This ballata is a relatively early work upon which the influence of dance music is still obvious. The music skips lightly along in a gentle triple meter, speaking entirely in rhythmically simple, short phrases. Its shortened proportions are perhaps the only odd thing: the refrain is but one line long, and the verses but two each, making the sections rather curt, which, with the dotted notes and charming breath-held rests, suggests, in an abstracted way, the execution of dance steps, even a ritualized courtship. Each phrase is like the hand held out to kiss or the lips that gracefully kiss the hand, the fallen handkerchief or the reverent, trembling bow made to pick it up. With Landini's subtle contrapuntal interplay, we cannot know which is which, who is the hunter, who is the hunted.

The sheer intensity of human response to music often reminds us of how animal we are after all, and how primal the experience of music really is, a fact that no music-lover should hide from. The courtship of animals is a highly ritualized exercise rather like our dances, perhaps even more like the inflexible dances of the Renaissance. That the apocryphal tales of Landini speak of the incredible effect his music had upon other animals—the stories sound strangely like those of St. Francis of Assisi—is no accident: it's symbolic. Someone understood that Landini's graceful music somehow accessed the hidden, primal magic of courtship and the dance.

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