(It.).
An Italian dance of the 16th and 17th centuries based on the same harmonic structure as the romanesca, but with diminished note values. Each of the eight main framework chords (see Ground, ex.1a) usually occupies a single triple unit (in contrast to the Romanesca, where each framework chord usually spans two bars of triple metre). The main music is followed by two standard riprese or ritornellos (see Ripresa, ex.1b); the earliest example, in Bernardino Balletti's lutebook of 1554, consists of three continuous variations on the scheme and its riprese. M.A. di Becchi in 1568 provided three separate lute examples followed by another, called ‘la sua rotta’, which has the same harmonic scheme in duple metre (both the Balletti and the Becchi pieces are transcribed by G. Lefkoff in Five Sixteenth Century Venetian Lute Books, Washington DC, 1960).
17th-century examples include one for theorbo by P.P. Melli (1616) and three variations for keyboard in the Chigi manuscripts (I-Rvat; ed. in CEKM, xxxii/3, 1968); another source (I-Bc Q34) gives the bass line as one of a series of gagliarde diverse. Chordal examples for the five-course guitar appear in tablatures of Montesardo (1606), Milanuzzi (1625), Fabrizio Costanzo (1627), Milioni (1627) and G.P. Ricci (1677) and in some manuscripts (I-Fr 2951, PEc 586 [H72] and Rsc A 247). The guitar versions are often in duple metre, followed by a rotta or tripla della favorita. Ricci curiously provided his favorita with both ‘sua ripresa’ based on I–IV–V–I and a ritornello on III–VI–VII–III. The Passamezzo della favorita printed in Oscar Chilesotti's Da un codice Lauten-Buch del Cinquecento (Leipzig, 1890), as well as Barbetta's Pavana ottava detta La favorita (1569) and Salamone Rossi's Gagliarda terza detta La favorita (1622), is harmonically unrelated to the other pieces that bear the name favorita.
BrownI
L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956), 160–62, 244–7
H. Spohr: Studien zur italienischen Tanzkomposition um 1600 (diss., U. of Freiburg, 1956), esp. 48–52
R. Hudson: ‘The Concept of Mode in Italian Guitar Music during the First Half of the 17th Century’, AcM, xlii (1970), 163–83
E. Apfel: Entwurf eines Verzeichnisses aller Ostinato-Stücke zu Grundlagen einer Geschichte der Satztechnik, iii: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Frühgeschichte des Ostinato in der komponierten Mehrstimmigkeit (Saarbrücken, 1977), 55, 236–7
RICHARD HUDSON