Francesco Landini, the greatest Italian composer of the 14th century, was immensely popular in his day. The King of Cyprus crowned him the poet laureate of Venice, even though he was Florentine. This fact is reflected in one of the names that he is known by, Francesco da Firenze (the Italian name for Florence). He was also called Francesco il Cieco (Francesco the Blind), a condition that resulted from catching smallpox as a child.
One can view Landini’s likeness today, carved into the slate of his tomb at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, where he worked as choirmaster for three decades. His hollow eyes exemplify a contemporary’s observation that he was physically blind “but illuminated in his soul.” As he stared at a point beyond mortal sight, his fingers plied the keys of the instrument that gave him one of his other names: Francesco degli Organi (Francesco of the Organs).
The instrument is not an organ as we would recognize it. Rather, it is a “portative organ” or organetto: a smaller version of this instrument that rested on the player’s lap. As one hand played keys, the other pumped a bellows that blew air through the pipes. Landini is probably the most famous master of this half-forgotten medieval instrument.
Landini or Not?
There was one name that Francesco was not known by in his lifetime: Landini. The association with this family, made by later music historians, is now thought to be an error. But because people have referred to him by this name for centuries, we are stuck with it.Although he worked in a church, all of his extant music is secular. He is one of the most famous representatives of the Italian Trecento, or “Ars Nova” (New Art) style, a movement that flourished in France and Italy during the late Middle Ages. Several surviving manuscripts have preserved handfuls of his “ballate,” or lively songs for two to three voices.
The primary source that collects most of his known pieces is “the Squarcialupi Codex,” a manuscript named after its first owner. Landini’s compositions, which make up nearly half of the codex, far outweigh contributions from the other 11 composers, demonstrating his higher status.
Countertenors and Birds
Landini’s music is known for its sweet harmonies and equally pleasing vocal melodies. He wrote songs for either two or three voices. As one singer played the organetto (usually Landini), another beat a percussion instrument such as the tambourine. Most often, he wrote for a tenor and a countertenor, who are male singers capable of singing as high as female sopranos.Countertenors are the rarest naturally occurring voice types. From the Middle Ages through the Baroque era, the main way of preserving a high male singing voice into adulthood was to castrate the singers as boys before they hit puberty. This barbaric method, one of the darker sides of music history, is no longer practiced today. Because true countertenors usually have a hormonal imbalance and it is taxing for baritones to train their voices to sing falsetto, it is unsurprising that hardly any contemporary music is written for men in this vocal range.
Having myself once been a choir member during a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” that employed a countertenor for several arias, I observed audience members hearing this voice type for the first time. Faces twisted in stupefaction gradually gave way to rapt delight as ears absorbed a completely new experience, and hands signaled their appreciation afterward with thunderous applause.
The Italian composer has given his name to a particular stylistic device he used, the “Landini cadence”: At the end of each line, the tenor’s notes descend step by step as the countertenor also descends at first, then ascends abruptly by skipping up a third. Although Landini did not invent the technique—it was widely used in Italian songwriting both before and after him—he is the figure most associated with it.
Old and New Songs
One of Landini’s most well-known songs is “Musica Son” (“I Am Music”). As the title suggests, the composer imagined himself personifying his art to lament the decline of good taste:I am music, and tearfully complain of seeing eager minds forsake my sweet and perfect gifts for trifling street-songs. All are so used to ignorance and vice that they reject what’s good and choose the scum.
Does this theme sound familiar? Appreciators of serious music have always been few, and Landini himself would probably not be surprised that fans of his own oeuvre now sing this complaint. Nevertheless, in an age that has seen a revival of interest in historically based music, including new compositions of works for the organetto, the medieval Italian composer probably has more connoisseurs today than he ever did in the past.
As is the case with other past composers, new works are being recovered. A manuscript known as the San Lorenzo Palimpsest was found at San Lorenzo Church in 1983. A “palimpsest” is a document containing traces of an original text that was erased and written over with new text. Palimpsests were common in the days before the invention of the printing press, when paper was scarce and writing material made of animal skin was expensive to produce.
In the case of the San Lorenzo Manuscript No. 2211, some practical but shortsighted person scraped clean more than 200 songs dating from the turn of the 15th century so that the document could be used as an administrative ledger. The manuscript’s rediscovery led to a generation of graduate students gazing at shadows on microfilm, struggling to decipher its contents. Then a few years ago, multispectral imaging techniques fully revealed the beautiful notes beneath the mundane surface material.
After the Squarcialupi Codex, the San Lorenzo Palimpsest has become the most important source of Italian polyphony for this period. Some of the music contained within it is previously unknown. Of the 216 lost songs, Landini wrote 17. One of these, No. 130, is an unidentified ballata for two voices in a fast pace, written “tempo fugge”—literally, “time flies.”
Although more than six centuries have passed since Landini’s death, from a bird’s eye perspective, time is still flying. And whether the birds pause to listen to his songs or not, you should.
