Ciconia is cited as the first important figure in music to embrace the creative ideals of humanism. In that sense, he carried the social status of the composer forward from Machaut, who had brought the figure of the music composer out of artisanal anonymity. Ciconia comes at the end of the medieval period. His music, often stunningly lovely, gives an autumnal sense of overripe decadence that strengthens the strange poetry of its appeal. Che Nel Servir Anticho is one of Ciconia's numerous secular works in Italian. The piece is a three-part ballata piccola (little ballade) that unfolds in an A B b a A pattern, where the lower case letters represent recurrences of music with different words. The music of the verse continues on quite seamlessly in the same vein as the refrain, although acting obviously and pleasurably as a musical commentary upon it. This not only gives the ballata greater unity, it also means that the second occurrence of the refrain music somehow sounds scripted into the music of the verse, as if it is a logical conclusion of the premise it sets down. It also features, in the top line of the refrain, a melody so lovely and memorable that it's almost like it came down through all of these years by word of mouth. The way Ciconia's odd rhythms push back against the lyrical flow of that melody also gives it a teasing quality, as if it's holding something back that it's always on the verge of revealing. With such an appealing terseness of design and such a richness of intellectual nuance, it's not surprising that the text is a kind of ode to intelligence symbolized by the image of a radiant, celestial woman and encrypted into familiar medieval tropes of frustrated love, a love that shall be faithfully followed "even to the furthest gate." It does a good job of expressing the intellectual pride of a humanist like Ciconia, his fundamental faith in the potentials and products of the human mind.

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