Cunnan:15th Century Italian Dance
The 15th Century Italian Dance Project is an attempt provide a comprehensive set of dance reconsturctions and musical arrangements for the extant corpus of 15th Century Italian Dance.
Dance Reconstruction
A complete list of Italian dances can be found at 15th Century Italian dances. Anything in red can be assumed not have a reconstruction with Cunnan friendly copyright.
If you wish to reconstruct a piece you can follow the red link to place a holding page, with a message along the lines of "Reconstruction pending". It would help if you signed your name to such a message by adding ˜˜˜˜ at the end.
At the moment there is no absolute rule on style. Petit vriens can serve as a guideline to page style for the moment, although it is likely that a better system will be accepted as the benchmark later.
If no music survives for a piece it would be helpful for the music component of the project to point out repeating patterns and themes in the discussion page in order to help a composer trying to write a score for it.
Music
There are two distinct elements to the musical component of this project. The first is creating four-part arrangements for existing melodies. The second is the composition of original dance music to suit the choreography. In either case a look at the page 15th Century Italian Dance Music should be instructive.
At the moment these pieces are to be uploaded as midi files. If you are currently working on a piece, please leave a note on the relevant page to avoid duplication of effort.
Dances needing four part arrangements
Dances needing new compositions
The following pages do not have Cunnan reconstructions, but are in Del's Dance Book, so music would be useful:
Offline project
It is currently envisaged that there will be a recording of the music, with live musicians. This is a long way off though.
Other things
Other things that need doing include
- descriptions for the 15th Century Italian Dance steps
- biographies for Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo.
- More information on the philosophy of dance in 15th century Italy.
