page_title: Madrigal
section_title: After 1600:  the "concerted madrigal"
hierarchical_section_title: Madrigal / History / After 1600:  the "concerted madrigal"
caption_attribution_description: Caccini - le nuove musiche
context_page_description: A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Usually, the polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varied between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets. Unlike the verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals were through-composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being sung.
  In the 1520s, the madrigal partly originated from the three-to-four voice frottola; partly from composers’ renewed interest in poetry written in vernacular Italian; from the stylistic influence of the French chanson; and from the polyphony of the motet, as written by Italianized Franco–Flemish composers. The technical contrast between the forms is in the frottola consisting of music set to stanzas of text, whilst the madrigal is through-composed, a work with different music for different stanzas.
context_section_description: During the first decade of the 17th century the madrigal moved away from the old ideal of an a cappella vocal composition for equally balanced voices, into a piece for one or more voices with instrumental accompaniment.  The soprano and bass line became more important to the texture than the inner voices, if they existed at all as independent parts; functional tonality began to develop; composers treated dissonance more freely than before; and dramatic contrasts between groupings of voices and instruments became increasingly common.  In the 17th century madrigal, two separate  trends can be identified:  the solo madrigal, which involved a solo voice with basso continuo, and madrigals for two or more voices, also with basso continuo.  In addition, some composers continued to write ensemble madrigals in the older style, especially in England.
  While the harmonic and dramatic changes in the madrigal around 1600 may seem abrupt, the addition of instruments was not a new development.  Instrumental performance of madrigals had already been widespread for much of the 16th century, either in arrangements or in performances mixed with singers.  As madrigals had originally been largely designed for performance by groups of talented amateurs, without a passive audience, instruments were also commonly used to fill in for missing parts.  Instrumentation during the period was rarely specified; indeed Monteverdi indicated in his fifth and sixth book of madrigals that the basso seguente, the instrumental bass part, was optional in the ensemble madrigals.  The most commonly used instruments for playing the bass line and filling in any inner parts, at this time, were the lute, theorbo (chitarrone), and harpsichord.
  One of the prominent composers of madrigals in the solo with continuo style, related to monody and descended directly from the experimental music of the Florentine Camerata, was Giulio Caccini, who published the first collection of solo madrigals with his Le nuove musiche in 1601/2.  The point was anti-contrapuntal:  Caccini and the Camerata believed that the words needed to be heard above all else, and polyphonic, evenly balanced voices easily obscured intelligibility.  After Caccini, composers such as Marco da Gagliano, Sigismondo d'India, and Claudio Saracini published collections of their own; while Caccini's music was almost entirely diatonic, some of these later composers, particular d'India, wrote their solo madrigals in a more experimental chromatic idiom.  Monteverdi himself wrote only one solo madrigal, which he published in his Seventh Book of Madrigals in 1619.  While it uses only one singing voice, it employs three separate groups of instruments – a considerable advance from the simple voice and basso continuo compositions of Caccini around 1600.
  Solo madrigals in the monodic style began to go out of fashion shortly before 1620, to be replaced by the aria.  The last book of solo madrigals which did not contain any arias appeared in 1618; that was also the first year in which a group of arias was published which contained no madrigals.  After that date arias outnumbered madrigals, and both Saracini and d'India, previously prolific composers of solo madrigals, ceased publishing them in the early 1620s.
  Two collections of the late 1630s serve as a summation of late madrigal practice.  Domenico Mazzocchi's 1638 book splits madrigals into continuo and ensemble works specifically intended to be performed a cappella; Mazzocchi's instructions are precise, and he even includes, for the first time in any printed music collection, symbols for crescendo and decrescendo.  However, these madrigals were not intended for performance so much as study, and as such show that the form was being viewed in retrospect.  Monteverdi's Book Eight, of the same year, contains some of the most famous madrigals of the entire epoch, including the enormous Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, a dramatic composition much like a secular oratorio.  Among other innovations in this work is the stile concitato – the "agitated style", which uses, among 
caption: Title page of Le nuove musiche (1601)
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