YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

POLYPHONY AND WORD-SOUND IN ADRIAN WILLAERT’S LAUS TIBI SACRA RUBENS
The poets have used their utmost diligence and most wonderful skill in
adapting the words to the verses and distributing the piedi according to the
conventions of speaking. Virgil has observed this in his whole poetic oeuvre.
He adapts the sonority of the verse so skilfully to the three sorts of writing,
that it seems as if through the sounds of the words he puts the things of which
he speaks in front of our eyes. Where he speaks of love, you can see he has
carefully chosen words that are soft, sweet, graceful, and agreeable to the
ear. When he needs to describe a feat of arms, a naval battle, a maritime disaster
or something similar, where bloodshed, anger, outrage, displeasure and
other odious things come into play, he chooses hard, harsh, and unpleasant
words, so that hearing and pronouncing them gives you a fright.
Needless to say, similar attention to the correspondence between content and wordsound
can be found in Comes’s poem of 1544. His encomium is clearly rooted in the
tradition of the ancient Latin authors, not only through its use of a Classical metrical
scheme, but also through the conscious organisation of the phonetic material. Another
quotation from Zarlino enables us to make yet another link with the central theme
of this article. Book 3, chapter 45 of Le istitutioni harmoniche deals among other
things with ‘a common error of changing the vowel sounds, singing a in place of e,
i in place of o, or u in place of one of these’. 14 The theorist illustrates his intentions
with the first verse from Petrarch’s Aspro core, e selvaggio, e cruda voglia: as singers
transform these words into Aspra cara, e selvaggia, e croda vaglia, the message of
these words is corrupted both on an aural and a semantic level. Interestingly enough,
this sonnet from the laureatus poeta also appears in Adrian Willaert’s famous Musica
Nova (Venice, 1558–1559), a collection of motets and madrigals for four to seven
voices that is generally labeled as a milestone in the relationship between word-sound
and musical texture in the mid-sixteenth-century Venetian madrigal. 15 Zarlino’s statement
might thus be understood as a double warning, since by so doing singers not
only violate the poet’s intentions, but – what is equally (or even more) important –
they also show themselves to be completely unaware of the extraordinary care the
composer took in translating these very intentions into music.
In the following analysis, I will confine myself to what I consider to be the most
eye-catching passages in Willaert’s motet Laus tibi sacra rubens, namely the above-
14 ZARLINO, Le istitutioni harmoniche, p. 204: [U]no errore, che si ritrova appresso molti, cioè di non
mutar le Lettere vocali delle parole, come sarebbe dire, proferire A in luogo di E, ne I in luogo di O,
overo U in luogo di una della nominate. The English translation is quoted from G.A. MARCO and
C.V. PALISCA, The Art of Counterpoint, Gioseffo Zarlino: Part Three of ‘Le istitutioni harmoniche’,
1558, (Music Theory Translation Series, 2), New York, 1983, p. 111.
15 Hence the title of Jonathan Marcus Miller’s dissertation (see above, note 9). In book 4, chapter 32 of
Le istitutioni harmoniche, Zarlino explicitly mentions Willaert’s madrigal as an example of the perfect
adaptation between words and music.
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