Perissone Cambio - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

Perissone was one of the followers of Willaert in the early time of development of the Italian madrigal, the period referred to by Alfred Einstein as the "madrigal's age of innocence". Even though he was a personal friend, he was not significantly influenced by fellow Willaert student Cipriano de Rore, the principal figure in madrigal composition in the 1550s, and whose style marked an extraordinary increase in expressive intensity of the secular vocal form.

In all, Perissone published four books of secular music by himself: a book of villanellas for four voices in 1545, a book of madrigals for four voices in 1547, and two books of madrigals for five voices, in 1545 and 1550. Some other individual madrigals appear in collections by others, particularly Cipriano de Rore, and Perissone wrote a dedicatory letter for one of Rore's books, but only in the alto part-book (Perissone was probably an alto). If he wrote any sacred music aside from a single five-voice motet setting of Ad Te, Domine (1549), it has not survived. While most of the composers who worked at San Marco in the 16th century left a substantial body of sacred music, Perissone was one of the few who did not.

Perissone was a versatile stylist, and wrote both light and serious madrigals, with a texture varying from the smooth polyphony of the Netherlanders to bright, largely chordal textures. Sometimes he anticipated harmonic developments of the 17th century, such as when he used the bass voice as a harmonic support rather than as an equal participant in the motivic interplay of a composition. He was also fond of false relations, as in his setting of Gottifredi's Deh, perchè com'è il vostro al nome mio, a madrigal which also contains deliberately mis-accented text setting, a characteristic which distinguishes him from his teacher Willaert, who was more inclined to follow Pietro Bembo's strict advice on text setting.