Francesco's Dream: Musical Logic in Landini's Three-Voice Ballate

[1] Francesco Landini's most intriguing composition may not be, strictly speaking, musical but poetic in nature. A dream-vision composed in Latin verse survives through a manuscript recorded at the papal court in Avignon ca. 1382.(2) In this literary though not literal dream a mob of old men enters Francesco's chambers after midnight. Arguing and grumbling, they push forward a young, bright-faced man to speak on their behalf. The spokesperson identifies himself as William of Ockham and bemoans the ill treatment he received during life and after death.(3) He has come forward to warn that an unlearned dilettante [ydiota rudissimus] has been irreverently maligning Dialectic, whom William extols at length (the passage appears in the Appendix). The arrival of dawn cuts short William's other complaints, and Francesco awakes.[2] The dream's intrigue revolves around its central figure, William of Ockham (ca. 1287-1347), an English logician summoned to the Avignon papal court on charges of heresy in 1324. William launched a counterattack through a debate concerning the Franciscan tenet of "Apostolic poverty," thereby directly challenging John XXII, who accepted lavish donations. Through his logic system, William demonstrated the heretical leanings of John himself. Having burnt ecclesiastical bridges, William sought asylum under the Holy Roman Emperor (Ludwig of Bavaria) in 1328, dying in Munich in 1347 (during the Black Death). At some point he was excommunicated, not for heresy but for leaving Avignon without permission. Decades later during the Great Schism, the anti-papal William was praised in writing by Francesco during a period of escalating vulnerability for the French Pope.[3] As improbable or mysterious as its very existence might seem, Francesco's dream nonetheless provides exactly the kind of vita nuova needed to extract music analysis out of what I perceive as a rut that it has inhabited with regard to the Italian fourteenth-century repertoire. On the one hand, analysts who maintain close contact with contemporaneous theoretical and archival sources have made significant advances, but with regard only to French compositions.(4) On the other hand, graphic enterprises of a Schenkerian nature (thus more in step with current music-theoretical activity) have met only occasional and limited success with music from both sides of the Alps, but they seem at odds with more historically minded efforts.(5) In an attempt to improve the situation, I shall depart from the dream that Francesco "composed in praise of the logic of Occam"(6) and relate my own dream-vision here, in which I endeavor to apply the pluralist mindset of medieval syllogistic for two purposes: to engage a relatively unexplored element of Francesco's intellectual milieu, and to depart decisively from Schenkerian principles in the graphic analysis of complete works.FRANCESCO'S INVOCATION OF SYLLOGISTIC[4] Francesco's praise of William's logic invites exploration into medieval logic study. Unfortunately, Michael Long, who has commented more on the dream than any other person, uses the dream to illustrate Francesco's sympathy toward Ockhamist theology, not logic.(7) In fact, the extended laud of Dialectic shows working familiarity with William's logic writings, and likely the entire canon of logic treatises.(8) The long-winded stream of epithets to Dialectic resembles the prologue to William's Summa logicae (1341), written by William's associate Adam of Wodeham. Adam's prologue can be used as a point of comparison to gauge the degree to which Francesco appropriates ideas of William and others (the prologue appears in the Appendix).(9) The end of the first paragraph and the bulk of the second paragraph of Adam's text resonate with Francesco's line 11; similarly, Adam's fifth paragraph exposes the same imagery as Francesco's lines 12-13. In its own right, Francesco's poem possibly contributes new tropes on Dialectic, such as her ascending heavenward in Christian fashion to "serve the one-and-triple king" (line 8) and traversing the pagan Tartarus (line 21). …