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Wilson, Blake. Italian Monophony. In A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music, edited by Ross W. Duffin, 163-172. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Blake Wilson is a professor of Music at Dickinson College.

Late medieval Italy was not a place, but many places, and just as individual cities like Florence often constituted a discrete cultural environment, so the musical repertories were probably just as manifold. But from a soundscape that certainly teemed with the songs of minstrels, improvvisatori, courtly singers, processing flagellants, and confraternity singers, each further subdivided by strong regional traditions of language and song, only a fraction survives in written form. The handful of monophonic ballate preserved in the Rossi and Squarcialupi codices belongs, in terms of literary, notational, and performing conventions, to the sphere of the Italian Ars nova. However, a significant extant repertory of Italian monophony of increasing interest to performers is the lauda.

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