Estampie
medieval dance and musical form
The estampie (French: estampie, Occitan and Catalan: estampida, Italian: istanpitta) is a medieval dance and musical form which was a popular instrumental and vocal form in the 13th and 14th centuries. The name was also applied to poetry.
Musical form
The estampie is similar in form to the lai, consisting of a succession of repeated notes. According to Johannes de Grocheio, there were both vocal and instrumental estampies (for which he used the Latin calque "stantipes"), which differed somewhat in form.
Grocheio calls the sections in both the French vocal and instrumental estampie puncta (singular punctus), Each puncta has a pair of lines that repeat the same melody, in the form:
aa, bb, cc, etc..
The two statements of the melody in each punctus differ only in their endings, described as apertum ("open") and clausum ("closed") by Grocheio, who believed that six puncta were standard for the stantipes (his term for the estampie), though he was aware of stantipes with seven puncta. The structure can therefore be diagrammed as:
a+x, a+y; b+w, b+z; etc..
In an instrumental estampie, the open and closed endings of the puncta are the same each time, so that the end of the punctum serves as the refrain, in the form:
a+x, a+y; b+x, b+y, c+x, c+y, etc.
According to Ian Pittaway, there is also the compound estampie where puncta following the first punctus begin by adding new material, then repeat one or more sections of material from preceding puncta before the open and closed endings. There is no exact form aside from the fact that new material comes first.
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This entry incorporates text from “Estampie” 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.