Benedetto Pallavicino

Madrigals His madrigals use from four to six voices, and show the influence of several of the prominent stylistic trends of the time.

There is a gradual progression from an early dense imitative and polyphonic style, to one making use of most of the trends current at Mantua and Ferrara, including the seconda pratica style of declamatory writing, which was one of the musical characteristics defining the beginning of the Baroque era.
Unlike Monteverdi, for whom it was a defining characteristic of his polyphonic madrigals, Pallavicino generally ignored the possibilities for dramatic characterization inherent in the texts he set, especially in his earlier books.
This was the period in which the precursors of opera were being written, and one of the prominent madrigalian trends was to take dialogue, monologue, or straight narrative texts and set them with appropriate characterization.

In this respect he was a conservative. Yet he also experimented with unprepared dissonance in precisely the way which Artusi so fiercely criticized Monteverdi – and remained on the list of composers which that famous reactionary critic considered to be exemplars of correct polyphonic practice – but most likely because Artusi had never heard his last books of madrigals.

The ten books of madrigals show a gradual absorption of the styles of other composers in the orbit of the courts of Mantua and Ferrara, particularly Wert. In the first book, Pallavicino wrote mostly in an imitative style similar to that of previous generations of composers, and related to the polyphonic style of sacred music. By the fourth book, Pallavicino was experimenting with sudden and extreme contrasts of texture rhythm, devices later taken to an extreme in the works of Carlo Gesualdo, but seen earlier in Wert. The influence of Luzzasco Luzzaschi is also evident in this book, particularly in the virtuosic writing for high female voices, including ornamentation and voice exchange techniques reminiscent of the music being composed for the famous three singers, the Concerto delle donne, of Ferrara.

It is in his sixth book of madrigals, published in 1600, the year traditionally (and arbitrarily) marking the end of the musical Renaissance, that his shift to the new style of the seconda pratica is most prominent.
The madrigals, mostly based on texts by Giovanni Battista Guarini – by far the favorite poet of madrigal composers of the time – are written in a largely homophonic and declamatory style which is highly attentive to text accentuation and rhythm.

It is also in this book that he uses some of the musical devices that were to make Monteverdi famous, such as the unprepared dissonance that so horrified Artusi, as well as previously forbidden melodic intervals such as diminished fourths; he also exploits cross relations for expressive effect. Curiously, he also frequently uses the interval of the falling sixth, a characteristic of Monteverdi's – though which learned it from the other is uncertain.