(b Milan, c1535; d ?Milan, after 1604). Italian dancing-master. His important treatise on dance, Le gratie d’amore (1602), is dedicated to Philip III of Spain, then ruler of Milan, but most of it was written during the long reign of Philip II, who died in 1598. This treatise gives the most comprehensive picture in a single source of social and theatrical dance and dance music of the late Renaissance; it reveals the great geographic spread of Italian dancing-masters, dances and techniques to many courts of Europe and testifies to the existence of a fully professional class of virtuoso male dancers. Taken together with Fabritio Caroso's works, Il ballarino (1581) and Nebiltà di dame (1600), it provides a colourful context for the social dances of the Italian upper classes.
Negri's treatise is in three sections (trattati). The first section provides information about the author's professional life; Negri is unique in supplying enough autobiographical detail to give readers some idea of the life of a successful dancing-master of the period. His annotated list of Italian dancing-masters includes his teachers, colleagues and disciples along with their specialities and locales. The lists of his titled students during his 40-year career in Milan are organized under the successive governorships of Milan, making it reasonable to date the dances he dedicated to some of these pupils later in the book. His citations (with dates) of important events in Italy and Spain in which he participated as performer or director between 1555 and 1600 make his work a summation of styles and techniques of northern Italy during the second half of the 16th century. He is, furthermore, the only authority to include detailed descriptions of various allegorical processions which involved dancers and musicians, together with the precise instrumentation employed, as well as the identification of the characters portrayed.
The treatise's second section includes some advice on ballroom etiquette, but is primarily devoted to the steps and combinations of many complex and highly competitive galliard variations for men (see Dance, fig.8); these include such feats as multiple capers (capriole intrecciate or entrechats), and double turns (salti tondi or tours-en-l’air). It is apparent that the principle of improvised variation in music was applied to dance as well, although the exact relationship between improvised dances and their improvised musical variations is difficult to determine from Negri’s treatise since, unlike Arbeau’s, it does not use dance notation which precisely correlates steps and music. Nevertheless, Negri did give the precise number of leg gestures within a fixed span of time (for example, ‘this variation is done quickly, and has 25 strokes in four musical measures’), thus making it possible to establish norms of tempo. However, the final choice of tempo for a given variation depends as much on its physical requirements as on the size, skill and elevation of the dancer.
In the third section of the treatise Negri gave a set of rules for steps, which appears to be largely taken from Caroso’s Il ballarino; but most of the section is devoted to directions for 43 dance choreographies, by himself and others, with their music printed in lute tablature and mensural notation. Many of the dances are both more difficult and more interesting than those supplied by Arbeau and Caroso. A considerable number are figure dances for two couples, a type not found elsewhere, and there are also figure dances for four couples which employ figures similar to those in English country dances and American square-dances and reels. Some of the dances, such as La Corrente and Alemana, are the only Italian version of their types to appear in a 16th-century source.
The musical significance of Negri’s dance collection is considerable, even though much of it is composed by means of a pasticcio technique in which pre-existing melodic or rhythmic cells are united and reunited to fit the music to the dance. The music is simple, homophonic and repetitive. Popular bassi ostinati of the period appear, for example the canary and passacaglia (La Catena d'Amore). One-movement dances have from one to three strains, each made up of two- or four-bar phrases. Most of the ballettos, which dominate the collection, are in several movements which may be musically related, with different mensurations and varying instructions as to the repetition of sections. They give valuable information about the variation suite and its performing practice. Most begin with an unnamed movement in duple metre, similar to a figured pavan, followed by a galliard (so-named in source); the piece may close with a return of the first movement or sometimes with a canary in rapid triple metre. Some dances are set to popular and pre-existing vocal pieces by such composers as Orazio Vecchi or Gastoldi (e.g. Vecchi's So ben mi ch'a buon tempo), showing how such music could be choreographed, adapted or supplemented to suit the choreographers' purposes. Negri's specific rubrics for the musical paths to be followed by the musicians reveal a complexity in combining musical strains with choreography which is not evident when looking at the music alone. Those dances specifically designed for the stage typify what contemporary composers such as Monteverdi would have expected for their staged balli. The Brando detto Alta regina, for four shepherds and four shepherdesses (see illustration), is an elaborate finale to a set of intermedi of 1599 that included the Orpheus myth.
Le gratie d’amore (Milan, 1602/R, 2/1604 as Nuove inventioni di balli); ed. and trans. of 1st edn in Kendall, 1985
PirrottaDO
L. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)
P. Aldrich: Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody (New York, 1966)
J. Sutton: ‘Reconstruction of 16th-Century Dance’, Dance History Research: Warrenton, VA, 1969, ed. J.W. Kealiinohomoku (New York, 1970), 56–63
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Zur Entstehung des modernen Taktsystems im 17. Jahrhundert’, AMw, xviii (1961), 223–40
M.B. Collins: ‘The Performance of Sesquialtera and Hemiolia in the 16th Century’, JAMS, xvii (1964), 5–28
J. Sutton: Renaissance Revisited (New York, 1972) [accompanying film also available]
Y. Kendall: Le gratie d'amore (1602) (diss., Stanford U., 1985)
P. Jones: ‘Spectacle in Milan: Cesare Negri's Torch Dances’, EMc, xiv (1986), 182–98
J. Sutton: Introduction toFabritio Caroso's Nobiltà di dame (1600) (Oxford, 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
A. Feves: ‘Fabritio Caroso and the Changing Shape of the Dance, 1550–1600’, Dance Chronicle, xiv (1991), 159–74
P. Jones: ‘The Editions of Cesare Negri's Le Gratie d'Amore: Choreographic Revisions in Printed Copies’, Studi musicali, xxi (1991), 21–33
J. Sutton: ‘Musical Forms and Dance Forms in the Dance Manuals of Sixteenth-Century Italy’, The Marriage of Music and Dance: London 1991
M. Esses: Dance and Instrumental Diferencias in Spain during the 17th and Early 18th Centuries (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991)
W. Kirkendale: The Court Musicians in Florence during the Principate of the Medici (Florence, 1993)
P. Gargiulo, ed.: La danza italiana tra Cinque e Seicento: studi per Fabrizio Caroso da Sermoneta (Rome, 1997)
JULIA SUTTON