‘A Voice Crying in the Wilderness’: Issues of Authorship, Performance, and Transcription in the Italian Frottola

ABSTRACT For many years, scholars have represented the frottola repertory as light-hearted, frivolous, often bawdy songs – the purview of the uneducated – and many of them are exactly this. But within this repertory are also songs based on biblical passages and psalms that bring religious themes into a highly secularised context, offering lay interpretations of sacred scriptures. The most famous example of this is Josquin’s ‘In te domine speravi’, based on Psalm 30. The example of ‘Vox clamantis in deserto’, though, offers an intriguing instance of a song that shows evidence of both oral and written composition. This performative compositional history calls into question the song’s authorial attributions to Serafino Aquilano, Antonio Tebaldeo, and Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and highlights the complex, nuanced character of the genre as a whole.