Dance music

Dance Music is music that is specifically written to dance to. We have surviving sources for both Medieval Dance music and Renaissance dance music in surprisingly good quantities and quality.

In many cases we have surviving music for a dance, without the surviving choreography. Many people have through various means attempted to reconstruct a dance matching the available music but the end result is usually more of an invention and probably bears little resemblence to the original, or is based on very limited primary sources.

Much dance music was written by the Renaissance dance masters themselves such as Cesare Negri or Fabritio Caroso, but some of it was written by the various Renaissance Musicians such as Josquin des Pres or Tielman Susato.