The meaningful play between repetition and variety, one of the essential dialectics in this music generally, can clearly be heard at work in this nervously dancing, edgy piece. Much of the pervasive, but subtle tension that rides on the natural flowing rhythms of the lines, flows from the sequences of intervals and the way Landini constantly negotiates his use of octaves and fifths. Every measure begins with one of those intervals, and often ends with one. They are here, as in other Landini songs, like harmonic framing devices, as well as the basic intervalic currency by which our ears measure all the others.

In this piece, depending on the melodic movement that brings them about and depending on the intervals nearby or adjacent, they sound at different times neutral, expressively tense like dissonant intervals, or eerily hollow and resonant, cavern-like in their small way. Landini here is a trickster who knows how to hide the limitations of his means, a shell-game illusionist who makes you think you're hearing more than you actually are.

As an aspect of the dialectic of the un-expected, the parts in this piece don't just hold each other up: they are inextricably bound. The one is an organ of the other, their relation not mere counterpoint, not melody and accompaniment, but a kind of rhythmic symbiosis. The abundant vitality of each line is totally dependent for that vitality on the other line. By means of both rhythm and harmonic intervals, they project each other forward. In a general, tonal sense, there isn't a strong, key-oriented directionality. Instead, frequent highly directional, even cadential, gestures occur so there is a forward moving quality all the time. If the work is dancy it is made dancier still by the fact that it moves in short, eloquent, energetic motions as it does. It is a startling and engrossing work.

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