15th Century Italian Dance

15th Century Italian Dance 3Tempi and Misure“Tempi and Misura” means “Time and Measure”, to an extent also meaning“time and motion” as well as many other things. -- these were consideredto be the two most important aspects of all Italian dance.Time sequencesThe basics of understanding misure is theunderstanding of how the music related to the dance.In all Italian dances there were only four major timesequences used, these are shown on a diagram inCornazano’s text which looks somewhat like this:The diagram shows the relationship between the fourmisure, bassadanza, quadernaria, saltarello, and piva.MeasuresBassedanza was considered to be the most important of the measures(“Bassadanza is the queen of measures”), while piva was considered to bethe least important, or the most “common”. Bassedanza steps are theslowest and most elegant of the steps, while the piva steps are the fastest.Saltarello and quadernaria steps are obviously in their respective placessomewhere between bassedanze and piva.TempiThe tempi relate to the misure in that the music relates to the dance -- thetempi (time) of the music corresponds to the steps or misure of the dance.Each of the 4 misure have their own tempi, as follows:Bassadanza 6/4Quadernaria 4/4Saltarello 3/4Piva 2/4So music that is in 6/4 time will have bassedanze steps to it, music that isin 3/4 time will have saltarello steps to it, etc. Of course there arevariations to the above sequences, for example you occasionally seeSaltarello or Piva in 6/8 time or other minor differences but by and largethe tempi listed above are the main ones used.