The musical life of Florence in the sixteenth century was no rival to that of Rome or Venice, but the city could legitimately claim to be the birthplace of the madrigal. In troubled times, scarred by a succession of contrasting political regimes and against a backdrop of civil war, foreign composers like Arcadelt and Verdelot, as well as native Florentines like Pisano, Corteccia, Layolle and Rampollini, contributed significantly to the creation of this most representative musical genre of the Italian Renaissance. Of the many factors contributing to the appearance of the madrigal, one of the most important was patronage: several studies have shown how members of the great Florentine families encouraged the dawning of the genre by commissioning new works from composers or by ordering manuscript copies of anthologies, which today give us a precise idea of the repertory that was sung in the 1520s and 1530s.

This study springs from the conviction that it is time to enlarge our understanding of the canzone villanesca's genesis and evolution by engaging concepts from two related approaches, namely, genre criticism and speech-act theory. Heretofore, when adopting the formalist approach to genre, I defined the villanesca in terms of its ‘outer form’ (metre and structure), thereby reinforcing claims by Gennaro Monti and Alfred Einstein that the canzone villanesca is essentially a strambotto (or ottava rima) transformed by the addition of a refrain after each hendecasyllabic couplet. However, it has become increasingly clear that when intrinsic qualities like attitude, tone and use-value are addressed, the result is a far more comprehensive view of the changes that the villanesca experienced during the initial phrase of its development (1537–57), when Neapolitan songwriters reproduced or varied the generic expectations of their audiences.

‘… Squarcialupi, a famous organist, but who remains a rather mythical figure’. Of course we know that Antonio degli Organi, as he was called throughout his life, was a real person, and if we trust in the verisimilitude of Benedetto da Maiano's portrait bust of him (made ten years after his death, strongly classicising in design, and altered at least once in the early sixteenth century), we have an idea of what he looked like. Antonio degli Organi (1416–80) was not born with the surname Squarcialupi, nor do we know precisely when or under what circumstances he took this name (but see below). We have enough information about his life to form a preliminary notion of his character, but the mental image we create is not altogether a coherent one. He was organist at Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentine cathedral, for an extraordinarily long period, from 1432 until his death. This alone makes him a ‘famous organist’; but a good deal of the fame is posthumous, and there is next to no meaningful comment from contemporaries about his playing. He judged the quality and state of repair of organs but is not known to have had organ-building expertise. Antonio presumably taught his son Francesco, who succeeded him at the cathedral on his death and served until his own death in 1509. His only other student of note is the Greek organist Isaac Argyropoulos, whose playing was much admired in Naples, Bologna, Florence and Milan in the 1470s.

On 11 November 1417, the election at the Council of Constance (1414–18) of Oddo Colonna as Pope Martin V brought to an end a period of almost forty years of instability and crisis within the Church, which had begun with the outbreak of the Schism in 1378. After his consecration, the new pope set out to return to Rome, intending to re-establish there the Holy See, while the Council continued. Martin V entered Rome in September 1420, after travelling through Geneva, Pavia, Mantua, Milan and Florence. In the latter city he resided for almost two years, from 26 February 1419 to 9 September 1420. It was most likely during the pope's residence there that an Italian student in law, Antonio Baldana, wrote and dedicated to him a peculiar work: a narrative of the Schism written in the form of prophecy, in a mixture of prose and verse, Latin and Italian, and accompanied by thirty watercolour illustrations. The only known surviving version of this work is contained in a manuscript now preserved in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, as MS Parmense 1194. The manuscript has been studied primarily for its iconography, while its musical implications, which form the subject of the present study, have so far passed unnoticed. In fact, as we shall see, Baldana's work is also designed as a framework for a discussion encompassing the disciplines of trivium and quadrivium – a small encyclopedia, where a distinctive connection is drawn between rhetoric, astrology and music.

Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1–2). In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themselves, a task aided by the small numbers Cossard has placed beneath the text to show how many letters should be read together as a syllable.

In a letter written in the year he died, the novelist Italo Calvino spoke of his unease with the writing of the story of his own life: ‘Each time I see my life fixed and objectified I am seized with anxiety, especially when it is notes that I myself have supplied … by repeating the same things [but] using different words I always hope to get round my neurotic relationship with autobiography.’ Such testimony from a still-living creative artist is a valuable reminder of the historiographical conundrums of even the most apparently ‘authentic’ biographical narrative. Those of us who read, research and write the stories of long-dead artists, relying as we must on the contents of documents both written and preserved for all kinds of forgotten and quite likely unfathomable reasons, have learnt to be cautious, if not a little anxious, in our relationships with what they seem to be saying to us. The more consciously autobiographical such writings appear to be, the more circumspectly we tend to tread, trying to temper the seductive pleasure of a time-dissolving intimacy with our subjects which such texts seem to promise with our historians' sense of their Siren dangers. Nevertheless, in the case of the still largely unknown story of Philippe de Monte, whose scarce documentary sources, apart from a rich but small handful of private letters, consist of the often enigmatic prefaces to his published music, the addition of two new, very substantial and intensely autobiographical documents can hardly fail to excite expectations of increased access to ‘the man himself’.