Saltarello
dance
The saltarello is a musical dance originally from Italy. The first mention of it is in Add MS 29987, a late-fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century manuscript of Tuscan origin, now in the British Library. It was usually played in a fast triple meter and is named for its peculiar leaping step, after the Italian verb saltare ("to jump"). This characteristic is also the basis of the German name Hoppertanz or Hupfertanz ("hopping dance"); other names include the French pas de Brabant and the Spanish alta or alta danza.
History
The saltarello enjoyed great popularity in the courts of medieval Europe. During the 14th century, the word saltarello became the name of a particular dance step (a double with a hop on the final or initial upbeat), and the name of a meter of music (a fast triple), both of which appear in many choreographed dances. Entire dances consisting of only the saltarello step and meter are described as being improvised dances in 15th-century Italian dance manuals. (The first dance treatise that dealt with the saltarello was the 1465 work of Antonio Cornazzano.) A clearer, detailed description of this step and meter appears in a 16th-century manuscript in Madrid's Academia de la Historia. During this era, the saltarello was danced by bands of courtesans dressed as men at masquerades.
The saltarello is one of four dance misure or rhythms at the time, the others being bassadanza, quadernaria, and piva.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saltarello” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.