Editing Jacques Arcadelt (section)

====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"/>