Caccia
A fourteenth-century Italian canonic form depicting hunting and everyday scenes.
What it means
The caccia (Italian for "hunt") is a polyphonic vocal form of the fourteenth-century Italian ars nova. Two upper voices carry the same melodic line in canon, one following the other, over a more freely composed, often instrumentally conceived lower voice.
The text often depicts lively scenes of hunting, the marketplace, or daily life, with calls, animal sounds, and onomatopoeic exclamations that the canon itself imitates musically: the following voice literally "hunts" the leading one.
Musical use
Well-known composers of caccias include Francesco Landini and Gherardello da Firenze. The genre was closely related to other secular ars nova forms such as the madrigal and the ballata, but differed from them through its canonic structure and its vivid, often realistic text setting.
The caccia should be distinguished from the later, more general canon as a compositional technique: the caccia is a fixed historical genre with a characteristic repertoire of texts and subjects, while the canon as a procedure is used across periods and styles.