ABSTRACT
The frottola, the secular song of early 16th-century Italy, flourished from around 1490 to 1530. The centres of its cultivation were chiefly the smaller courts in the north-east of the peninsula—Ferrara, Urbino, Padua, and, above all, Mantua. Left to the modern-day performer is a large corpus of elegant works, much of which is available in modern edition, by a wide variety of composers. Frottole are generally short compositions whose texts, written in the Italian formes fixes, are most often courtly in tone and amorous in language. The length of the musical phrases is dependent upon that of the poetic lines, since most frottole employ a text setting that is more or less syllabic. The rhythmic nature of the frottola strongly affects the performance, both within the cantus and in the lower voices. Most of the works are written in duple time, the mensuration being either or C; many compositions, have a rhythmic logic that is opposed to the metre.
