Bartolomeo Tromboncino

In spite of his stormy, erratic, and possibly criminal life, much of his music is in the light current form of the frottola, a predecessor to the madrigal. He was a trombonist, as shown by his name, and sometimes employed in that capacity; however he apparently wrote no strictly instrumental music (or none survives). He also wrote some serious sacred music: seventeen laude, a motet and a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Stylistically, the sacred works are typical of the more conservative music of the early 16th century, using non-imitative polyphony over a cantus firmus, alternating sectionally with more homophonic textures or with unadorned plainsong. His frottolas, by far the largest and most historically significant part of his output (176 in all) are more varied than those of the other famous frottolist, Marchetto Cara, and they also tend to be more polyphonic than is typical for most frottolas of the time; in this way they anticipate the madrigal, the first collections of which began to be published near the very end of Tromboncino's life, and in the city where he lived (for example Verdelot's Primo libro di Madrigali of 1533, published in Venice). The major differences between the late frottolas of Tromboncino and the earliest madrigals were not so much musical as in the structure of the verse they set. The poetry that Tromboncino set tended to be by the most famous writers of the time; he set Petrarch, Galeotto, Sannazaro, and others; he even set a poem by Michelangelo, Come haro dunque ardire, which was part of a collection Tromboncino published in 1518.