This book offers a valuable contribution to studies of trecento poetico-musical culture. It continues a series (‘La tradizione musicale’) that has already yielded several indispensable studies of trecento theory and practice, including a weighty conference volume on Francesco Landini and the publication of several crucial music treatises from the trecento and early quattrocento.Footnote ¹ In a larger scholarly context, this book testifies to the newly emerging interest in the trecento, continuing from the celebrated series of L'Ars Nova italiana (eight volumes so far), Musica mensurabilis (whose last, seventh, volume is reviewed by Margaret Bent above), and the facsimile series Ars Nova (the latest volume being the San Lorenzo facsimile likewise reviewed above). This interest, to which the book under review testifies, is only to be warmly welcomed.

Musica e poesia nel Trecento italiano also draws on past research in that it gathers the proceedings of the international symposium (with the same title) held in Florence on 2–3 December 2013.Footnote ² This is not, however, a simple collection of single articles, as very soon becomes clear to a reader: the volume is unified in many respects, presenting a consolidated view of the culture, with the contributors drawing extensively on each other's research. This orientation towards the past, however, is well balanced with a few glances into the future. As the title itself suggests (‘verso una nuova edizione critica’), the book has a larger claim to make: it aims to serve as a methodological basis for future critical editions of trecento polyphony, some of which are now leaving the press.Footnote ³ The need to replace older PMFC and CMM editions of trecento music has become urgent in recent years, so this claim is well calculated. This volume, as well as the future critical editions, complement nicely the earlier editorial initiatives, particularly that of Oliver Huck and his team.Footnote ⁴

The main title (‘Musica e poesia’) clarifies the interdisciplinary aspirations of the whole volume, which is concerned equally with trecento poetry and music. The book is therefore divided into two main parts: the first, on poetry, comprises the first three articles written by Lauren Jennings, Davide Checchi and Maria Sofia Lannutti; the second, on music, includes the remaining articles by Maria Caraci Vela, Antonio Calvia, Michele Epifani, with the last article written jointly by Marco Mangani and Daniele Sabaino. This is complemented by two appendices that present a critical edition of the madrigals that take centre stage in the contributions of Lannutti and Caraci Vela: La fiera testa che d'uman si ciba set by Bartolino and Nicolò del Preposto, and La douce çere d'un fier animal by the same Bartolino.

The first part proceeds from general reflections on the entire repertory of trecento song texts and the nomenclature associated with it (by Jennings), to examining single manuscripts and their rubrics (Checchi), to close analytical readings of single compositions (Lannutti). Jennings's article introduces this musico-poetic practice as part of a larger trecento poetic culture, rather than as a segregated (and inferior) sub-tradition of poesia per musica – a formulation she rightly criticises in her essay. She then substantiates her view in two brief case studies presenting song texts transmitted in two manuscripts without musical notation (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Pal. 315 and Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 1100) in relation to its otherwise purely ‘literary’ context, with their ‘literary’ quality being enhanced, paradoxically, by the ‘distance from the sonic realization of song’ (p. 10). For this scale of argument the essay seems rather brief (eleven pages without appendices), and the reader is therefore constantly referred to Jennings's earlier PhD thesis, now published separately as a monograph, where the argument is presented much more thoroughly.Footnote ⁵ This brevity and incompleteness, and the linguistic disconnect from other essays in the volume (this being the only contribution in English), make this introduction regrettably detached from everything else, with Jennings's ideas rarely incorporated or directly referenced in the main body of the volume.

Davide Checchi's contribution opens up an intriguing discourse of poetic authorship with regard to song texts transmitted in four manuscripts: Genoa, Biblioteca Universitaria A.IX.28; BAV Chig. L.IV.131; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. VII.1041; and the frequently debated Parma, Biblioteca Palatina MS Parmense 1081. With compelling contextualisation of these sources’ historical and scribal background and meticulous textual criticism, Checchi makes a strong case for validating the poetic attributions proposed in the rubrics of those four manuscripts: to Francesco Landini in the first three and to Nicolò del Preposto in the last. Checchi further clarifies the relation of Parma 1081, or its exemplars, to the Florentine cultural elite of the late trecento, and in particular to the entourage of Coluccio Salutati, which certainly makes the attributions that this codex transmits look more reliable. This serves to support the more general claim made by Jennings that song texts were well integrated into a larger poetic tradition, and that the scribes transmitting song texts might have been more interested in their poetic than their musical qualities; but the emphasis on the scribes’ prior knowledge of musical settings accompanying these texts (knowledge, at least, of their existence) makes one wonder whether this link could argue for closer musico-textual relationships in trecento song itself. In other words, the question remains as to whether the scribes were interested in these texts solely because of their poetic qualities, or because these texts were associated with their respective musical settings, which, although omitted in the literary sources, constituted an indispensable background.

Maria Sofia Lannutti's article comprises a close analytical reading of the trilingual madrigal La fiera testa, which she considers attributable (according to the same Parma 1081 manuscript) to Petrarch. She starts by elucidating the madrigal's complex historical and literary contexts – the former dominated by the anti-Visconti rhetoric directed specifically against the figure of Bernabò Visconti, the latter revealing many Dantean and biblical echoes and allusions that help strengthen the vituperative tone of the piece. All this helps clarify the complexity of the madrigal's rhetoric. Next comes Lannutti's identification of the dedicatee's name that she argues is reiterated three times: first in the combination of initial syllables and letters of various words in lines 1–3 (LA-P-V-S), then in reverse in line 4: S-V-PAL=LAPVS, and finally as a kind of acrostic whose first syllable is again inverted, and whose flow is interrupted by one ‘extra’ letter (lines 4–8: AL=LA-P-V-[C]-S). To support her reading, Lannutti provides rich contextualisation from both poetic and metrical sides of Italian and French literary traditions, striving to make this kind of technique look less extreme than it may at first glance seem. While one must admire both her mastery of decipherment and the sheer quantity of supporting material, some of the most intriguing kinds of reading proposed remain unaccounted for at the end, namely, the reading that combines initial letters and initial syllables to form a word, and the retrograde reading by letters alone. Regarding the combination of initial syllables and letters, Antonio da Tempo's prescription to read acrostics ‘aut per litteras aut per sillabas’ comes close, but what it implies, as I see it, is either/or, not a combination of the two. All practical examples cited in the article confirm this impression.Footnote ⁶ As to the retrograde reading by letters alone, Lannutti shows convincingly that it was used quite often at that time, but, again, it is not the kind of reading to which her examples point: while she is concerned with reversing the order of letters to form ‘LAPVS’ from ‘S-V-PAL’, her other examples show the reversal of syllables or the reversal of words. There is no doubt that La fiera testa reveals a highly peculiar and clever phonetic structure, and Lannutti's close analysis of that structure is exemplary, yet the significance of the latent name and its relevance for later historical contextualisation remains open to further discussion.

The issue of how (and what) to read from the text becomes pressing when the author derives other senhals from the madrigal. These words are formed first from the initial, then from the last syllables of various final and penultimate words of lines 2–6, in all cases read from bottom to top: thus the imperatives ‘AS-SI-DE’ and ‘DE-TUR-BA’ appear, then the past participle ‘STA-TUM’ – words that are later used to reconstruct historical circumstances around La fiera testa. One problem with these readings is purely methodological, namely that they shift the accent from single letters back to syllables. It is unclear why ‘LAPVS’ would be formed in one way (or rather in three different ways), and these words in another. More important, however, is the question of what we choose to read as ‘hidden’ senhals. The majority of two- or three-syllable words can easily be ‘reversed’ (by syllables) into other perfectly meaningful words: in line 1 alone, for instance, this technique might equally yield ‘baci’ for ‘ciba’, ‘manu’ for ‘uman’, and ‘state’ for ‘testa’, while a combination of different syllables from different words only multiplies the number of possible derivations. None of these words would make any sense in the context of Lannutti's analysis, but their very possibility of derivation using the same method might invite caution in accepting some of the readings it generates.

Matters become more debatable when Lannutti proceeds to contextualise and date the piece. Having used these conjectural readings to establish ‘Lapus’ as a dedicatee of the text, Lannutti makes the claim that ‘the best candidate seems to be Lapo di Castiglionchio il Vecchio’ (p. 61), but provides no further substantiation in the article. Why one Lapo and not another? It is not the lack of documentary evidence that bothers me here so much as the circular reasoning that eventually leads to the (re)-attribution of the text to Petrarch: Lapo di Castiglionchio il Vecchio was a close friend of Petrarch's, and it is this that is said to make the attribution to Petrarch in Parma 1081 look more reliable. Lapo's links to Petrarch are instrumental in the identification that the author makes, but this identification itself strengthens the attribution to Petrarch (which is partly validated by Checchi's earlier analysis of the manuscript rubrics). The attribution is further supported by quoting sonnets and madrigals by Petrarch that interweave into their narratives various hidden names and their attributes (such as ‘Laureta’ in RVF 5, ‘Amor(e)’ in RVF 25, and ‘Nova novata’ in RVF 106). Again, the contextualisation is exemplary, but in the light of Lannutti's earlier discussion, Petrarch's examples lose their force and singularity – they look rather straightforward and unambiguous when compared with what has earlier been proposed for La fiera testa. Notwithstanding these reservations, Lannutti's article yields some significant insights in the heraldic and literary contexts of La fiera testa, its phonetic structure, and its preoccupation with obscuritas, and ends with a very nuanced discussion of another madrigal, La douce çere.

The next essay, by Maria Caraci Vela, complements Lannutti's discussion of La fiera testa by focusing on its two musical settings by Bartolino and Nicolò del Preposto, and is likewise concerned with extracting all kinds of contextual information (mostly related to chronology) from the internal features of the text, and from its manner of presentation in the primary sources. This article opens with a meticulous methodological discussion of how to arrange musical settings chronologically, offering an exhaustive set of criteria for earlier or later dating, based in part on Kurt von Fischer's earlier studies of chronology in Landini's works:Footnote ⁷ textual layout, mensural choices, type of notation, voice disposition, contrapuntal structure, cadential forms, rhythm, prosody and stylistic profile of different genres (for instance, the madrigal being stylistically more ‘conservative’). Caraci Vela focuses in particular on parallelisms of perfect consonances, a phenomenon she sees as strongly present in the earlier layers of the repertory, and then gradually more ‘regulated’ in later stages, both in practice (in florid counterpoint) and in theory. This discussion explores the familiar territory of contrapunctus and its norms, an issue raised by Kurt Sachs and then examined, mostly in relation to fourteenth-century music, by Sarah Fuller, Margaret Bent, Elizabeth Eva Leach and others. Caraci Vela's position is clear and balanced, but makes only passing reference to Margaret Bent's seminal essay on ‘The Grammar of Early Music’ and omits mention of Elizabeth Eva Leach's contrapuntal analyses of Machaut's works.Footnote ⁸ The author's clear predilection towards Kurt Sachs and his definition of Gerüstsatz leads to a different understanding of what the author calls ‘CPPSS di struttura’ (‘structural parallelisms of perfect consonances’) from what is usually considered ‘structural’ in the medieval contrapunctus, at least in the English-speaking area: Caraci Vela asserts that this kind of ‘structural parallelism’ retained its significance even at a later stage of the trecento (pp. 111 onwards); what is meant here by ‘structural’ is the contrapuntal ‘skeleton’ articulated, roughly, by ‘strong beats’, rather than a dyadic progression in Bent's sense, which adheres to strict contrapuntal norms (with parallels between perfect consonances of the same species explicitly prohibited). From Caraci Vela's perspective, it is possible to draw an analogy between the parallelisms that she calls ‘di struttura’ and the various oral practices (for instance, ‘diapentizare vel quintiare’) that permitted or even encouraged such progressions; this analogy would dissipate, however, if ‘structural’ were understood more strictly in the light of contrapunctus theory, as proposed by Bent. Strong-beat progressions may of course coincide with the underlying grammatical base at some points, but I believe there is nothing to suggest its ‘structural’ significance for trecento counterpoint.

The second part of Caraci Vela's essay applies this methodological discussion to Bartolino and Nicolò’s settings of La fiera testa, arguing for the earlier date for Bartolino's piece (immediately after 1366), and the later for Nicolò’s (around 1375, but with a list of possible occasions from 1373 to 1388). The year 1366 as terminus post quem relies on Lannutti's reading of the text, which, as I argued above, is open to further debate. It is a much earlier dating than Petrobelli's, and seems justified on stylistic grounds, but whether these stylistic features alone allow us to infer any precise date remains questionable. Bartolino's piece is then linked both textually and musically to a French-texted repertory around Paolo's Soffrir m'estuet and the Esperance circle, with Nicolò’s piece remaining outside this complex intertextual scheme. The article ends with an intriguing assumption that the inclusion of both musical settings in the Squarcialupi manuscript might have been a deliberate attempt to redirect its strong anti-Visconti rhetoric against Bernabò’s successors, who appropriated his power as well as some of his heraldic symbols.

Nicolò’s works make their next appearance in Antonio Calvia's essay focused on some of his ballatas previously considered ‘anomalous’ with regard to their textual or musical form. Calvia's essay seeks to reduce the number of these ‘extraordinary forms’ (in Dorothea Baumann's designation)Footnote ⁹ by arguing convincingly for various lacunae and errors in manuscript transmission (particularly in the residuum section), some of which can now be remedied with the help of new discoveries. These lacunae are carefully diagnosed through syntactic or formal incompleteness, peculiarities of textual layout in the sources, or simply hypothesised because of resultant formal incongruities. In the last of his five case studies, focused on the ballata Stato nessun ferm’à, Calvia demonstrates how a correct interpretation of the verse structure might affect our appreciation of its accompanying musical setting, and the resulting musico-textual coordination. Restoring the missing volta section from a literary manuscript (pp. 165–7), the author is able to draw a parallel with Nicolò’s other ballatas employing the same verse structure, rhyme patterns (rime tronche) and similar poetic motifs. This allows a closer musico-textual analysis that reveals significant intersections between two of them (Stato nessun ferm’à and Chi ‘l ben sofrir non pò), the last one (Ciascun faccia per sé) being an outlier musically, poetically, and, it is argued, chronologically. This case study demonstrates in an exemplary manner a close connection between poetic content, verse structure and musical style, helping to recover ‘a clearer picture of relationships between poetry and music in the Italian trecento’ (p. 187).

Michele Epifani's contribution is concerned with practical editorial issues, which bear fruit not only in the article itself, but also in his fine musical edition of Bartolino's La douce çere appended to the volume. The article makes a strong case for reintroducing the category of modus to Italian notation, following Nino Pirrotta's pioneering attempt (left without commentary) in his CMM edition. It starts with a panoramic overview of trecento theory from Marchetto to Prosdocimus, in which modus is shown to have never completely disappeared from the tempus-based Italian ‘divisiones’. Epifani then takes a closer look at practical sources, finding some traces of modus and even maximodus in the use of the ‘imperfect long’ and ‘imperfect maxima’ with stems on both sides of the figure. His three case studies (all cacce) show three different editorial approaches: in the first, one modus is used consistently throughout the piece (or its section); in the second, a certain modal pattern (as Marchetto's ‘cantus mixtus’) is used consistently throughout the piece or its section; and in the third modus is applied flexibly, adapted to the pace of declamation and a canonic entrance of the second voice. Although Epifani's individual editorial solutions might be debatable, particularly in the last case, his approach in general seems very convincing, and the point he makes is well argued. As the author himself emphasises, modus certainly ceased to be an essential component of this music's mensural organisation (based on tempus units), but it retained its importance for the form and pace of the music. Its careful application to trecento polyphony results not just in deleting a number of extra bar lines, but also in a better understanding (both visual and sonic) of structure and flow, greatly facilitating analytical consideration of the repertory.

The final contribution, written jointly by Marco Mangani and Daniele Sabaino, continues their long series of articles on ‘tonal space’ and its organisation in polyphonic music spanning a wide chronological spectrum, from the Notre-Dame conductus to Claudio Monteverdi, focusing this time on trecento repertory. The essay seeks to analyse cadential dispositions and types of cadential gestures used in Nicolò’s ballatas and madrigals, viewed in comparison with other trecento composers (such as Bartolino, Jacopo da Bologna and Francesco Landini). As in Caraci Vela's article, readers find themselves in the analytical territory of contrapunctus regulated by cadential gestures, which the authors understand similarly to Fuller's ‘directed progression’ and Bent's ‘cadentia’.Footnote ¹⁰

At this point, the presentation would have benefited from a clearer discussion of, and distinction between, ‘directed progression’ as a certain interval pattern (not necessarily closural) and the formal idea of a closure (not necessarily conforming to any ‘directed progression’) – that is, a distinction between the underlying contrapuntal structure and the formal articulation of a piece. The lack of such distinction makes the overall picture somewhat unclear. For instance, the authors are at pains to extend and modify the standard corpus of cadential gestures by asserting that some cadential gestures may not include a characteristic semitone resolution in one of the two parts (as in minor 6→8, or major 3→1), or by including some idiosyncratic progressions in this corpus (as in the 1→1, to be discussed below). In reality, such interpretations largely depend on our ficta choices, which can often readily be made so as to realise the kinds of progressions just quoted in their standard form (major 6→8; minor 3→1), even when these cadences lack a characteristic suspension in one of the two voices. And in those cases where this would be more difficult to do, it might simply mean that the progression in question is not articulated as ‘directed’ (for instance, in Ex. 20 on p. 254). Here the distinction mentioned above would be pertinent. This would imply not so much a need to expand the repertory of cadential figures as an acknowledgement that composers could have deliberately played with cadential expectations by construing progressions that appear ‘directed’ or ‘closural’ but actually frustrate or abandon their expected roles.

The essay offers a detailed classification of cadential figures according to their formal position (at the end of a verse or a hemistich, at the beginning of a melisma, etc.), and a further discussion of the means of cadential weakening and evasion. In this section, I wondered if the use of an authentic term such as ouvert (rather than simply ‘weak’) would be appropriate in defining certain progressions (for instance Ex. 26 on p. 259, which lacks ‘mi’ ficta at the end of the cantus), considering how popular the terms ouvert and clos were in ballata repertory of the Italian trecento. The lack of this term is regrettable in the later analysis of cadential disposition and cadential relations in the ballata and madrigal, which is presented largely in the form of statistical data scattered through several large tables. These data are extremely helpful in understanding the inner cadential flow, and allow one to see certain patterns emerging from these tables: in particular, the use of ouvert cadences at the end of a first line in the madrigal (in both the first part and the ritornello) uncovers a compositional tendency to override these first musical caesurae and to stitch together the first line with what follows (see particularly the tables on pp. 269–71 and 275). In the ritornello, which often consists of just two musico-poetical units, this approach results in a continuous flow from the beginning to the end, with the first (weak) caesura articulated by an ouvert cadence, and the second (strong) one by a clos. A parallel may be drawn, I believe, between this formal articulation and the one we know from the ballata repertory, which at some point adopts the same cadential disposition for the piedi (and sometimes even for ripresa/volta).

The authors emphasise the independence of cadential mechanisms from the poetic content, claiming that trecento melos ‘is related to words in a manner decisively distant from the rhetorical attitude prevalent in Renaissance polyphony’ (p. 255). While I fully agree that musico-textual relationships in the trecento are distinct from those in the Renaissance, I find it difficult to subscribe to the corollary implied by the authors, namely that cadential progressions deliver formal musical articulation, but can be easily distanced from the semantic field established by the text. Coming back to the only example in the article where a truly idiosyncratic cadence with parallel unisons occurs (Ex. 19 on p. 254: 5–3–1→1), I wonder whether it is the expressivity conveyed by the word ‘guay’ (woe, lament), or by the whole phrase that ends with this word (‘in pena vivo et in guay’ – I live in suffering and woe), that has some explanatory power here; in other words, whether the textual expressivity here stimulates a rare musical gesture. Playing with, and overcoming, our cadential expectations may have had a deliberately expressive, and not only formal, effect. While I do not wish to argue that this was always the case, I believe semantic relations cannot be eliminated from the consideration of cadential articulation, let alone musico-textual relationships in this period in general.

Overall, this book successfully accomplishes its aim to provide a solid methodological base for future critical editions of the repertory under consideration. The first editorial fruits of this consolidated effort can be seen in the critical editions appended to the book: the settings of La fiera testa by Bartolino and Nicolò and Bartolino's La douce çere. These editions present text first (edited by Maria Sofia Lannutti), then the musical setting (edited by Maria Caraci Vela, Antonio Calvia and Michele Epifani), both accompanied with an extensive and meticulous critical apparatus. The quality of this collaborative effort is admirable, and is perhaps the best evidence of this book's success. In the musical editions, I would further clarify the potential use of ficta for some cadential progressions. One significant error crept into these otherwise impeccable editions: in Bartolino's La fiera testa (pp. 292–4), the tenor d in bar 92, taken from the manuscript Pit (BNF ital. 568), creates the unsupported fourth d/g in the two-voice counterpoint, which is easily removed with the c offered in Sq (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Palatino 87).

As for the other aim set in the first part of the title (Musica e poesia), the book leaves some room for further studies and for different approaches. The focus here is mostly on formal coordination of music and text, with the semantic potential of this interrelation receiving only a few brilliant insights in Calvia's and Epifani's articles – the insights that seem to prove that a further research in this direction may bear more fruit. This need to incorporate the semantic aspect is particularly noticeable in the contrapunctus studies that at times seem to adhere to the view that contrapuntal rules and exceptions are themselves inherently musical, rather than trying to explore them (particularly the exceptions) in relation to poetic content. This focus is entirely appropriate for a book that aims to signal future critical editions (in the second part of its title), but one thirsts for more comprehensive covering of the conjunction of ‘musica e poesia’ offered in the main title.