The Italian madrigal can be thought of as a kind of gentrification of its own precedent genres, the carnival song and the frottola. While these earlier genres excelled in liveliness and color and were extremely popular for those qualities, they were fairly crude in construction with texts that were mainly disposable, occasional doggerel. To bring this music out of its own muck, madrigal composers began to self-consciously refine the musical and literary aspects of the genres, giving rise to the madrigal proper. Their initial aim was to enhance the poetic resonances of the text through the settings and articulate a new, entirely vocal conception of the music. A work like Verdelot's Se lieta e grata is quiet, intimate, and direct, created as it was for the ears of a small appreciative group of illuminati. It is a mostly homophonic piece made up of a delicate, fleeting mixture of flavors, with none of the fire and drama of madrigals composed later in the century. Although Verdelot isn't attempting to thresh out the details of the poem on a microscopic level, he nevertheless writes a lot of textural variety into the piece, quite frequently changing the roster of voices. Listening closely becomes like looking over a finely painted miniature that constantly surprises the eye with the aptness and subtlety of its details. This sense of minute care is set off by the overall sense of formal balance. Its best quality, though, is its unity: although for four voices, it approaches the ideal poetic unity of a monophonic song, holding itself together as if a single thought, even across polyphonic passages. The aim that early madrigal composers had of creating a self-contained poetical/musical statement is totally fulfilled. The only way the piece seems to fail is in how the music, ostensibly servant to the words, outshines them.

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