Remigio Romano's Collection of Lyrics for Music

Abstract

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

Strumming in the void: a new look at the guitar and rhythm in early 17th-century canzonettas

“…In addition, Silke Leopold's study of solo song in this period finds evidence for structured rhythmic and harmonic periods in early to mid-17th century Italian canzonettas, the very repertory most closely associated with guitar accompaniment, although she does not discuss the role of the guitar in this development. 4 There is a disconnect, therefore, between two types of guitar notation: the chord symbols that, in the song manuscripts, seemingly float above poetic lines, free from the encumbrances of metre or bass, and the multitudes of solo guitar dances, often in the same manuscripts, in which page after page of notated strumming patterns display a cultural predilection for repetitive rhythm that borders on the obsessive.…”