Bernardo Pisano - Music and Influence

Music and Influence

While Pisano wrote sacred music in a sober, homophonic style, probably intended to be used during his tenure as maestro di cappella at Ss. Annunziata, it was as a composer of secular music that he was most influential. Pisano is arguably the first madrigalist. In 1520, Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci published his Musica di messer Bernardo Pisano sopra le canzone del Petrarcha, a collection of settings of Petrarch influenced by the literary theories of Pietro Bembo; while the pieces in the collection were not yet called "madrigals", they contained several features recognized in retrospect as distinctive of the genre: the set serious texts, the placement of words and accents was done carefully, and they contained word-painting. This publication was also the first collection of secular music by a single composer ever to be printed; previous publications, in the brief two decades since moveable type had first been used for printing music, had been anthologies only.

The slightly later composers who became famous masters of the madrigal genre — Costanzo Festa, Jacques Arcadelt, Philippe Verdelot — were aware of his work and copied some of his stylistic traits.

Pisano's early secular music is typical of Italian music of the first two decades of the 16th century: light, rhythmically active, usually homophonic, containing frequent repetition, and generally for three voices. Most of these pieces are ballatas or canzonettas. His later secular music, including the important collection of 1520, the first printed book of secular music dedicated to the work of a single composer, contains music which is best defined as madrigalian (although he did not use the term). Poetry is sometimes serious, and sometimes humorous; seven poems by Petrarch are represented. The music carefully attempts to convey the emotion expressed by the poem being set. Often the last line of the text is repeated for emphasis, a peculiarity which was to become a defining feature of the early madrigal. Texturally, the music varies between homophonic and polyphonic passages, as well as between passages for groups of two, three, and four singers together.