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Thus does the frottola acquire from its text that architectural shape which places it in marked contrast to the swift-paced and fluid contrapuntal chanson of the Netherlanders. Its rhythm and accents are arranged not by the needs of contrapuntal development, but by the meter of the line and the accent of the Italian tongue.
If at the close of the sixteenth century chromatic compositions, which were then making much progress, could be performed on a bowed lyre, there is no reason to think that in Poliziano's time there would have been much labor in arranging frottola melodies for voice and lyra di braccio.
Sometimes they used themes of their own invention. In time musicians of small skill, undertaking to imitate these earliest secular songs, developed the popular form called frottola. Later we find some of the famous masters cultivating this music of the people. Adrian Willaert, who settled in Venice in 1516, wrote frottole and gondola songs in frottola form.
We may now reconstruct for ourselves the classic scene with Orpheus "singing on the hill to his lyre" the verses "O meos longum modulata lusus." The music was the half melancholy, half passionate melody of some wandering Italian frottola which readily fitted itself to the sonorous Sapphics.
A frottola thus ennobled would become a madrigal, while a madrigal, all too scantily treated, would sink to a frottola." A typical frottola by Scotus shows observance of Cerone's requirements. These compositions are what we would call part songs and they are usually constructed in simple four-part harmony, without fugato passages or imitations.
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