Francesco Landini (c.1325–1397) Francesco Landini was Italy’s first great composer, the most prolific and gifted musician of the trecento (the fourteenth century). Like Machaut, his better-known contemporary from France, he was a prodigiously talented man and not just as a composer: he had strong literary, philosophical and scientific credentials, and, despite being blinded by smallpox at an early age, was a revered organist and organ builder. The son of a painter in the school of Giotto, Landini was raised in Florence at one of the most exciting times in the city’s history. The Church had started to lose its total domination over all aspects of life, and humanist, secular activities were burgeoning in the arts, with the trecorone– Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch – championing the use of the vernacular in poetry. With this new way of writing – dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style” – came a new lyrical approach to music, in which the beauty of the melody line was the all-important consideration (initiating a melodic focus that has been a defining feature of Italian music ever since). The carefully shaped, highly ornamented and virtuosic melody lines were supported by simple harmonic activity, usually with a bass moving “in parallel”, and the resulting texture was, essentially, decorated monophony. The pieces served as sensual, secular entertainment for social occasions. Although Landini spent most of his life working for the Church – his powers of improvisation at the organ were greatly revered – he devoted all his compositional energies to the development of the secular vocal tradition, expanding the preexisting musical language into a cohesive, organic style. He put less emphasis on embellishment and virtuosity, enriched rhythm and harmony, and developed a more goal-orientated style of writing. The increased homogeneity of his music is partly the result of the influence of French music, which marks the beginning of a fusion of the Italian and French styles that culminated in the more intricate Ars sublitor style of the fifteenth century. Songs Landini’s surviving output – quite possibly everything he ever wrote – consists of 154 songs for one, two or three voices. The madrigal had dominated Italian secular music until the 1360s with its rustic style, pastoral texts and a two-line closing section that was markedly different from the rest of the piece. Landini wrote some madrigals but focused mainly on the ballata, which has dance form origins and generally sets texts of a more self-revealing, personal nature. In structural terms, the ballata makes use of two repeated sections – similar to the virelai, which was used extensively by Machaut. The earliest manuscripts of works by Landini and his contemporaries date from some time after they were written. The most important source is the beautifully illuminated Squarcialupi codex, probably created in 1415, but copies of many of Landini’s pieces have been found in various manuscripts throughout Italy. The lack of original sources makes it nearly impossible to know exactly how the works were originally performed. The most contentious point is which lines, if any, were intended to be played on instruments, and consequently a work may be sung unaccompanied on one recording and supported by harps, bagpipes and drums on another.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 02:40:08 +0000
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