Development of Italian Madrigal - Essay Example

Madrigals were usually sung in all sorts of aristocratic social assemblies. Madrigals frequently performed on stage and in other theatrical shows. Four-voice settings of the madrigals were a trend approximately from 1520 to 1550 but eventually, five-vocal sets became a rule after the middle of the century and settings for six or more parts were not unusual.  The word "voices" is to be taken literally: the madrigal was a piece of vocal chamber music intended performance with one singer to a part. As a style of the 16th century, however, instruments often took their part or simply doubled the voices.

In the early madrigal period, the major, Italian composers who were active in Florence were the Franco-Fleming Philippe Verdelot and the Italians Bernardo Pisano and Francesco de Layolle and Verdelot, Pisano and Constanzo Festa, active in Rome. Adrian Willaert and Jacquez Arcadelt also became popular in Venice which is another early center. Frottola-like textures of the earliest madrigals were embodied in the works of Pisano and Festa and the four-voice pieces by Verdelot. They are homophonic in structure, having simple cadences at line endings. The motet-like approach is also evident in Verdelot’s madrigal having recurring patterns, varying voice groupings, and overlapping parks at cadences. Cipriano de Rore, another important Madrigalist, composed the Da le belle contrande d’oriente. Rore imbued each detail of the music with the sense and feeling of Petrarch’s sonnet altering the texture between homophonic and imitation.

Madrigal texts were mainly written by major poets, including Francesco Petrarca, Pietro Bembo, Jacopo Sannazaro, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanni Battista Guarini. Composers preferred poetry that was more elegant and serious. Madrigalists made much independence with the verses using various homophonic and contrapuntal textures in a series of overlapping sections, each based on a single phrase of the text. Matching, the sincerity, nobility, and artfulness of the poetry and the conveyance of ideas and passions, was the aim of the Madrigal composers to their performers and audiences. Most madrigal texts consisted of a single stanza with a rhyme scheme and a moderate number of seven- and eleven-syllable lines. The subject matter was sentimental or erotic, with scenes and allusions borrowed from pastoral poetry. The text usually ended with an epigrammatic climax in the last line or two.

The English madrigal was a style of music that was borrowed from the Italian madrigal. The composition of the English madrigal flourished from about 1590 to 1630. These pieces were written for ‘a cappella’ ensembles, although they were sometimes accompanied by vols. Unlike the treble-dominated air, another genre of this period, the madrigal placed equal importance on each vocal part. In addition, the texts of these pieces were always in English.

Nicholas Yonge published Musica transalpine in 1588. It is a collection of Italian madrigals with texts in English. Many of these had been circulating in manuscripts for several years before Yonge's book, which he characterized in the preface as music sung daily by a group of gentlemen and merchants who met at his home. This anthology and others that appeared in the next decade gave impetus to a period of English madrigal composition that flourished from the 1590s to the 1630s.

Thomas Morley (1557-1602) is regarded by many as the best composer of English madrigals during the Renaissance. He went beyond his contemporaries such as Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye. Morley wrote for several other genres including ballets and canonists. He published a collection of twenty-five madrigals by different composers in 1601. He modeled it based on Il trionfo di Dori - an Italian anthology. Each madrigal in Morley’s collection ends with the words “Long live fair Oriana”, a name from the conventional vocabulary of pastoral poetry often applied to Elizabeth. His ballets were based on the Italian balletti of Gastoldi. English Madrigals were written mainly for ensembles of unaccompanied solo voices, though many of the printed collections of part-books indicate on the tide page that the music is "apt for voices and viols", presumably in any available combination. The suppleness of the publication made it a perfect model for amateurs. The capacity of reading vocal or instrumental parts in such pieces was expected of educated persons in Elizabethan England.