Among the educated classes considerable knowledge of music was required. Castiglione demands of his courtier or gentleman some amateur proficiency in music, “which not only doth make sweet the minds of men, but also many times doth wild beasts tame.”102 Every person of culture was expected to read simple music at sight, accompany himself on some instrument, and take part in an impromptu musicale.103 Sometimes people joined in a ballata that involved a union of singing, dancing, and instrumental music. Universities after 1400 offered courses and degrees in music; there were hundreds of music academies; Vittorino da Feltre founded a school of music at Mantua about 1425; our “conservatories” of music are called so because in Naples many orphanages (conservatori) were used as music schools.104 Music was further spread by the adaptation of printing to musical notation; about 1476 Ulrich Hahn printed at Rome a complete missal with movable type for notes and lines; and in 1501 Ottaviano de’ Petrucci began at Venice the commercial printing of motets and frottole.
At the courts music was more prominent than any other art except those of personal adornment. Usually the ruler chose a favorite church, whose choir became the object of his care; he paid goodly sums to attract to it the finest available voices and instrumentalists from Italy, France, and Burgundy; he trained new singers from their childhood, as Federigo did at Urbino; and he expected the members of the choir to perform also for his state ceremonies and court festivities. Guillaume Dufay of Burgundy directed music at the court of the Malatestas in Rimini and Pesaro, and at the papal chapel in Rome, for a quarter of a century (1419–44). Galeazzo Maria Sforza about 1460 organized two chapel choirs, and brought to them from France Josquin Deprès, then the most famous composer in western Europe. When Lodovico Sforza welcomed Leonardo to Milan it was as a musician; and it is to be noted that Leonardo was accompanied, in going from Florence to Milan, by Atalante Migliorotti, a celebrated musician and maker of musical instruments. A still more famous maker of lyres, lutes, organs, and clavichords was Lorenzo Gusnasco of Pavia, who made Milan one of his homes. The court of Lodovico was flush with singers: Narcisso, Testagrossa, Cordier of Flanders, and Cristoforo Romano, chastely loved by Beatrice. Pedro Maria of Spain conducted concerts in the palace and for the public; and Franchino Gaffuri founded and taught in a famous private music school in Milan. Isabella d’Este was devoted to music, made it the chief theme of decoration in her inner sanctum, and herself played several instruments. When she ordered a clavichord from Lorenzo Gusnasco she specified that the keyboard should respond to a light touch, “for our hands are so delicate that we cannot play well if the keys are too stiff.”105 At her court lived the leading lutanist of his day, Marchetto Cara, and Bartolommeo Tromboncino, who composed such alluring madrigals that when he killed his unfaithful wife no punishment was meted out to him, and the matter was passed over as a discord soon to be resolved.
Finally the cathedrals and the churches, the monasteries and the nunneries resounded with music. In Venice, Bologna, Naples, Milan, the nuns sang Vespers so movingly that crowds flocked to hear them. Sixtus IV organized the famous Sistine Chapel choir; Julius II added, in St. Peter’s, a capella lulia, or Julian chapel choir, which trained singers for the Sistine choir. This was the summit of the Latin world’s musical art in the Renaissance; to it came the greatest singers from all Roman Catholic countries. Plain chant was still the letter of canon law in church music; but here and there the ars nova of France—a form of complex counterpoint—made its way into the Roman choirs and prepared for Palestrina and Victoria. Once it had been held undignified to have any other musical instrument than the organ accompany a church choir; but in the sixteenth century a variety of instruments were brought in to give church music some of the grace and adornment of secular performances. At St. Mark’s in Venice the Flemish master, Adrian Willaert of Bruges, presided over the choirs for thirty-five years, and trained them to such performances as made Rome envious. At Florence Antonio Squarcialupi organized a School of Harmony, of which Lorenzo was a member. For a generation Antonio reigned over the cathedral choir, and the great duomo rang with music that stilled all philosophic doubt. Leon Battista Alberti was a doubter, but when the choir sang he believed:
All other modes of singing weary with repetition; only religious music never palls. I know not how others are affected; but for myself those hymns and psalms of the Church produce on me the very effect for which they were designed, soothing all disturbance of the soul, and inspiring a certain ineffable languor full of reverence toward God. What heart of man is so rude as not to be softened when he hears the rhythmic rise and fall of those voices, complete and true, in cadences so sweet and flexible? I assure you that I never listen… to the Greek words (Kyrie eleison) that call on God for aid against our human wretchedness, without weeping. Then, too, I ponder what power music brings with it to soften us and soothe.106
Despite all this popularity, music was the one art in which Italy lagged behind France during most of the Renaissance. Shorn of papal revenues by the flight of the popes to Avignon, and with the courts of the despots still culturally immature in the fourteenth century, Italy lacked then the means and the spirit for the higher grades of music. She produced lovely madrigals (a word of uncertain derivation), but these songs, modeled on those of the Provençal troubadours, were set to a musical frame of such strictly regulated polyphony that the form died of its own rigidity.
The pride of trecento music in Italy was Francesco Landini, organist of San Lorenzo in Florence. Though blind from his childhood, he became one of the finest and most loved musicians of his time, honored as an organist, lutanist, composer, poet, and philosopher. But even he took his lead from France; his two hundred secular compositions applied to Italian lyrics the ars nova that had captured France a generation before. The “new art” was doubly new: it accepted binary rhythms as well as the triple time previously required in the music of the Church; and it devised a more complex and flexible musical notation. Pope John XXII, who hurled his thunderbolts in all directions, aimed one at the ars nova as fanciful and degenerate, and his prohibition had some effect in discouraging musical development in Italy. However, John XXII could not live forever, though at times it seemed possible; after his death at the age of ninety (1334) the new art triumphed in the learned music of France, and shortly thereafter in Italy.
At Avignon French and Flemish singers and composers constituted the papal choir. When the papacy returned to Rome it brought with it a large number of French, Flemish, and Dutch composers and singers; and for a century these alien musicians and their successors dominated the music of Italy. As late as Sixtus IV all the voices in the papal choir were from beyond the Alps; and a like foreign supremacy ruled in the music of the courts in the fifteenth century. When Squarcialupi died (c. 1475), Lorenzo chose a Dutchman, Heinrich Ysaac, to succeed him as organist in the cathedral at Florence. Heinrich wrote music for some of the canti carnascialeschi, and for Politian’s lyrics, and he taught the future Leo X to love—even to compose—French songs.107 For a time the chansons of France were sung in Italy, as once Italy had recited the lays of the troubadours.