Ensemble Chominciamento di gioia

Music of the Trecento refers to Italian secular (and some sacred) polyphony of the 14th century, roughly from the 1320s through about 1420. It is often called the Italian Ars Nova and is best known for three vernacular song forms: the madrigale, the ballata, and the caccia. Stylistically, Trecento music favors melodically flowing upper voices, clear text declamation in Italian, and sweet-sounding cadential formulas—most famously the “Landini cadence.” Texts tend toward courtly love, pastoral, and urban vignettes (street cries, hunts), while the music explores two- and three-voice counterpoint with lively syncopations and occasional hocket. Our understanding of the repertory rests on lavish manuscripts such as the Rossi Codex (early) and the Squarcialupi Codex (early 15th century), which preserve hundreds of works by major Florentine and northern Italian composers.

Medieval music refers to the diverse sacred and secular musical practices of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the dawn of the Renaissance. It spans more than eight centuries, from early monophonic chant to the first notated polyphony. Core features include the use of church modes rather than major/minor, extensive reliance on vocal music (Latin sacred chant as well as vernacular song), and the progressive development from unmeasured chant to rhythmic modal notation and, later, mensural notation. Texture evolves from monophony (plainchant, troubadour songs) to organum, conductus, and the motet, culminating in complex isorhythmic works by the late 13th–14th centuries. Secular traditions—troubadours and trouvères in France, Minnesänger in German lands, and the Iberian Cantigas—coexisted with and influenced sacred practice. Instruments such as the vielle, harp, psaltery, recorder, shawm, hurdy-gurdy, and portative organ often doubled or accompanied voices, though much music remained purely vocal.