Metrical categories have long been recognised as important ingredients of musico-textual relationships in medieval song, yet the issue of their semantic potential remains largely unanswered. Modern literary critics have recently drawn attention to the links between poetic and metrical vocabularies, arguing that the two often intersect, thus creating a ‘metapoetic’ (or ‘metametrical’) level of interaction. But this metapoetic lexicon has rarely been tested in musical analysis, and has never been viewed through the lenses of medieval musical terminology.
Focusing on Francesco Landini’s ballata Da poi che va mia donna in altra parte, this paper aims to examine ‘divisio’ as precisely such an intermedial tool, one that potentially links Landini’s musical language to the ballata’s metrical structure and poetic topoi. I will concentrate, first, on the way the poetic ‘divisions’ articulate the ballata’s metrical ‘divisiones’ (or vice versa?); and, second, on how the metapoetic discourse of the piece is then represented on the manuscript page (Sq, fol. 154v) and in the musical language that Landini creates, particularly in its rhythmic ornamentation.
This case study provides an analytical model that could help extract other important items of this musico-(meta)textual dialogue in Trecento song.