“MADRIGALISM” IN PRACTICE
Bembo’srevival of Petrarch was a watershed for Italian poetry and for the reestablishment of the Florentine or Tuscan dialect as a standard literary language. Precociously erudite, the future cardinal published an edition of Petrarch’s complete works in 1501, when he was thirty. Four years later, he published a dialogue on courtly love that included a selection of illustrative verses of his own composition in the style of Petrarch, demonstrating what Bembo took to be the great poet’s essential devices and themes. The most famous part of the book was the chapter devoted to lovers in conflict, in which the device of antithesis—the immediate confrontation of words, feelings, and ideas with their opposites—was exploited in spectacular fashion. In a later work, Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo drew out of Petrarch the idea of an antithesis of styles (“heavy” vs. “light”) as well. His polar categories—gravità (gravity or dignity) and piacevolezza (pleasingness or “charm”)—were to be realized technically by the mechanics of the verse: phonology or sound-content, rhyme-scheme, meter.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017008.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music. In Oxford University Press, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017008.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 17 Commercial and Literary Music." In Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-017008.xml
