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• Landini, Francesco: 2 Ballate

Landini, Francesco: 2 Ballate

(Gram piant´agli occhi and Charo singnor) for 3 voices or instruments.

Francesco Landini (1325-1397) was the leading light in Florentine music of the 14th century: he was especially valued as an organist. Over 150 pieces of his have survived, 90 of which are ballate. He was a poet as well as a musician, and may have composed many of his own texts.
The two pieces here are printed after the Squarcialupi Codex (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, MS 87). Note values have been quartered. Editorial accidentals appear above the stave, applying to one note only. I am grateful to Alan Robson for editing and translating the texts of these songs.
There is considerable disagreement about the role of instruments in 14th-century music, some scholars even asserting that they were not normally used together with voices. It is perfectly possible to perform there pieces purely vocally, but this requires a high standard of singing. For most performances today a mixture of voice(s) and instruments will be found to be more comfortable: in Gram piant´ agli occhi the superius and tenor may be sung, with the contratenor played on a plucked or bowed string instrument. If only one part is to be sung, it should be the top one. There is every justification for performing these pieces on instruments alone, either recorders, viols, or a mixture of wind and strings. In any performance it is important to grasp that the contratenor, however strange it may seem at first, still has a real melody line, i.e. the cross-rhythms need not sound jerky.