Composers, especially during the late sixteenth century, are ingenious in their use of so-called "madrigalisms"—passages in which the music assigned to a particular word expresses its meaning, for example, setting riso (smile) to a passage of quick, running notes which imitate laughter, or sospiro (sigh) to a note which falls to the note below.

This technique is also known as "word-painting."

While it originated in secular music, it makes its way into other vocal music of the period.

Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale.

The style of Neopolitan nobleman Carlo Gesualdo, who killed his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto and wrote some of the most extravagantly expressive and harmonically experimental music prior to the nineteenth century, followed directly from that of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, a skilled representative of the late Italian madrigal style, along with Palestrina, Wert, Monte, Lassus, Marenzio, and others.

Gesualdo names the older composer as his mentor: the two work together at Ferrara in the early 1590s, giving Gesualdo ample opportunity to absorb the chromaticism and textural contrasts of the Ferrarese, including Luzzaschi and Alfonso Fontanelli.