Editing Jacques Arcadelt (section)

==Music==
During his long and productive career, Arcadelt wrote music both sacred and secular, all of it vocal. He left a total of 24 [[motet]]s, 125 French chansons, approximately 250 madrigals (about fifty of which are of uncertain attribution), three [[mass (music)|masses]], as well as settings of the [[Lamentations of Jeremiah]] and the [[Magnificat]]. There may be as many as 250 more madrigals by Arcadelt which survive anonymously in manuscript sources.<ref>Reese 1959, p. 322.</ref><ref name="Grove"/> Influences on his music ranged from the chanson and polyphonic style of his northern homeland, to the native secular music of Italy such as the [[frottola]], to the music he heard while he served in the Sistine Chapel choir. Of all the early madrigalists, he was the most universal in his appeal; his influence on others was enormous. Arcadelt brought the madrigal form to its early maturity.<ref>Einstein, p. 264</ref>

===Secular music===

====Madrigals====
{{Audio|ARCADELT Io dico che fra noi.mid|''Io dico che fra voi''}} (Madrigal for four voices; setting of a poem by Michelangelo, from the early 1540s)
Arcadelt's several hundred madrigals, composed over a span of at least two decades, were usually for four voices, although he wrote a few for three, and a handful for five and six voices. Stylistically his madrigals are melodious and simple in structure, singable, and built on a clear harmonic basis, usually completely diatonic. The music is often syllabic, and while it sometimes uses repeated phrases, is almost always through-composed (as opposed to the contemporary chanson, which was often strophic).<ref>Brown 1999, p. 201.</ref> Arcadelt alternates homophonic and polyphonic textures, "in a state of delicate, labile equilibrium".<ref>Blume, Friedrich. Renaissance and Baroque Music. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1967. p. 67.</ref> His madrigals best represent the "classic" phase of development of the form, with their clear outline, four-part writing, refinement, and balance; the [[word painting]], chromaticism, ornamentation, virtuosity, expressionistic and manneristic writing of madrigalists later in the century are nowhere to be found in Arcadelt.<ref name="Einstein, Vol. I p. 269">Einstein, Vol. I p. 269</ref>

His music became immensely popular in [[Italy]] and France for more than a hundred years, with his first book of madrigals being reprinted fifty-eight times by 1654, and his music appearing in innumerable [[intabulation]]s for instruments such as the [[lute]], [[guitar]], and [[viol]].<ref name="Grove"/> Additional hints to his popularity are the frequency with which anonymous compositions were attributed to him, and the appearance of his music in several paintings of musicians from the time.<ref name="Grove"/> Likely his popularity was due to his gift for capturing the Italian spirit and marrying it with the technical perfection of the Franco-Flemish harmonic and [[polyphony|polyphonic]] style; in addition he wrote catchy tunes which were easy to sing. Unlike later generations of madrigal composers, Arcadelt did not expect professional singers to be the only consumers of his work; anyone who could read notes could sing his madrigals.<ref>Abraham 1968, pp. 69–70.</ref>

For his texts, Arcadelt chose poets ranging from [[Petrarch]] (and his setting of a complete canzone, as a set of five interrelated madrigals, was the predecessor of the vogue for madrigal cycles), [[Pietro Bembo]], [[Sannazaro]], to Florentines Lorenzino de'Medici, Benedetto Varchi, Filippo Strozzi, and Michelangelo himself, to others such as [[Luigi Cassola]] of Piacenza, a now-obscure writer who was among the most often-set poets of the early madrigalists.<ref>Einstein, Vol. I p. 172</ref><ref name="Grove"/> Much of the poetry of Arcadelt's madrigals has remained anonymous, just as some of Arcadelt's music is believed to survive anonymously. Another poet he set was Giovanni Guidiccioni, who wrote the words to his most single famous composition, and one of the most enduring of the entire 16th century: the four-voice madrigal ''Il bianco e dolce cigno'' (The white and gentle swan).<ref name="Einstein, Vol. I p. 269"/>

This madrigal was appealing on many levels. According to [[Alfred Einstein]], writing in ''The Italian Madrigal'', "… he is content with a simple, tender declamation of the text, depending upon the elementary and magical power of music, of harmony, which veils this poem in a cloak of sublime and distant sentimentality. Here is attained the ideal of what the time expected of the ''dolcezza'' [sweetness] and the ''suavità'' [suaveness] of music. Arcadelt has conferred upon this composition a quality which is very rare in sixteenth-century secular music, namely durability …"<ref name="Einstein, Vol. I p. 270">Einstein, Vol. I p. 270</ref> The texture is mostly homophonic, with a hint of [[fauxbourdon]] in the harmony; the subject matter is erotic, with the orgasmic "thousand deaths" portrayed by a rising fourth figure in close [[imitation (music)|imitation]]; brief bits of word-painting occur, such as the use of a flattened seventh on "piangendo"; and the musical phrases overlap the lines of verse, blurring the formal division of the line, a technique known in music, as in poetry, as [[enjambment]].<ref>Atlas 1998, p. 431.</ref><ref name="Einstein, Vol. I p. 270"/>

====Chansons====
Since Arcadelt lived both in France and Italy, writing secular music in both countries, his chansons and madrigals not unexpectedly share some features.  The chanson was by its nature a more stable form, often strophic and with patterned repetition; the madrigal, on the other hand, was usually through-composed.<ref>Einstein, Vol. I pp. 264–265</ref>  Arcadelt borrowed some features of the chanson when he wrote his madrigals, in the same way, he wrote some of his chansons with madrigalian features. Most of his chansons are syllabic and simple, with brief bursts of polyphonic writing, occasionally canonic, and with sections imitating the ''note nere'' style of the madrigal – the fast "black notes" producing the effect of a [[patter song]]. Some of his chansons were actually ''contrafacta'' of his madrigals (the same music, printed with new words French instead of Italian). Rarely in music history were the madrigal and the chanson more alike.<ref name="Grove"/>

===Sacred music===
In addition to his copious output of madrigals and chansons, Arcadelt produced three [[mass (music)|mass]]es, 24 [[motet]]s, settings of the [[Magnificat]], the [[Lamentations of Jeremiah]], and some sacred chansons – the French equivalent of the ''[[madrigale spirituale]]''. The masses are influenced by the previous generation of Franco-Flemish composers, particularly [[Jean Mouton]] and [[Josquin des Prez]]; the motets, avoiding the dense [[polyphony]] favored by the Netherlanders, are more declamatory and clear in texture, in a manner similar to his secular music. Much of his religious music, except for the sacred chansons, he probably wrote during his years in the papal chapel in Rome. Documents from the Sistine Chapel archives indicate that the choir sang his music during his residence there.<ref name="Grove"/> Arcadelt's ''[[Ave Maria]]'' is not an original sacred work by the composer.  In 1842, [[Pierre-Louis Dietsch]] adjusted Arcadelt's chanson "Nous voyons que les hommes" to the Latin text and added a bass line.<ref name=SSO>{{cite book|last=Smith|first=Rollin|title=Saint-Saëns and the Organ|location=Stuyvesant, NY|publisher=Pendragon Press|pages=46–7|date=1992}}</ref>

===Publishers===
Antoine Gardano became the primary Italian publisher for Arcadelt, although the competing Venetian publishing house of [[Scotto]] brought out one of his madrigal books as well.<ref>Atlas 1998, p. 458.</ref><ref name="Grove"/> Arcadelt's ''Il bianco e dolce cigno'' opened one of Gardano's books; as the piece had already achieved immense fame, it was the main selling point.<ref>Atlas 1998, p. 430.</ref> In Paris, some of Arcadelt's chansons appeared as early as 1540 in the publications of [[Pierre Attaingnant]] and [[Jacques Moderne]], so must have been written in Italy.<ref name="Einstein, Vol. I p. 264"/> After Arcadelt returned to France, his chansons, masses, and motets appeared in the editions of the printing firm of Le Roy and Ballard throughout the 1550s and 1560s, while his music was still being printed in distant Venice.<ref name="Grove"/>