(It.: ‘bagpipe’).
An Italian dance of the 15th and 16th centuries. Perhaps originally a peasant dance to the accompaniment of bagpipes, it is described in 15th-century dance manuals as the fastest variety of the courtly bassadanza. Its steps were twice as quick as those of the bassadanza proper and were enlivened by leaps and turns. By about 1450 it had gone somewhat out of fashion, though occasionally a few bars of it were included in ballo melodies as a contrast to their more sedate sections (see Ballo and Basse danse).
The term reappears in early 16th-century sources as the title of a lute dance in quick triple time. The first seven of the nine suites in Dalza's Intabulatura de lauto (Venice, 1508) consist of a pavan, saltarello and piva. These dances are very repetitive but have no clearly defined sectional form. The piva is the fastest of the three, usually being notated in proportio tripla. In the last two suites the final dance is called ‘spingardo’: nevertheless these two spingardos and the pivas of the sixth and seventh suites all begin with the same tune (ex.1). Dalza's book also contains a saltarello and piva for two lutes, in which, bagpipe-like, the second lute is restricted to a tonic chord ostinato. What is probably the earliest source of Italian keyboard dances (I-Vnm ital.iv.1227, dating from c1520) opens with a Padovana in piva (‘Padoana in the style of a bagpipe dance’). An isolated piva occurs in the Intabolatura di lauto libro nono il Bembo of Melchiore de Barberiis (Venice, 1549).
BrownI
O. Gombosi: ‘About Dance and Dance Music in the Late Middle Ages’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 289–305
O. Kinkeldey: ‘Dance Tunes of the Fifteenth Century’, Instrumental Music: Cambridge, MA, 1957, 3–30, 89–152
R. Chiesea: ‘Storia della letteratura del liuto e della chitarra: il Cinquecento, V’, Il Fronimo, i/5 (1973), 15–20
C. Celi: ‘La danza aulica italiana nel XV secolo’, NRMI, xvi (1982), 218–25
B. Sparti: ‘The 15th-Century balli Tunes: a New Look’, EMc, xiv (1986), 346–57
ALAN BROWN