Although the aim of his second book of madrigals was to announce new directions in music, Monteverdi didn't blindly abandon what he'd inherited from the older masters. Even in the most progressive madrigals of Book 2 many elements of the older style are still present. And, set among all the forward-leaning works, which anticipate the Baroque so clearly, there are madrigals conceived along entirely traditional lines. Cantai un tempo is the most stylistically pure example of those. Until Book 2 Monteverdi had yet to prove himself capable of making a first-rate statement in the older, loftily schooled style of men like Lasso and Palestrina. He had to master, and then demonstrate, his mastery of the older forms before any serious musician would trust his radical inventions. Placed last in a collection headed by one of its most progressive numbers, Cantai un tempo can thus be heard as a kind of footnote to Book 2, like support material at the end of an essay.

But as a work in traditional style, frankly, it is unexceptional. Compared to everything else in Book 2, the emotional tone is flat and soggy. It opens more or less as it ends, and nothing sticks out in between, a continuous, churning imitative polyphony. You'd think he was grinding corn. None of Monteverdi's delightfully sensitive text setting is heard, none of his melodic charm, none of the exciting tricks copped from Rore and Luzzaschi. The harmony is tepid, the lines almost completely lifeless. It sounds like the schoolboy exercise it essentially is, not the work of the dynamic young composer of works like Ecco mormorar l'onde. One wonders why this piece was used at all. Some argue that Monteverdi helped create the Baroque because the idiom of the renaissance wasn't his true musical tongue; madrigals like this support that argument.

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