Moresche (music)

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Moresche is the plural of moresca, meaning Moorish thing, or Moorish girl in Italian. Both the singular and plural can refer to both a 15th~16th century dance genre or to a 15th~16th century song genre. This article concerns the genre of moresche, polyphonic "moorish" songs.

Contents

Moresche musically have no common heritage with the moresca dance form. [1] [2] Instead moresche are related to villanella and villanescas, stylized village songs for three to five voices. The significant difference relates to their texts – parodying the Italian spoken by African slaves in Italy. A related genre are greghesche, madrigals imitating Italian spoken by Greeks in Italy. [3] The texts of moresche are often near untranslatable, due either to obscenity and double entendre, or nonsense language, or both.

The French singer and printer Antonio Barrè can claim the distinction of publishing the first known examples of moresche as partsongs in his Secondo libro delle muse a tre voci: canzoni moresche di diversi autori (Rome 1555). The Neapolitan moresca à 3 appeared only "after the canzone villanesca alla napolitana à 3 had gained a secure foothold" [4] and can be considered a development of the villanesca from bucolic to more raucous subject matter; in text, language and musical idiom.

Chronologically, moresche belong the last years of Renaissance polyphonic song before monody and Baroque polyphony, and also on the cusp of change from the dominance in Italy of Flemish masters such as Adrian Willaert to native Italians such as Andrea Gabrieli.

Etymology

The term is ultimately derived from the name of the Moors, a historic people in the western Mediterranean. Other similarly derived words include Blackamoor, Kammermohr, Matamoros, Maure, Mohr im Hemd, Moresca, Moresque, Moreška, Morianbron, Morisco, Moros y cristianos, and Morris dance.

Composers of moresche

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Moresca (Italian), morisca (Spanish), mourisca (Portuguese) or moresque, mauresque (French), also known in French as the danse des bouffons, is a dance of exotic character encountered in Europe in the Renaissance period. This dance usually took form of medieval wars in Spain between Moors and Christians. Elements of moresca include blackening of the face, bells attached to the costumes and, in occasions, men disguised as women to portray fools. An example of the moresca can be seen in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 production of Romeo and Juliet, which has a scene with both, Juliet and Romeo dancing the moresca in a circle.

Girolamo Conversi was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance. His music, which was popular from the 1570s through the 1590s, was noted for its combination of the light canzone alla napolitana with the literary and musical sophistication of the madrigal. He appears to have written only secular vocal music.

Oltremontani were those of the Franco-Flemish School of composers who dominated the musical landscape of Northern Italy during the middle of the sixteenth Century. The role of the oltremontani composers at the ducal courts of Italy was analogous to the dominance at the Spanish court of the Flemish chapel, and other composers of the Franco-Flemish School in Germany and France.

References

  1. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal Princeton, 1949
  2. Cardamone. D. The Canzone villanesca alla napolitana: Social, Cultural and Historical Contexts. Variorum Collected Studies Series
  3. Booklet essay in Greghesche - A Musical Treasure of the Venetian Renaissance. Label: EtCetera Records Catalog No: ETC 4028
  4. Donna Cardamone cited in introduction to Complete madrigals. 2. Madrigals a 4, greghesche a 4, 5, and 7, Volume 2 Andrea Gabrieli