Edmund Gosse and Donald Tovey

“ The strict meaning of the word in its musical sense is, then, a musical setting of an Italian or English non-ecclesiastical poem (typically a canzone) for unaccompanied chorus, in a 16th-century style less ecclesiastical than the motet, but as like it in organization as the form and sentiment of the words admit. The greatest classics in the madrigal style are those of Italy; and but little, if at all, below them come the English. The form, though not the name, of course, exists in the 16th-century music of other languages whenever the poetry is not too light for it. ”

“ Elegiac madrigals, whether spiritual or secular, were thus as common as any other kind; so that when the Musica transalpina brought the word “madrigal” to England it brought a precedent for the poet Drummond’s melancholy type of madrigal poetry.
Italian madrigals, however, are by no means always elegiac; but the term always means a highly organized and flowing polyphonic piece, often as developed as the motet, though, in the mature classical period, distinct in style. Yet masses were often founded on the themes of madrigals, just as they were on the themes of motets (see Mass; Motet) ”

“ Cried ah! and can death enter Paradise?
This may be taken as a type of Drummond’s madrigals, of which he has left us about eighty. They are serious, brief, irregular lyrics, in which neither the amatory nor the complimentary tone is by any means obligatory. Some of these pieces contain as few as six lines, one as many as fourteen, but they average from nine to eleven. In the majority of examples the little poem opens with a line of six syllables, and no line extends beyond ten syllables. The madrigal appears to be a short canzone of the Tuscan type, but less rigidly constructed. ”