Ch'io non t/'ami cor mio

This secular Italian madrigal, Ch'io non t'ami cor mio, by Vittoria Aleotti, would suit a concert program of Renaissance part-music. The SATB voices explore the passionate, rhetorical questions of the text, which pleads against the idea of the singer abandoning their love. The text asks how one could possibly cease to love and live without the beloved, who is described as the source of all good things and desires, and the very essence of life itself. The music would have been performed in private aristocratic courts or in public concerts during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.