An unaccompanied partsong for 2 or 3 voices

Usage examples of madrigal.

He was the author also of some motets, and Luca Marenzio, who brought the madrigal style to its most beautiful development and whose influence molded the methods of the English glee and madrigal writers, is believed to have been his pupil for a short time.

In these works the choruses were set to music in the madrigal style and they were frequently of great beauty.

It was from such works that he advanced to the composition of the madrigal of which he was so famous a composer and which he raised to the dignity of an art work.

A frottola thus ennobled would become a madrigal, while a madrigal, all too scantily treated, would sink to a frottola.

At the time of the full development of the madrigal the serious and humorous elements which dwelt together in the frottola separated completely.

That her first experiments were made in the popular madrigal form was to be expected.

In the course of that century the irresistible drift of Italian art feeling, retarded as it was by the supreme vogue of musicians trained in the northern schools, moved steadily toward its destination, the solo melody, yet the end was not reached till the madrigal had worked itself to its logical conclusion, to wit, a demonstration of its own inherent weakness.

They made their march of a century on the very verge of the promised land, but they had to lose themselves in the bewitching wilderness of the madrigal drama before they found their Moses.

Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the communication of worldly thought.

Their endeavors to escape the contrapuntal music of the madrigal drama were the labors of men consciously confronting conditions which had been surely, if not boldly, moving toward their own rectification.

It rested first on the basis of the frottola, but when the elegant and gracious madrigal provided an art form better suited to the opulence of the decorative features of the embryonic lyric drama, the madrigal became the dominating element in the music.

Certain it is that, despite the earlier publications of Petrucci, the madrigal became dominant in Italy after the advent of Willaert.

We are therefore to understand that in the plays about to be mentioned the madrigal style prevailed in the music.

In this spectacle was heard the solo madrigal for Sileno already mentioned.

At the same time the evidence is conclusive that the madrigal was acquiring general popularity as a form of dramatic music, and the madrigal drama reached the zenith of its glory at the very moment when its fate was preparing in the experiments of Galilei and others in the new monodic style destined to become the basis of modern Italian opera.