The Collected Secular Works, and: Primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (review)

We tend to associate the Italian madrigal with places like Mantua, Ferrara, and Venice—cities that provided extensive patronage to a host of famed madrigalists such as Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio, and Giaches de Wert, among others. Or perhaps Florence and Rome come to mind as important centers of madrigal composition. But only recently have we really begun to acknowledge the important and rather distinctive madrigal tradition that developed in Naples, one that ultimately had a significant impact on madrigalists in some of the other key Italian cities (among the few studies of this repertory is Keith A. Larson's dissertation "The Unaccompanied Madrigal in Naples from 1536 to 1654" [Harvard University, 1985]). We see evidence of this influence not only in the hybrid madrigal of the latter part of the century, but also in midcentury works modeled on the villanesca napolitana—most notably those by Willaert.

In past scholarship, fifteenth-century Neapolitan music seems to have overshadowed that of the sixteenth century. We find clear evidence of this in The Renaissance: from the 1470s to the End of the 16th Century (ed. Iain Fenlon, Man & Music [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989]), for example, where the coverage of musical life in Naples simply stops at the beginning of the sixteenth century. While Naples's most famous sixteenth-century son, Carlo Gesualdo, has garnered his fair share of attention, more has been made of his personality and the anomalous historical position occupied by his music rather than his place among a significant musical community in Naples. Scholars are only now bringing to light the works of Neapolitan composers who spent much of their careers living and working in this distinctive environment. We therefore welcome the two editions of madrigal collections by Giovanthomaso Cimello (ca. 1510-after 1579) and Giovanni Domenico Montella (ca. 1570-1607), which bring us one step closer to filling out our present picture of secular Neapolitan musical life of the sixteenth century.

Both of these publications live up to the impressive standards so often reached by A-R Editions in its Recent Researches series. The physical features of the volumes and the editorial work are of a consistently high caliber—in addition to their informative introductions, both editions include texts with side-by-side idiomatic translations, critical notes, translations of the dedications, and a small selection of facsimile reproductions of the original publications.

Editors Donna G. Cardamone and James Haar give us two collections of works by Cimello, both dating from the 1540s: the Canzone villanesche al modo napolitano (Venice: Antonio Gardano, 1545) and Libro primo de canti a quatro voci (Venice: Antonio Gardano, 1548). It is fitting that Cardamone, one of the foremost authorities on the villanesca repertory and the patronage system in sixteenth-century Naples and Rome, should present Cimello's contribution to this rustic and comedic, though certainly not unsophisticated, offshoot of the madrigal. Cardamone is the author of numerous articles and a book on the genre and has edited other villanesche editions (see, for example, "The Debut of the Canzone villanesca alla napolitana," Studi musicali 4 [1975]: 66-130; The Canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537-1570, Studies in Musiocology, 45 [Ann Arbor, MI...