The two parts of this early piece tend to stay very close together, so often in homophonic chains that the shorter notes of one part over the longer of the other are heard as ornamental, not substantial. But Landini's main musical strategy is to make careful and clear plays of homophonic passages against more animated, divergent ones in which the parts are far more animated and independent. Thus he keeps the two clear in our minds and affects a kind of rhythmic chiaroscuro. Such techniques are familiar enough.

We also hear in this piece Landini's increasing sensitivity to his texts: the divergences we spoke of often comes on last word of a line, which is usually the crucial one: words like "dolore" (pain) "tornati" (return)—the key themes of the poem—are where the music launches into beautiful, dazzling elaboration. In those brief passages Landini does what he'll do for the length of entire pieces later on in his career.

Yet in spite of increasingly sophisticated use of harmonic coloring and text-setting, rhythm will remain the single most important element in Landini's music, as would be the case for most ars nova composers. At this point, the influence of the dance, with its metrical fist continually pounding, is still dominant. While essentially still their slave, he plays upon the conventions and functions of dance music on the gestural level, mainly in terms of his pointed use of dotted rhythms, evoking the sensation of movement, and well-placed rests, which break it up far too much for it to be viable for use on the floor. It is the sound of Landini beginning to outwit his master.

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