YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

130 DONNA G. CARDAMONE JACKSON
tener or audience in the immediate here and now. 13 The speakers habitually adopt a
moralizing tone enhanced by the interpolation of pungent proverbial expressions. The
three villanelle that follow the keynote villanella are made in this mold, and they comprise
a unified set whose content attests to group improvisation by a coterie of singersongwriters
practiced in imitation and intertextual allusion.
All the tunes are declamatory and formulaic in construction with virtually no
rhythmic contrasts, and they open with variants on a rising motive that fills in the
interval G to C. Even the order of cadential pitches is similar: the first on G, the second
on C (or D), and the third on A, approached in every case by a short point of imitation.
This uniformity suggests that the tunes were invented quickly by improvisers
locked into a formulaic model. All the poems consist of three-line stanzas cast in the
same metrical form, and they are narrated by disgruntled men whose complaints are
strewn with moralizing proverbs. Overall, gestural language in this set suggests creation
by musical comedians who stocked their memories with formulaic expressions
ready to be unleashed in comical tirades appropriate to the individual player’s role
specialization. Once proven effective as ‘stage’music, these villanelle could be written
up as vocal trios and performed independently as evocative reflections of deception
– a topos on which the plot lines of comedies and farces frequently turn.
As far as I can tell, the only musicians active in Rome and motivated to invent
villanelle with theatrical or para-theatrical uses would be Lasso – whose knowledge
of comedic routines was undoubtedly acquired in Italy – and the Dentices. Widely
acclaimed as vocal improvisers and virtuoso lutenists, they had previously doubled
as singing-actors in comedies sponsored by the Prince of Salerno in Naples. Even the
Dentices could have arranged villanelle as vocal trios, for they were composers as
well. In fact, Fabrizio was said to be a prolific composer of villanelle, although just
a few were published under his name. 14 Nos. 6 and 7 in Dorico’s anthology, which
circulated together in stampe popolari as ‘canzoni da cantare’, might be attributed to
Luigi Dentice as I have argued elsewhere. 15 They are gendered laments in propostarisposta
form that voice the pain of lovers separated by exile in graceful tunes supported
by stock chordal progressions. Altogether they bear unmistakable traces of a
style of extemporized singing to lute accompaniment associated with Fabrizio (most
likely handed down from Luigi), and described by a Neapolitan eye-witness as aria
per cantar’ un bascio [basso] et un suprano sopr’un istromento. 16
13 B. CROCE, Velardiniello e la sua inedita farsa napoletana, in Atti della Accademia Pontaniana, 40
(1910), pp. 2–24.
14 D. FABRIS, Da Napoli a Parma, Itinerari di un musicista aristocratico. Opere vocali di Fabrizio
Dentice 1530 ca-1581, Milan, 1998, p. 48.
15 D. CARDAMONE, The Prince of Salerno and the Dynamics of Oral Transmission in Songs of Political
Exile, in Acta Musicologica, 67 (1995), p. 87.
16 D. FABRIS, Vita e opere di Fabrizio Dentice, nobile napoletano, compositore del secondo Cinquecento,
in Studi Musicali, 21 (1992), p. 104.