(It.: ‘branle’).
Generally, the 16th-century Italian equivalent for Branle. The word also designated a particular kind of social and theatrical set dance only tenuously related to it. Castiglione and G.B. Doni mentioned the brando as a social dance, agreeing that its most important distinguishing feature was that it was best performed in costume. Like the moresca, the brando was often part of a mascherata or intermedio.
The dancing-master Cesare Negri described both social and theatrical brandos in Le gratie d'amore (1602), including ‘la musica della sonata con l’intavolatura del liuto del brando’. Negri consistently referred to brandos together with ‘balletti’ and ‘balli’, all multi-sectional dances reminiscent of or directly incorporating individual dances such as the corrente, pavan or gagliarda; the musical accompaniments to his choreographies are not labelled, so that one must read the dance descriptions to ascertain which sections are thought to be ‘in corrente’, which ‘in gagliarda’ and so on. In addition to describing social brandos for sets consisting of two to four couples with four to nine musical sections, Negri mentioned three theatrical brandos he created. Two were part of a mascherata staged in 1574: a brando for the kings and queens of each of the four elements was the first of a series of allegorical dances and madrigal performances, ultimately culminating in a brando for the entire masked company of 82 performers. Rather more detail (and a musical accompaniment) is given for a brando that followed the last intermedio to a performance of G.B. Visconti's pastoral comedy Armenia, given in Milan in 1599 for the Infanta Donna Isabella of Spain and Archduke Albrecht of Austria. The brando, for four couples, is not pantomimic as has been suggested, but simply an extended version of the court dance, with the performers costumed as shepherds and nymphs. Both the detailed choreography and the 11 sections of the ‘sonata del brando’ were re-created by M. Dolmetsch (Dances of Spain and Italy from 1400 to 1600, London, 1954/R).
Few pieces specifically called ‘brando’ survive in 16th- and 17th-century collections of dance or chamber music. Those included in Megalaniscus's Suonate da camera a tre, published by Hendrik Aertssens (iii) in 1692 (incorrectly attributed to Corelli), are straightforward binary dances in duple metre, mostly cast in two repeated eight-bar strains. The brandos in Salvatore Mazzella's Balli, correnti, gighe, sarabande, gavotte, brande e galiarde (1689) are rather more interesting historically, for the triple-metre dances called ‘brande’ in the title are each called ‘minuetta’ in the print itself, lending some credence to the often debated idea that the minuet derived from the branle.
For bibliography see Branle.