A bassadanza tune. One of the few surviving from 15th-century Italy, it was used widely as a cantus firmus in the 16th and early 17th centuries, particularly in instrumental music and didactic exercises. (For the dance form of the tune, see Crane, no.17.) It is also known by many other names, including Re di Spagna, Alta, Lo bas despagno, La baixa de Castilla, El bayli de Spagna, Le bail despaigne, La basse dance de Spayn, Casulle le novelle and Spanier Tantz.
The earliest source of the Spagna melody is Antonio Cornazano’s dance treatise Libro dell’arte del danzare (1455), where it is used to illustrate the application of various misure, or metres, to dance tenors (see Saltarello). It also appears in dance treatises from northern Europe, for example as the tenor for the basse danse Casulle la nouele in Michel de Toulouse’s L’art et instruction de bien dancer (Paris, c1488). It is thus one of the very few dance tenors or tunes known to have been in both the bassadanza and basse danse repertories. A two-part setting of the Spagna tune in a Perugian manuscript, published by Bukofzer, is the earliest surviving polyphonic elaboration of the tune, and has formed the cornerstone of the widely accepted practice among early dance musicians of improvisation on basse danse tenors. Crane listed eight other polyphonic settings from before 1520, including one printed later by Hans Ott (Novum et insigne opus musicum, 1537) and Adam Berg (Secunda pars magni operis musici, 1559) as a motet by Josquin (Propter peccata quae peccastis; see H. Osthoff, Josquin Desprez, 1962–5, ii, 397ff), and suggested that these may have retained at least an association with actual dance accompaniment. Isaac used the tune as the cantus firmus for his Missa ‘La Spagna’ (printed by Petrucci, 1506), and it continued to be a common cantus prius factus throughout the 16th century, sometimes identifiable only by the solmization syllables of its incipit, la–mi–re–fa–mi–re. Instrumental settings include variations by Spinacino, Kotter, Kleber, Capirola, Ortiz and Cabezón (see HAM, no.102).
It is not certain when the Spagna tune came to be a frequent cantus firmus for counterpoint training, nor when it was first associated with the 16th-century composer Costanzo Festa. Ludovico Zacconi’s note to printed counterpoints on ‘La bascia di Costanzo Festa’ in Prattica di musica seconda parte (1622, p.199) seems representative of 17th-century knowledge of the pedagogical tradition: ‘Note that the above cantus firmus made of breves is called “Bascia”. I have not been able to investigate why it is so called and designated; one day while I was talking with a professor of music he told me that it must be the cantus firmus on which the same Costanzo Festa once made 120 counterpoints’. Zacconi’s unnamed professor of music is thus the source for the still unchallenged ascription of 120 lost settings of the Spagna to Festa. Zacconi drew his example from Scipione Cerreto’s Della prattica musica vocale et strumentale (1601); Cerreto did not, however, choose to speculate on the tune’s origins or title, but instead drew his readers’ attention to the challenges the tune presented for writing counterpoints invertible at the 10th, especially in resolving mi-contra-fa cross-relations (p.293). Cerreto did not, in his turn, name the source of his example, but the tune had apparently been identified with Festa for some time. 157 counterpoints and canons by the Roman composer and pedagogue G.M. Nanino are extant in various manuscripts thought to represent notes from his counterpoint instruction; 28 of them were published in his Motecta (1586). A number of early 17th-century composers, notably Neapolitans such as Rocco Rodio, G.M. Trabaci and Ascanio Mayone, used the Spagna tune, with its pedagogical name, as the basis for works variously entitled ‘ricercare’, ‘canzona’ and ‘capriccio’. In all there are known to be some 280 polyphonic settings of the tune. Significantly, settings of the tune described as ‘sopra il canto fermo di Costanzo Festa’ (or some such phrase) do not retain the rhythmic structure of the original dance tenor, a structure almost invariably found in the settings using one of the many dance-related titles.
The 16th- and 17th-century ostinato pattern known as ‘La Spagnoletta’ is unrelated to the Spagna melody.
BrownI
M.F. Bukofzer: ‘A Polyphonic Basse Dance of the Renaissance’, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New York, 1950), 190–216
O. Gombosi, ed.: Compositione di Meser Vincenzo Capirola: Lute-Book (circa 1517) (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1955) [pp.xxxvi–lxiii present a basic historical survey]; review in Mf, xi (1958), 251–2
O. Kinkeldey: ‘Dance Tunes of the Fifteenth Century’, Instrumental Music: Cambridge, MA, 1957, 3–30, 89–152
F. Crane: Materials for the Study of the Fifteenth Century Basse Danse (New York, 1968)
I. Brainard: The Art of Courtly Dancing in the Early Renaissance (West Newton, MA, 1981) [esp. pt II]
W. Marrocco: Inventory of 15th Century Bassedanze, Balli & Balletti in Italian Dance Manuals (New York, 1981)
G. Ebreo da Pesaro: De practica seu arte tripudii/On the Practice or Art of Dancing (MS, 1463), ed. and trans. B. Sparti (Oxford, 1993)
SUZANNE G. CUSICK