Poy che morir is a lovely two-part ballata piccola, one of a number of such pieces that survive from Ciconia's pen. The form is the typical A B b a A (lower-case letters indicate a recurrence of music with different text), fully medieval in the way that the specifics of text usage are inscribed into the musical form. Ciconia's ballate are always full of an autumnal suggestiveness, an attractive sense of decadence. Poy che morir is among the most beautiful and, in its way, perhaps the most puzzling of them all. It's remarkable how plain this piece looks on the page compared to the strange allure it has in the right performances. Both lines offer opportunities for magnificent ornamentation, and each dual phrase comes on in a brief, wing-like flutter, vanishing afterwards like a hallucination. Poy che is not a warm work; it's instead intriguingly evasive, and it has made its way in the world by hinting, to risk a bit of wordplay, that there's more to it than meets the ear. The setup is very much one of melody and accompaniment, with the top line far more audible, active, and what we would call syncopated than the lower line. The top line isn't especially beautiful, however, so listeners end up listening to the piece far more as counterpoint, perhaps as a marvelously well-turned exercise or experiment. To turn another phrase, the beauty of Poy che morir is "between the lines"; it partakes of the mysterious poetry of absence. The syncopations and subtle ways that the two lines fall in and out of melodic accord with each other creates a fine magnetism of tension between the lines so that when they come together, as they do at the ends of phrases, it feels as right as it feels unexpected. Poy che is a perfect musical artifact for all of this and a treasure for its very recalcitrance. It requires a performance of a really artistic caliber to animate it because its beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

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