(b probably Sermoneta, c1527–35; d after 1605). Italian dancing-master. He was the author of two large manuals of vital significance as sources of dance steps, types and music of the second half of the 16th century. Caroso's works include over 100 different dances by himself and others, as well as valuable rules for basic step vocabulary and etiquette. The ballettos, which form the major part of his repertory, clearly descend from the balli of 15th-century Italy, being similarly multi-partite and individually choreographed, with specially composed or adapted music. The fact that Nobiltà di dame (1600) was reprinted under a different title as late as 1630 supports other evidence that Caroso's style may have continued to hold good for Italian dance in the first third of the 17th century.
Caroso's volumes include a few simple group figure dances such as the contrapasso, but most are more elaborate social dances for a skilled amateur couple, for example the passo e mezo. Caroso thus stands midway between Arbeau, whose Orchesographie (1588) favours in equal measure simple circle dances (e.g. branles) and more complicated types, and Cesare Negri, who detailed in Le gratie d’amore (1602) many extremely difficult galliard variations and some choreographies for theatrical productions. Although the three authorities differed in particulars (for example only Caroso used the term ‘cascarda’ for a dance type), the frequent correlations of step patterns suggest that the basic features of court dance were essentially international in Europe during the second half of the 16th century. Variation and improvisation, pervasive principles in 16th-century musical performing practice, seem also to have been characteristic of 16th-century dance, for many ‘mutanze’ of the basic steps or choreographic patterns are described, and it is clear that others could always be introduced ad lib.
Both Caroso's volumes contain music in Italian lute tablature, with some additional parts in mensural notation. Most of the music is of no great value in itself; it is close in style to dance music of the period: homophonic, periodic, strongly metric and dominated by two- and four-bar phrases. Identical sections often appear in separate dances, mixed and matched differently, and abbreviated, elongated or transposed in obvious adaptation to the needs of the choreographies. The many musical concordances with other sources provide valuable clues to the manner of dissemination of the popular tunes, bass types or chord progressions (Moe). Despite many problems of interpretation, Caroso's works are helpful to the study of performing practice, for they often clarify the metric relationships between dance steps and music, as when the term for a step pattern (e.g. ‘seguito ordinario o breve’) is precisely correlated with rhythmic values, or when, as in the galliard, the body's natural tempo for the steps suggests approximate tempos for the music. Further, proportional indications for movements within ballettos (e.g. ‘this minim should be played as a semiminim the second time’) assist in the establishment of tempo norms for those dance types such as the canary or the galliard which also may appear as independent dances. Musically, the multi-movement ballettos are variation suites (the same musical material is present in two or three metric guises); this undoubtedly played a role in the development of the instrumental variation suite of the 17th century. The required repetitions of strains to accommodate the choreography (up to 26 times for one strain) must have encouraged improvised variation by the musicians as well.
Caroso claimed as his patrons the Caetani, the ruling family of Sermoneta, who were also influential in Rome. He may well have spent much of his life there, for most of the dances are dedicated to ladies of other Roman families; to judge from the dedications his wide circle of acquaintances also included the Medici, Farnese, Gonzaga, d'Este and Sforza families, as well as Spanish rulers of Naples and Milan. Negri in 1602 appropriated many of the rules from Il ballarino (while adding significant instructions of his own), and Tasso contributed a sonnet in praise of the author to Nobiltà di dame, further evidence of Caroso's high repute.
Il ballarino (Venice, 1581/R); ed. for gui by H. Mönkemeyer (Rodenkirchen, 1971); 3 dances on videotape, dir. J. Sutton (Pennington, NJ, 1990)
Nobiltà di dame (Venice, 1600/R, 2/1605) [reissued and reordered as Raccolta di varii balli, Rome, 1630]; Eng. trans., ed. by J. Sutton (London, 1986, 2/1995 with dance notation by R.P. Tsachor and J. Sutton)
L. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablature from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)
J. Sutton: Renaissance Revisited (New York, 1972) [accompanying videotape also available]
I. Fenlon: ‘Music and Spectacle at the Gonzaga Court, c. 1580–1600’, PRMA, ciii (1976–7), 90–105
G. Corti: ‘Cinque balli toscani del Cinquecento’, RIM, xii (1977), 73–82
G. Tani: Storia della danza (Florence, 1983)
P. Jones and I. Brainard: ‘Comparative Reconstructions: “Ardente sole” from Caroso's Il ballarino, 1581’, The Myriad Faces of Dance: Albuquerque 1985, ed. C.L. Schlunt (Riverside, CA, 1985), 189–98
Y. Kendall: Le gratie d'amore (1602) (diss., Stanford U., 1985)
A. Feves: ‘Caroso's Patronesses’, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference: Society of Dance History Scholars: New York 1986 (Riverside, CA, 1986), 53–4
R. Hudson: The Allemande, the Balletto, and the Tanz (Cambridge, 1986)
P. Jones: The Relation between Music and Dance in Cesare Negri's ‘Le gratie d'amore’ (1602) (diss., U. of London, 1989)
Y. Kendall: ‘Rhythm, Meter, and Tactus in 16th-Century Italian Court Dance: Reconstruction from a Theoretical Base’, Dance Research, viii (1990), 3–27
M. Esses: Dance and Instrumental Diferencias in Spain during the 17th and Early 18th Centuries (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991)
A. Feves: ‘Fabritio Caroso and the Changing Shape of the Dance, 1550–1600’, Dance Chronicle, xiv (1991), 159–74
J. Sutton: ‘Musical Forms and Dance Forms in the Dance Manuals of Sixteenth-Century Italy’, The Marriage of Music and Dance: London 1991
P. Gargiulo, ed.: La danza italiana tra Cinque e Seicento: studi per Fabrizio Caroso da Sermoneta (Rome, 1997)
JULIA SUTTON