From: Adina Hamilton

Subject: [lochac-dance] bella gioiosa

Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:49:40
+1100

Here's a reconstruction of Bella Gioiosa from Il Balarino. I've just knocked it out and am in the mulling it over stage, and may well change my mind about some bits. Input sought! If you want a nicely formatted copy in Word, email me and I'll send it to you direct. I assume Del will get upset if we start sending great planetkilling attachments to the list.I can email you a noteworthy file of the music, too, or you can download Mathilde's transcription in various formats from

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/caroso/music/

(note the noteworthy version won't play my repeat schedule unless you fiddle with it).

First, though, here are the notes on what I thought I was doing:

1) Fitting it to the music.

The first variation obeys the instructions on the tablature to play the A music twice and the B music three times. Otherwise, the 'ritornello' B music always goes with the dance unit of a spezato turned over the left shoulder followed by a cadenza (notated as spez(l) cad(r)). The one exception is in the second section of the third variation, where the spez-cad unit seems to be in the middle of the main piece of music to enable people to change direction easily as they dance round the circle and back.

Despite mulling over Del's suggestion of using teh BBB spez cads as a chorus, and looking at another reconstruction that did so, I have not inserted any extra of the spez cad units, except possibly at the end, where I have made the assumption that each persion does their own, as specified in the first variation. As you will see, the this means the repeat pattern of the music is not regular. However I think that this way it responds to the dance ideas in an appropriate way that a forced regularisation would not. It also applies Occam's razor by assuming the minimum number of misprints or badly written sections on the part of Caroso and his printers. Real musicians should have no trouble with the repeat schedule; in period improvising variations on the tune repeated 5 times in a row would have been second nature. But does anyone else have a theory about this?

riverinza in balzetto - 8 bars

seguiti spezzati, scambiate, passi gravi, cadenze, seguiti battuti del

canario - all 2 bars

passi presti, trabuchetti, riprese - all 1 bar

2) Textual problems

The paragraphs are weird; the way I read it the first para encompasses the first two variations and the first playing of the A music in the third, each para thereafter deals with one playing of the A music in the third variation (which _is_ the idea-heavy variation).

Where I have put 4 bats, the text says 5. It then says you can do 4 trabs instead if you want. I have assumed 5 is the misprint, and that if you were wimping out of canary steps you would do nice slow (grav = 2 bar) trabs. This is where I feel dodgiest about the whole thing, what do others think?

3) Anything else?

Cheers

Eleanor

From: Del

Subject: [lochac-dance] bella gioiosa

Date: Fri Nov 15 14:39:00 2002

In summary: this dance is a bit strange because the dance instructions don't fit the music. It's unusual for Caroso to give us instructions on how to play the music, but in this case he does -- it's AA BBB. So that's significant. The problem is that unless you mangle the dance, you aren't going to get AA BBB except for the first time through.

Opinions differ about whether you should be mangling the dance to match the music or mangling the music to match the dance -- see the fairly long-winded discussion as to the rationale different people chose to use for doing either.

Etienne de Clermont's reconstruction, which is the one I think Adina has seen, does AABBB x 7. The recording on the Waits of Southwark album "Silence is Deadly" does AABBB x 5. Neither Adina's reconstruction nor one by Diana Cruickshank match AABBB times anything. There's no right or wrong answer. Etienne's one is the one commonly danced in the barn at Pennsic.

Despite mulling over Del's suggestion of using the BBB spez cads as a chorus, and looking at another reconstruction that did so, I have not inserted any extra of the spez cad units, except possibly at the end, where I have made the assumption that each persion does their own, as specified in the first variation. As you will see, the this means the repeat pattern of the music is not regular. However I think that this way it responds to the dance ideas in an appropriate way that a forced regularisation would not. It also applies Occam's razor by assuming the minimum number of misprints or badly written sections on the part of Caroso and his printers. Real musicians should have no trouble with the repeat schedule; in period improvising variations on the tune repeated 5 times in a row would have been second nature. But does anyone else have a theory about this?

Yeah, actually I don't have problems with either but then it's something best debated by the likes of Cormac and Mathilde than myself.

I certainly have no problems going up to the likes of Geoffrey et al and saying "play this AABBCCBAAABBBCCCBBAAAABB" or any other such squiggly incantation, but I do find that musicians do tend to trip over themselves a bit if it's complex. e.g. even in Contentezza d'Amore, which is AAAAA BBCBBC, I find that a lot of the time the musicians have trouble counting to 5 while concentrating on playing all of the bits that make up the A section.

Even in Conto dell'Orco I've had problems getting the musicians to play AABBAABBCCC, and each bit is only 8 bars long.

The paragraphs are weird; the way I read it the first para encompasses the first two variations and the first playing of the A music in the third

That seems to be pretty much a consensus opinion.

each para thereafter deals with one playing of the A music in the third variation (which _is_ the idea-heavy variation).

Depends on how you break up the variations. Your variations are quite long.

I would have called the second playing of A "variation 4". Etienne has your second A taking up more music -- AAA in fact. I guess his seguiti semidoppii are longer. The seguito doppio in Conto dell'Orco takes 4 bars -- as long as 4 passi gravi, however a seguito semidoppio in a cascarda is unusual so it's anyone's guess as to how many bars it should take.

From: Adina Hamilton

Subject: lochac-dance] bella gioiosa

Date: Fri Nov 15 23:23:00 2002

Yep. And I figure that throughout his 2 books Caroso wrote the text out deliberately in considerable detail, and then provided a piece of tab detailing the main musical phrases to be used in the dance. Only very occasionally with instructions as to which bit got played where how many times. I also figure that the aspect of his reputation as a dance master that his two texts seek to further is the aspect of choreographer (and general suck to his patrons and potential patrons, viz the oft overlooked and undervalued poems); my reading of the differences between Nobilta and Il Ballarino is that by the 1600 text this desire to be known as a choreographer shaped the text's discourse even more strongly, and must further be understood in the context of humanist ideas about the structure and meaning of art. I'd also write a little essay about how Il Ballarino is effectively the first time that this sort of dance language has been transmitted in a big way through a textual process rather than an oral one, and that Nobilta is probably Caroso's response to a now unknown audience's response to experiencing choreography in a new - textualised - way through Il B.

Um. I am seriously wandering. I'll save all that for life post thesis. What I'm trying to say is that I think there are good reasons

1) within Caroso's texts themselves, and

2) from what we know about the 16th C culture Caroso operated in

to generally give the text primacy over the music when interpreting the structure of his dances.

Opinions differ about whether you should be mangling the dance to match the music or mangling the music to match the dance -- see the fairly long-winded discussion as to the rationale different people chose to use for doing either.

Yes, it seems to mostly come to a quasi-religious divide over which a priori assumption you make. As I indicated above I think this should be the realm of evidence not faith, and I think the evidence is on my side (like all good religious maniacs, I guess). Which isn't to say that the music doesn't have real value for making sense of the dance, and that I don't use my ears to help me reconstruct.

Having scanned through the list discussions I would emphasise more heavily my use of Occam's razor. I have assumed the minimum necessary differences from what is written.

A few people on both sca-dance and rendance think you can do 5 bats in this time, it's just tricky. See Dorothee Wortelboer's post in the pile of stuff I picked up from rendance.

Hmm - I can't do this without assuming non-uniform step lengths, which I am loathe to do, since Caroso is pretty keen on the steps having fixed relationships to each other. Haven't seen her full reconstruction though obviously.

From: Del

Subject: [lochac-dance] bella gioiosa

Date: Sat Nov 16 18:01:02 2002

Yep. And I figure that throughout his 2 books Caroso wrote the text out deliberately in considerable detail, and then provided a piece of tab detailing the main musical phrases to be used in the dance. Only very occasionally with instructions as to which bit got played where how many times.

Yup, this is my point. It's unusual for him to do this, but he does it on this one occasion.

I'm prepared to accept, however, that he meant for the tune to be played that way the in the first figure of the dance, and then all bets are off. I just think it's an interesting point.

From: Del dance@sca.org.au

lochac-dance] bella gioiosa

Date: Wed Nov 20 18:17:01 2002

There are only 3 cascarde for 3 from Il Ballarino, in the order in which they appear:

• Squilina

• Allegrezza d'Amore

• Bella Gioiosa

Alta Sergarda appears to be for as many as will in a circle, as does Fedelta. Vita, e quanto Haggio doesn't say, but it is probably for two since it says "l'Huomo" and "la Dama" in the singular.

Spagnoletta Nuova isn't labeled as a cascarda, but follows the typical cascarda pattern and is in triple time, and is for 3, but for the purposes of evidence gathering I'd ignore it. It's worth noting that it's entirely regular, however.

Even if Squilina and Allegrezza d'Amore were regular cascarde, saying that Bella Gioiosa contains typographic errors because it is irregular would only be based on 1 out of 3. I'd prefer 1 out of 20 or so before I bang the gavel. There are 55 or so regular basse danses in the Brussels manuscript, plus a dozen or so irregular ones, plus La Danse de Cleves which is wildly irregular, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.