(It.: ‘Moorish’; Sp. morisca).
(1) A dance of exotic character which occurred widely in Europe during the Renaissance. Generally there was a Moorish element in the costumes or action; the dance often took the form of a stylized battle between Moors and Christians, reminiscent of the medieval wars in Spain. Certain recurring features of the moresca, however, are apparently of more ancient origin. Blackening of the face, bells attached to costumes, the presence of a fool (sometimes a man disguised as a woman) and the swordplay element itself have been traced back by Sachs and others to primitive fertility rites. The English morris dance – a variety of the moresca encountered as early as the 14th century – displays many of these features.
In the latter part of the 15th century moresche were danced in carnival processions and (especially in Italy) in intermedi between the acts of courtly dramatic entertainments. Although the dance is mentioned frequently in such connections, no detailed choreographic descriptions from this period survive. Some indication of the character of the moresca can be obtained from contemporary sculptures and paintings; for instance, ten statuettes carved by Erasmus Grasser in 1480 for the Tanzsaal of the town hall at Munich, and now in the Stadtmuseum, Munich, clearly convey the grotesque, whirling movement of the dance. In the courtly sphere the moresca seems to have been performed mostly by professional dancers, to the accompaniment of pipes and tabors (see illustration).
Musical sources for the moresca are not plentiful, and those that exist do not conform to one rhythmic type. There are a few 16th-century German examples, of which the earliest is Johann Weck's Tancz der schwarcz Knab followed by its Hopp Tancz (both in triple time) in Hans Kotter’s keyboard tablature of 1513–32 (CH-Bu F.IX.22; printed in Merian). Arbeau in Orchésographie (1588) recounted having seen in his youth ‘la dance des Morisques’ performed as a solo dance by a young man with the usual blackened face, and bells attached to his legs. Arbeau described the moresca as in ‘mesure binaire’, and he gave for it the tune shown in ex.1. A version of this tune had already appeared in Susato's Het derde musyck boexken (Antwerp, 1551) among the basses danses, with the title ‘La Morisque’. The Susato/Arbeau melody is loosely related to ‘The Morris’, a tune occurring with many variations in English sources from the 1590s onwards, and doubtless associated with village morris dancing over the next three centuries: Cecil Sharp noted parallels with Arbeau's tune and steps in what he encountered in England about 1900. ‘The Kinges Morisck’, in Parthenia inviolata (no.1) and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (no.247), was on the other hand probably masque music originally, perhaps for Beaumont's Masque of the Inner Temple (1613; see Ward, p.314). It is a miniature medley of five strains, with an echo of ex.1 in the third strain and a metrical change (duple to triple) in the last.
Other continental moresche, unrelated to the Susato/Arbeau line, include five in G.C. Barbetta's Intavolatura di liuto (Venice, 1585), each one based on different musical material. ‘La Moresque’ in Praetorius's Terpsichore (Wolfenbüttel, 1612) is given in two settings (a 4 and a 5); the same melody appears in Mersenne's Harmonie universelle (1636–7; see ex.2).
In the 17th century the term ‘moresca’ was also applied to ballet or pantomimic dance in opera, for example the moresca at the end of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607). The ‘Entrée de' Mori’ at the end of Act 2 of Handel's Ariodante (1735) has an eccentric musical character that links it to the moresca tradition.
For further illustration see Dance, fig.7.
(2) A carnivalesque vocal genre popular in the 16th century whose texts parody the speech of Moors, then defined broadly as Muslims or narrowly as inhabitants of the Barbary Coast.
Moresche are settings of free verse in which sections in binary time alternate with dance-songs introduced by onomatopoetic imitations of instruments. Stock characters are invoked at the beginning with formulaic motives declaiming their names. Composers of moresche for three voices appropriated the strident high-pitched sound and parallel 5ths of the Villanella. The first anthology of moresche contains eight anonymous pieces and was published in Rome (VogelB 15555). A moresca attributed to ‘Orlando’, but conceivably by Nola, is among the six published in Venice by Gardano (RISM 156013-14, 156214). Lassus reworked three pre-existing moresche for four voices and three for six, demonstrating his natural flair for burlesque. These works circulated among his patrons before being published in 1581, and some were performed by ‘six flutes and as many resonant voices’ at the festivities for Duke Wilhelm V's wedding in 1568. Other composers who contributed one moresca apiece to the repertory are Corneti (1563), Troiano (1567), Califano (1567), Andrea Gabrieli (1574), Metallo (1577) and Bianchi (1588).
Moors acquired through the slave trade were valued as domestic servants in the households of European aristocrats, particularly in Naples, Rome, Venice and Munich, and their presence in these places stimulated production of comic musical scenes evoking the antics of stock couples such as Lucia and Martina. They are represented as purely carnal creatures, and their scatalogical dialogue, a concoction of southern Italian dialects and pseudo-Moorish jargon, is filled with zoomorphizing images redolent of Carnival. Connections have been drawn between the moresca and the Maltese dance known in Naples as the ‘ballo di Sfessania’ (or ‘Lucia’), which is immortalized in Callot's etchings (c1620; ed. K. Klose, Vienna, 1924) and described as a dance-song in 17th-century Neapolitan literature.
EinsteinIM
MGG1 (H. Engel)
C.J. Sharp and H.C. MacIlwaine: The Morris Book (London, 1907–13, 2/1911–24)
W. Merian: Der Tanz in den deutschen Tabulaturbüchern (Leipzig, 1927/R), 52–4
L. Werner: ‘Una rarità musicale della Biblioteca vescovile di Szombathely’, NA, viii (1931), 89–105
O. Gombosi: ‘The Cultural and Folkloristic Background of the Folía’, PAMS 1940, 88–95
B. Baader: Der bayerische Renaissancehof Herzog Wilhelms V (Leipzig, 1943)
P. Pecchiai: Roma nel Cinquecento (Bologna, 1948)
P. Nettl: ‘Die Moresca’, AMw, iv (1957), 165–74
W. Boetticher: Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit (Kassel, 1958)
W. Boetticher: Aus Orlando di Lassos Wirkungskreis (Kassel, 1963)
P. Nettl: The Dance in Classical Music (New York, 1963)
E. Ferrari Barassi: ‘La tradizione della moresca e uno sconosciuto ballo del Cinque-Seicento’, RIM, v (1970), 37–60
H. Leuchtmann, ed.: Die Münchner Fürstenhochzeit von 1568: Massimo Troiano, Dialoge (Munich, 1980)
D.G. Cardamone: The Canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537–1570 (Ann Arbor, 1981)
J.M. Ward: ‘The Morris Tune’, JAMS, xxxix (1986), 294–331
M. Farahat: ‘Villanescas of the Virtuosi: Lasso and the Commedia dell'arte’, Performance Practice Review, iii (1990), 121–37
For further bibliography see Dance.
ALAN BROWN (1), DONNA G. CARDAMONE (2)