If Shakespeare ever happened to see a modern Valentine’s Day playlist, he’d surely think that little has changed since his day. While pop songs about love seem every inch a modern product, their roots lie in the renaissance. Since the 1400s, composers of madrigals, canzone, and frottola vied with each other in setting texts by poets. Petrarch’s poems set a series of images, hyperboles, and paradoxes that were “recycled” from Shakespeare and writers after. Being wounded by love, pain from the coldness of the beloved, catalogues of physical charms, comparisons to angels or the sun and moon—these are so easily recognisable by listeners of today’s pop music.

In this performance, Vanessa Guinadi and Edward Yong explore some settings of Petrarch’s poetry by Italian renaissance composers for lute and voice.