Music of the Trecento
The Trecento was a period of vigorous activity in Italy in the arts, including painting, architecture, literature, and music.
The music of the Trecento paralleled the achievements in the other arts in many ways, for example, in pioneering new forms of expression, especially in secular song in the vernacular language, Italian.
One of the musicians to set Dante's poetry was his friend Casella (died 1299 or 1300), memorialized in Canto II of Purgatorio.
[4] Though the pioneering music theory of Marchetto da Padova was written in this early period, the influence of his treatise on notation, the Pomerium, is largely seen in the manuscripts of the succeeding generations.
Marchetto, building on (or in parallel with) the innovations of Petrus de Cruce, described a system of division of the breve into 2, 3, 4, 6,8, 9, or 12 semibreves (later minims) with dots (singular punctus divisionis[5]) indicating breaks at the end of a breve (however, Marchetto never used a term "punctus divisionis").
The two most common forms of early Trecento secular music were the two-voice madrigal and monophonic ballata.
Francesco's music was particularly admired for its lyricism and expressive intensity: his fame has endured for six hundred years, and numerous modern recordings exist of his work.
Text-painting is evident in some of their music: for example, some of their programmatic compositions include frank imitations of bird calls or various dramatic effects.
Ciconia, as a Netherlander, was one of the first of the group which was to dominate European music for the next two hundred years; early in his life, he spent time in Italy learning the lyrical secular styles.
Ciconia was also a composer of sacred music and represents a link with the Burgundian school, the first generation of Netherlanders which dominated the early and middle 15th century.
[10] Ciconia and Zachara play dominant roles in Mass composition, and their sacred music reached England, Spain, and Poland.
The end of the period of the Schism also marked the end of the dominance of Florence over Italian music; while it always maintained an active musical life, it would be replaced by Venice (and other centers in the Veneto), Rome, Ferrara and other cities in the coming centuries and never again regained the pre-eminent position it attained in the 14th century.
The typical keyboard style of the time seems to have placed the tenor of a secular song or a melody from plainchant in equal tones in the bass while a fast-moving line was written above it for the right hand.
Other instrumental traditions are hinted at by the monophonic, dances without text in a manuscript now in London (British Library, add.
Instruments used during the Trecento included the vielle, lute, psaltery, flute, and portative organ (Landini is holding one in the illustration).
Consonances were unison, fifth and octave, just as in the ars antiqua, and the interval of a third was usually treated as a dissonance, especially earlier in the period.
Composers used passing tones to avoid parallel intervals, creating brief harsher dissonances, foreshadowing the style of counterpoint developed in the Renaissance.
Most of the manuscript sources of Trecento music are from late in the fourteenth or early in the 15th century: some time removed from the composition of the works themselves.
Probably the oldest of the larger sources is the Panciatichi Codex (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Panciatichiano 26).
