ABSTRACT
One of the earliest documents of Italian notation, with a lower part notated in letters, is a fragment of keyboard music which may have been written down by an Englishman. It has been dated c. 1325 and contains dances in an Italian style and transcriptions from motets, two of them from the Roman de Fauvel. The caccia is the earliest of the distinctive Italian trecento forms to reach maturity, though it is not an easy one to define. As a poem, it is a vividly descriptive piece with dialogue, generally of a hunting or similar scene. The verse-form varies, but the stanza generally consists of a large number of short lines of differing length. Like the caccia, the madrigal appears in a stable form at an early date. It consists of two, three or four short stanzas, followed by a ritornello of two lines.
