The proposta e risposta is a pair of poems enacting a dialogue between two characters in which the second responds to the first by imitating its form and content. Although this poetic type seemed to be quite popular among poets and composers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (over 200 proposta e risposta madrigals were composed between the 1550s and 1640s), musicologists address this madrigal type only tangentially in the literature as a lesser form of dialogue because it does not reflect the quick back-and-forth exchange of verbal conversation. They neglect to discuss the fact that the proposta e risposta was a common form of written communication in which poets engaged in discourse with one another by imitating the structure and rhyme scheme of a given poem and manipulating its meaning to generate a response. In other words, the proposta e risposta was a dialogic poetic type.

Composers reflected the poetic imitation in their proposta e risposta madrigals by reusing their own music and by borrowing and modeling their music on existing madrigals by other composers. Lewis Lockwood first suggested that "musicians of the sixteenth century recognized in their own manipulations of antecedents something akin to the transformations practiced in contemporary literature...and that the prevalent term imitatio may reflect such a connection." Since this statement was published in 1966, many musicologists have looked to educational and rhetorical imitatio as an explanation for why composers used existing music to create new works. The proposta e risposta madrigal repertoire supplements Lockwood's idea by showing how composers also "recognized in their own manipulations of antecedents something akin to the transformations" characteristic of imitation in dialogic poetry. I argue that proposta e risposta madrigals are manifestations of a cultural context of dialogue where one's ability to engage in discourse literally and through publications with peers and patrons alike was highly valued and was integral to the court and academy experience.