Italian dance-song, and poetic and musical form, in use from the second half of the 13th century until the 15th century and beyond.
The word, which was synonymous with danza in earlier times, refers to the functional origin of the word ballare (‘to dance’). The first ballata texts survive without music from the second half of the 13th century in the so-called Bolognese Memoriali. Dante mentioned the ballata in De vulgari eloquentia (II, iii.5, 1304–5), stating that, in contrast to the canzone, it demands a singing dancer. The form is also indicative of the dance-song: it originally consisted of a choral refrain (ripresa) and several strophes (stanze) performed by a soloist. Moreover, even in the 13th century the oldest ballate were closely linked with the lauda. The numerous laude-contrafacta of the 14th and 15th centuries are evidence of this link (see Ghisi, 1953). It was in the lauda, and in the period of the dolce stil nuovo, that the development of the ballata into an artistic lyrical form was completed. The texts are love songs and also often moral aphorisms, in which the choral refrain yields to a solo ripresa and the strophes are reduced in length. However, alongside these, popular ballata types survived for a long time (these are still found in Boccaccio and Prudenzani, and are widespread in Quattrocento poetry).
The ballata consists of the following parts: ripresa, two (rarely more) symmetrical piedi or mutazioni, volta (equal in length to the ripresa) and ripresa. The terms ‘piedi’ and ‘volta’ were taken over from the canzone. One of the earliest ballate with music (I-Rvat 215) is given below. This is a three-strophe ballata piccola (i.e. with a one-line ripresa of 11 syllables), and its rhyme scheme is: A (ripresa), BB (two piedi), A (volta), A (ripresa):
Per
tropo fede talor se perìgola!
Non è dolor, nè più mortale spàsemo
Come sença falir cader in biàsemo
El ben se tacie e lo mal pur se cìgola.
(Per tropo fede …)
Lasso colui che mai si fidò in fèmena,
Chè l'amor so veneno amaro sèmena,
Onde la morte speso se ne spìgola.
(Per tropo fede …)
Oimè, ch'Amor m'à posto in cotal àrcere
Onde convienne ognor làgreme spàrçere;
Sì che doglia lo mio cor formìgola.
Per tropo fede talor se perìgola!
In manuscripts only the ripresa and the first piede are each notated with music. The text of the second piede and the volta is distributed between the two musical sections (ex.1), or written below the staves as a residuum. The question of whether the ripresa is to be repeated after every strophe or only at the end cannot be answered with certainty. In contrast to the madrigal, changes of time signature within the ballata are rare.
Alongside the ballata piccola 14th-century theorists described the ballata minima (one-line ripresa with seven syllables), the ballata minore (two-line ripresa), the ballata mezzana (three-line ripresa) and the ballata grande (four-line ripresa). In rare cases both piedi of the ballata are provided with musical notation. Even more rarely new music is provided for the volta.
Only the texts have reached us from the early history of the ballata. The music was evidently based on oral tradition. With the rise of the ballata to an art form the first monophonic ballate with music appear in a northern Italian manuscript (I-Rvat 215). Another manuscript (I-Fl 87) contains five monophonic ballate by Gherardello da Firenze, five by Lorenzo da Firenze and one monophonic piece by Niccolò da Perugia. The first polyphonic ballate appeared in Florence in the 1360s. It is with this development that the form finally reached artistic stature and from that time onward, especially in Florence, but soon also in the Veneto, it remained in the forefront of interest. Jacopo da Bologna's Nel mio parlar is the only surviving example of a polyphonic ballata from before 1360; however, judging from its text this piece is a lauda. The 141 ballate of Landini (composed between c1365 and 1397) offer a good cross-section of the various types of polyphonic ballate: the earlier examples still have many points in common with the madrigal (both voices with text, melismatic style) and the later examples resemble the French chanson (the upper voice only with text, a tendency towards syllabic style, ouvert and clos, and sometimes identical music at the end of the ripresa and piedi). The frequent occurrence of ballate with a single strophe of text is an indication of the central role of the music. The aphoristic short ballate of Niccolò da Perugia and Andreas de Florentia are characteristic of Florentine bourgeois culture. In northern Italy, along with the madrigal, the ballata was cultivated by Bartolino da Padova, Ciconia and Zacara da Teramo among others. A particular genre using the ballata's form, the siciliana, flourished in the Veneto at the end of the 14th century (see Pirrotta, 1982, 1984). Works by Du Fay and Arnold de Lantins can be reckoned among the last examples of this specifically Italian form. Only a few ballate by Italian composers from the first half of the 15th century have survived. By the time northern composers settled in Italy the ballata had lost its ancient charm and its distinctive characteristics. While ballate that survive without music can be traced until the end of that century and beyond, pre-eminence in the field of Italian song was passing to the frottola and the lauda, both formally related to the ballata.
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KURT VON FISCHER/GIANLUCA D'AGOSTINO