of one syllable to a flowing line of music) is rarely used, the vocal line being almost completely syllabic. At the same time, the strophic or repetitive nature of the frottola precludes the elaborate word-painting of the through-composed madrigal, as the same music has to serve different words. Where a madrigal 'sets' the words of a poem, a frottola might be said to 'present' them. The frottola, like the coolly minimalist works of Rore and Verdelot, is the epitome of the Renaissance ideal expressed by Count Bardi (a founder of the influential Florentine Camerata) in 1590: 'poetry is the soul, music but the body'. To the 21st century listener, accustomed to opera, oratorio and lieder, this philosophy may seem either puritanical or naïve. To the Renaissance composer it was part of a consciously sophisticated attempt to rediscover the magical power of music in Classical mythology.

The part-writing in most frottole is highly characteristic and quite unlike that of the madrigal. Typically, the simple vocal lines are supported by a slow moving, undecorated, unmelodic bass, with two more flowing and decorated lines between. In some cases the tenor is of a more sustained and melodic character than the altus, which in these instances may be omitted, as it is in contemporary arrangements for voice and lute ('O vaghe luci' [track 11]). In others the altus and tenor are of equal importance ('Vostro son' [track 10], 'Aspicias' [track 24]). In all cases, however, the bass is used only to reinforce or subvert a harmony which is largely complete in the upper three voices. (Compared to its higher relations the bass viol was relatively quiet and slow speaking‹it seems that composers took this into account.) In an unusual variant, the frottola may borrow duet techniques from the French chanson ('Amor da che' [track 15]): here the bass is used in a more conventional way.

Fire and Ice

All the frottole on this CD are taken from a Venetian manuscript (MSS. Marc. It. CL, IV, 1795-1798) compiled in c. 1520. The collection is notable for the quality of both poetic texts and music. The texts deal frequently with extremes‹the fire and ice of our title, for example, are juxtaposed in 'Fiamma amorosa' [track 26], 'Perché son tutto foco' [track 25] and 'Nel foco tremo' [track 27]. The manuscript as a whole runs the gamut of emotions from Dido's desolation ('Aspicias') through the gentle pastoral pleasures of 'Mentre io' [track 19] to the translucent meditation of 'O vaghe luci' [track 11] and the frenetic obsessiveness of 'Dura passion' [track 17]. Some works lend themselves to instrumental performance ('O dolce farfarela' [track 18], 'Tanto mi trovo' [track 23]): here, as elsewhere, the instruments used are mostly strings, recorders being reserved for the lighter and more rustic pieces. The lute music is taken from near contemporary sources, including dance music ('Pavana alla ferrarese' [track 20] and an intabulation of a frottola ('O miei ciecha e dura sorte' [track 13]). The disc opens with a sequence of frottole, dances and villotte (dance songs), put together as a sort of Spring 'Aubade', describing perhaps early morning revellers at the Calendimaggio (May carnival). First the injunction to 'knock at my lady's door' ('Bussa la porta' [track 1]), then the attempt to rouse her ('Su, su, leva' [track 2]): it is May ('Era di maggio' [track 3]‹the refrain also in 'La via de la fiumera' [track 4]); the reference to the 'Marchese di Saluzzo' [tracks 5 & 6]‹at least he got up in the morning! Finally the more gentle villotta 'Donde ne vienstu bella' [track 7], which also appears as a basse danse by Pierre Attaingnant ('La gatta' [track 8]) and as the refrain in 'Nel tempo che riveste' [track 9].
Philip Thorby, June 2002

Texts and Translations