Roma alla fine del '500, il madrigale, l'invenzione di nuovo diletto

Abstract

The research began with a memoir by the Genoese marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani: as is well known, around the year 1625, Giustiniani recalled that in Rome, at the end of the previous century, a new style of the madrigal was established, whose «nuova aria et grata» was linked to the use of certain «fughe facili e senza straordinario artificio». Anthony Newcomb has confirmed the substantial correctness of Giustiniani's recollection and has identified some contrapuntal techniques - in madrigals especially by de Macque, Marenzio and Giovannelli - that were capable of achieving the simplification evoked by Giustiniani; this simplification, according to the American scholar, had the effect of increasing the importance of harmony, contributing to the evolution, in this direction, of the musical style of the period.

Through the analysis of a madrigal by Ruggero Giovannelli, the present study sheds light on how the syntactic connections of the imitative texture could also be obtained by remaining within the contrapuntal techniques; in particular, the use of persistent sounds - prominent on hearing and also relevant with regard to cadential projections - succeeded in aggregating the imitative designs, reducing them within a single sound field and promoting the syntactic perception of the musical discourse. The concept of aggregation was thus realized both on the harmonic plane (as Newcomb noted), and apart from it.

If we extend our glance to the panorama of authors active in Rome in those decades, we can see that not all of them adhered to the same tendencies. This is probably to be put in relation to the different circumstances of use of the madrigal, which the many courts of the Papal City allowed within it.