From the very start of Book 2, Monteverdi spelled out his aims in musical terms. Older madrigals had been composed more or less moment-to-moment, phrase-by-phrase, with little regard for overall structural unity. Starting from that example, he wished to develop a new contrapuntal style and new structures that would make a far greater degree of unity possible. He'd been preceded in this aim by a few other madrigalists, but he pursued it with heightened intensity, and ultimately, with more historically significant success. Tutte le bocche belle, although not the best madrigal in Book 2, is one of its most formally daring and diverse, perhaps showing the strain of the effort to found a new style while paying respects to the old.

Certainly Tutte has a certain volatility, a propensity to sudden change that contrasts sharply with the other madrigals, which are far more even-tempered. The first section is reminiscent of Marenzio, who Monteverdi may have studied. It opens in a blur of textural change; the first three lines, in not even half a minute, are set to various degrees of imitative, freely polyphonic, homophonic polyphony, with a constantly shifting roster of voices. For a moment it feels like we have left Monteverdi's world, which is shadowed by the influence of his vigilantly cautious teacher Ingegneri.

Monteverdi's new harmonic conception is also heard in places. Harmonies don't merely arise as they might out of the polyphonic interactions of the lines, but become a determining aspect of the structure. Most important is the structural bass line, anticipating basso continuo. It is heard most clearly at "ch'intorno...." Its stereotyped, purely functional sequence of notes is not a melodic inspiration: it is harmonic ground, nothing more. It seems that in Tutte le bocche the stylistic demands of old and new aren't perfectly resolved, which creates both a vertiginous inner tension, and a strangeness of effect that is unusual for the madrigals from Book 2.

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