3. Early history to about 1600.

The earliest instrumental dances to have survived come from the early and late 14th century in two
manuscripts of French and Italian provenance respectively (F-Pn fr.844 and GB-Lbl Add.29987). Each
contains eight estampies, numbered from one to eight in the earlier source and provided with titles in the
later. In neither case is it a question of sequential performance, however, and hence of a suite; the length
and complexity of the individual pieces, as well as the fact that they are in different keys, make this
unlikely. But two other much shorter pieces in the Italian source, entitled Lamento di Tristano and La
Manfredina, are each paired with a faster-moving piece using the same thematic material condensed and
speeded up, called La Rotta. Here, among the earliest examples of notated dance music, is evidence of
what was probably an ancient tradition that carried forward to form one of the many evolutionary threads
of Renaissance and Baroquesuite composition: the Tanz and Nachtanz, a pair of dances of which the first
was danced with low or gliding steps and the second with high or leaping ones, and whose most familiar
English manifestation was the pavan and galliard.

The surviving dance music of the 15th century is contained chiefly in dance manuals and collections of
basse danse tenors. The dance manuals, notably those of Domenico da Piacenza (or da Ferrara; 1445),
Antonio Cornazano (1455), Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (c1463, also published under the name Giovanni
Ambrosio as he was later known), supply evidence that confirms and illuminates what is adumbrated in La
Manfredina and Lamento di Tristano, namely a practice widespread in Italy and extending to Germany of
creating pairs and sometimes larger groups of dances out of the same material. In the case of the
archetypal bassadanzasaltarello pair, the material was a tenore (cantus firmus) which served as the basis
for improvised polyphony. It could be danced in four mensurations, corresponding to four dance types: the
grave bassadanza, the moderate quadernaria, the livelier saltarello and the quick piva. Three and even
four of these were used in the pantomimic balli, though the norm for ordinary dancing was the pair
(see BASSE DANSE).

The French equivalent of the bassadanzasaltarello, known principally through the dance treatise of Michel
de Toulouse (1480s) and the magnificent manuscript B-Br 9085, was the basse danse and pas de Brabant,
though the evidence for coupling the latter to the former is indirect. The combination was called basse
danse majeure, and the freer ballo, basse danse mineure. An internationally popular example of the
latter, Rti bouilli joyeux, in the version in the Brussels manuscript (facs. in J.L. Jackman, ed.: Fifteenth-
Century Basse Dances, Wellesley, MA, 1964) shows certain features linking it to the suite idea (see Heartz,
A 15th-Century Ballo, 1966). Three dance tenors in three different kinds of rhythm succeed one another:
Roti boully ioyeulx en pas de breban; Lomme et la famme ensemble doibvent faire cecy deux fois. Et
puis sensuit la basse danse; and the basse danse itself with choreographic directions. Evidently the order
of basse dansepas de Brabant was reversed for the basse danse mineure. The order was determined by
choreographic rather than musical considerations, but to the ear the result would have been a set of three
rhythmically contrasting pieces unified by the melodic similarity of the tenors of the first and last and
enlivened by the improvised accompaniments of the other instruments.
Although no written part-music clearly intended for dancing has survived from the 15th century, an idea of
the probable character of these accompaniments can be formed from a four-voice dance pair discovered
and published by Heartz (Hoftanz, 1966); a 16th-century source (D-B 1516) also offers evidence of the
penetration of the basse danse into Germany under the name of Hoftanz, albeit with rhythmic
modifications. In this case, the afterdance, called Tripl (another term, Hoppertanz, suggests saltarello), is
based on a different tenor from that of its companion, whose tune, Le petit Rouen, appears in basse danse
sources of the preceding century.

Some time in the later 15th century, a new kind of basse danse appeared, called commune (the older
type being then called incommune). The first polyphonic examples now known, those in Attaingnant's
lute and ensemble collections of 1530, were based not on the old tenors but mainly on the newly
fashionable chansons musicales, adapted to fit the two sections of 20 and 12 steps into which the variable
15th-century choreography had crystallized. The second section, called by Attaingnant recoupe, by
Arbeau retour, and more generally moiti, was often followed by a third piece, of independent lineage,
called tourdion; and the three, unified by key, though not necessarily by musical material or even mode,
were recognized as a typical set as late as 1589 by Arbeau (Heartz, 1964).

Another grouping of three dances, descended from the second, third and fourth mensural transformations
of the bassadanza, made its appearance in the fourth book of PetruccisIntabolatura de lauto (1508). Here
the arranger, J.A. Dalza, called attention to what he must have felt was an important feature of his
collection: Nota che tutte le pauane hanno el suo saltarello e piua. In 1546, Dalzas grouping of pieces
was used (rhythmically, if not in the choice of terms for the dances) in a tablature by Antonio Rotta, and,
with the second and third pieces reversed, in another by Domenico Bianchini of the same year. This new
order, in Bianchini's terminology,Pass'e mezzo, La sua padoana, Il suo saltarello, was taken up in the four
collections of 156179 by Giacomo Gorzanis and in Matthus Waissel's tablature of 1573. The Italians
continued in general to base all the dances of a group on the same thematic material, using techniques
involving variation on a ground, parody and paraphrase. P.P. Borrono (1536, 1546 and 1548) was an
exception with his sets, which consisted of a pavan followed by three saltarellos, of which only the first was
derived from the pavan. The second of these collections contains a remark indicative, like Dalzas, of a
concern for the overall form of his groups in performance: where the last two saltarellos are missing, one
should borrow them from other groups. Here an Italian was recommending explicitly what others had
tacitly practised, namely the occasional compilation ofsuites from independent sources.

The first known groups of pieces bearing the name suite were the suyttes de bransles in Estienne du
Tertre's Septime livre de danceries of 1557 (fig.1). Arbeau (Orchesographie, 1588) described many
sequences of branles, a common one being branle double, branle simple (these two sedate ones for the
elderly at a ball), branle gay (for the young marrieds), and branles de Champagne orde Bourgogne (for the
youngest and most agile). For Arbeau, the gavotte was a miscellany of double branles, selected by
musicians and arranged in a sequence (Eng. trans., 175); here and elsewhere (pp.129, 137) he made it
clear that it was normally the musicians at a dance who assembled the branles into suites, drawing on
their memory or on tablatures in which the branles were classified by type, if at all, and ordering them
according to the demands of the dancers or current fashion. Thus, with rare exceptions, the printed suites
of branles constituted the raw material for practical use, and not the finished products themselves; for the
groups as played, there could be no question of musical unification beyond similarity of key.

Title-page of Estienne du Tertres Septime livre de danceries (Paris: Attaingnant, 1557)

liotheque Nationale, Paris / photo J. Colomb-Gerard

The vast majority of dance groups from the 1540s to the end of the century are pairs; and of this majority,
the overwhelming majority again are pairs of which the first dance is either a pavan or a passamezzo and
the second either a galliard or a saltarello. Since the two dances in each position are rhythmically and
historically related, the actual variety of pairs drawn from these four dances is smaller than the names
might suggest. Normally, the dances of a pair are based on the same material one of the passamezzo
progressions, perhaps with a tune as well, a vocal piece, an earlier version of one of the dances and so on.

Here, not less than in larger dance groups (branles excepted), the tangential relation to variation sets is
obvious, and with the expansion of the individual dances of a group into subsets of variations, either
written or improvised, to meet the requirements of the ballroom or to amuse the amateur player, variation
and suite became increasingly interwoven. Two ambitious complexes by Giorgio Mainerio (first printed in Il
primo libro de balli, 1578) are essentially expanded passamezzo-saltarello pairs in which both dances are
followed by a ripresa (which carries on with the rhythm and certain motifs of the parent dance but
abandons its phraseology and passamezzo progression). The first three of the resulting four sections are
presented in three to five modi, or variations. Each complex has a total of 13 strains, all more or less
related thematically. Such complexes became very common in German lute music.

In Italy, France and England towards the end of the century the development of entertainments involving
both theatrical and social dancing (mascheratas, balli, ballets de cour and masques) brought further
initiatives with consequences for the suite. Successions beginning with an entre or intrada and continuing
with varied dances were either chosen from among current social types or specially composed to
accompany mimed action. On the evidence of the music that has survived from these early, quasi-
theatrical festivities most of it known in early 17th-century arrangements for lute (Robert Ballard, 1611
and 1614) or ensemble (Praetorius, 1612) or through the schematic renderings of Andr Philidor (1680
1700), or through dance manuals (Fabritio Caroso, 1581, Cesare Negri, 1602) groups of pieces were
unified by key and sometimes by subtle thematic connections, though not usually by variation procedures.
Contrast was achieved through rhythm, shifts of mode, occasional harmonic surprises (Ballard, ballets Des
esclaves andDes chevaux), and, if Ballard's versions reflect anything of the originals, sharply distinctive
textures.

4. Early 17th century.

The two decades preceding the Thirty Years War saw an extraordinary burst of creativity in European
instrumental music, accompanied by and perhaps partly resulting from a lively exchange of musicians
among all countries and a growing consciousness of national styles. The English presence throughout
northern Europe was especially prominent during this period owing to the travels of the musicians
themselves and to extensive German publication of their works. Italy continued to be a magnet and a
training-ground, and the traffic between England and France was intense because of royal connections.
France exported dancing-masters and lutenists, and German anthologists made a special place for Polish
dances in their collections. The Low Countries were a crossroads and haven for exiles; the Italians took up
the Spanish guitar and its music with enthusiasm. All this mobility left its mark on the suite, though it is
not always possible to tell in what direction the influences were moving because of the lack of dates to
establish precedence.

The usual groupings of dances of the late Renaissance persisted until after 1600, though the popularity of
the ensemble canzona in Italy apparently diverted further development of the large passamezzo
complexes from ensemble to keyboard (e.g. a 30-page Pass'e mezzo antico di sei parti and Saltarello in
Giovanni Picchi's Intavolatura di balli, 1621, for harpsichord). The favourite dance in Italy was the galliard
without pavan, which was rare in Italy at this period (G.F. Anerio and Salamone Rossi, 1607; also G.M.
Trabaci, 1615, with nine galliards in a row).

It was mainly in the field of practical dance music that the Italians produced suites during this period.
Antonio Brunelli published a balletto danced by the noble ladies of Pisa in a version for five voices with
text and an ornamented intabulation for chitarrone per sonare solo senza cantare (Scherzi libro terzo,
1616). It consisted of a ballo grave, a seconda parte in gagliarda, and aterza parte in corrente all related
thematically (Nettl, 1921). Two years later, Lorenzo Allegri brought out a collection of eight balli, each with
a note giving the occasion of its performance (Il primo libro delle musiche, 1618). The first (printed in
Beck, 1964) has the same scheme as Brunelli's. Others have four or more pieces, including two brandi,
a canario and a gavotta. In both Brunelli and Allegri, the dances are derived from the first of the group by
rhythmic transformation. In Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali of 1607, there is an entrata followed by seven
texted dances in contrasting rhythms. The dances have but one strain and several are connected by half-
cadences (the composer may be Monteverdi's brother, Giulio Cesare).

One of the liveliest figures in Germany at the turn of the century was Valentin Haussmann, who gathered
Polish and East Prussian dances for his collections and also included English pavans and galliards in a
publication of 1604. Like Brunelli's balletto, Haussmann's many dance pairs show the overlap between
vocal and instrumental music at the time. His Neue liebliche Melodien(five editions, 15981606) have
German texts but are mehrern theils zum Tantze zu gebrauchen, and some of his Neue artige und
liebliche Tntze (six editions between the same years) are texted, some not. In the preface
to Venusgarten (1602), Haussmann confirmed what common sense suggests: that after-dances could be
improvised where needed; at the same time, he made a puzzling distinction: as an alternative to
extemporization, the players might follow Polish usage (unexplained). Other composers or anthologists of
ensemble dance music in the first decade of the 17th century were Coler, J.C. Demantius, Melchior Franck,
Balthasar Fritsch, Johann Groh, H.L. Hassler, Georg Hasz, Mathias Mercker, Johann Staden and Johann
Staricius. Christian Hildebrand of Hamburg brought out two important collections containing much English
music in 1607 (with Zacharias Fllsack) and 1609. The younger Bernhard Schmid's keyboard tablature of
1607 ends with 12 galliards. A few passamezzo complexes for lute are in the Gresse manuscript (NL-Uim)
and the tablature of J. Arpinus. In general, groupings in all this production are confined to Tanz
Nachtanz pairs, with other dances distributed at random in the sources or else (especially in the case of
galliards) arranged by type.

With the exception of the lute tablatures of Anthoine Francisque (Le trsor dOrphe, 1600) and the
expatriate J.-B. Besard (Thesaurus harmonicus, 1603), and an anonymous collection of Airs nouveaux et
chansons dancer bransles, voltes, courantes, ballets & autres (1608), there is a remarkable lack of
dated sources for French dance music from these years. But the evidence of what remains and of slightly
later sources like Robert Ballard's lute tablature of 1611 makes it clear that the typical suites were sets of
airs from ballets or the traditional sets of branles. Other dances were classified by type Besard devoted
whole volumes to a single type. Within these volumes, pieces with the same tonic (but sometimes with
different tunings of the bass strings) were grouped together. The French were not interested in dance pairs
of the German type, though the varied repeats in Ballard's pieces exhibit a richly developed technique
based perhaps on English models but emphasizing broken textures rather than divisions.

Across the Channel, the pavangalliard complexes continued, reaching their limit of expansion perhaps in
Scotland with William Kinloch's lang pavan and galliard for keyboard from Duncan Burnett's music book
(GB-En, c1615). This set, which runs to no fewer than 243 long bars, has the usual varied repeats in the
pavan, and the resulting complex is again varied. But what is not so common is that the galliard is entirely
based on the pavan and duplicates its pattern of variations (Caldwell, 1973).

The impulse towards new suite-like groupings seems to have emanated from England, the chief agents
being William Brade and John Coprario. But there is no evidence to prove that the former did not find the
stimulus for his ideas in Germany, or the latter for his in Italy; nor is it possible to say anything more
precise about Coprario's fantasia-suites than that they must have been written before his death in 1626.
Nothing is known of Brade before his appearance as an established musician on the Continent in 1594;
his suites a5, consisting of paduana, galliard and either allmand or coranta, cannot be completely
explained by reference to either English or German practice, though his coupling in certain instances of a
canzona (i.e. a free contrapuntal piece) with dance movements suggests a possible link with Coprario. In
any case, the first publication anywhere to consist of suite-like groupings as a series of uniformly
constituted composite works was Peuerl's Newe Padouan, Intrada, Dntz und Galliarda of 1611. The
individual dances were simply numbered consecutively, as was to be the practice for the next 75 years,
but the tenfold recurrence of four dances in the order indicated by the title, the key unity, and above all
the similarity of thematic material make clear the composer's intention to compose integrated suites.

The climax of this brief evolution, Schein's Banchetto musicale (1617), contains 20 sequences of
paduana, gagliarda, courente, allmande and tripla. Here, the principle of decreasing stylization cited above
(2) can be seen at its clearest: the richly polyphonic five-part pavanes in the English manner resolve
gradually to the less complicated textures of the popular allemande (the GermanTantz) and tripla, the
simplicity of these last two reflected in the reduction of the number of parts from five to four. The dances
of each suite were so ordered dass sie beydes in Tono undinventione einander fein respondiren
(composer's preface); and indeed the thematic correspondence among the more stylized dances is varied,
elaborate and often subtle. The tripla, on the other hand, is merely the allemande (itself a kind of
reduction of the preceding dances to thematic essentials) transformed metrically, in the manner of an
extemporized Nachtanz.

A year later, Isaac Posch (like Peuerl, an Austrian) published his Musicalische Ehrenfreudt, with
some Balletten and 15 sets of three thematically related dances of which the second, a Tantz, corresponds
to Schein's allmande and is similarly followed by its tripla. The first dance is either a galliard or a courante.
Posch's title and foreword supply precious information about the way this music was used. As one might
imagine, it was played at dinner, banquets, weddings, as well as andern erlichen Conviviis in
distinguished households; but the composer wrote that the Ballettenwere most suitable for the table, while
the suites could be used either at table or afterwards for dancing. On the extemporizing of Nachtnze (he
used the term Proportion), he complained that the practice by most composers of omitting
the Nachtanz allows each musician to play it as he likes, leading to great disorder. A correct Proportion,
such as the most distinguished present-day dancers are accustomed to, is therefore provided for
each Tantz.

Deeply rooted as it was in the Tanz-Nachtanz tradition, the variation suite occupied but a tiny corner of
published German dance music of the first 20 years of the 17th century four collections out of more than
50, all appearing between 1609 and 1618. Its importance was a matter of high musical quality rather than
of representative or seminal force. Brade, Peuerl and Posch all went on to publish later collections, but
none continued with the suite idea, reverting to the more usual pairs and miscellanies. It was nearly 20
years before another set of uniformly constituted suites, Vierdanck's Erster Theil newer Pavanen,
Gagliarden, Balletten und Correnten (1637), appeared in Germany. The 11 suites of this collection also
marked what may have been the first appearance in Germany of works for two violins and continuo.
Vierdanck's pavans and galliards were related; nevertheless, the vitality had gone out of the
variation suite, and although suites of thematically related dances continued to be written throughout the
17th century and into the 18th, as described above (2), and although courantes were fairly often related
thematically to the allemandes that preceded them, the only systematic collection of variation suites to be
published was the Hortus musicus (1688) by Reincken, who also left eight variation suites for keyboard in
manuscript (Hill, 1987). According to Niedt (pt ii, 1706, 2/1721), the composition of different suite dances
on the same bass appears to have been cultivated as a pedagogical exercise around the time of Bach.

The Terpsichore of Michael Praetorius (1612) belongs to the history of French rather than German dance
music. Praetorius said in his preface that most of the more than 400 tunes were given him by Antoine
Emeraud, dancing-master to the Duke of Brunswick; those, Praetorius himself harmonized. Others had
been composed by P.F. Caroubel, and of still others Praetorius had the treble and bass and supplied the
inner parts. The melodies, if not all the settings, may safely be taken as representative of the repertory of
the French court violinists under Henri IV. Somewhat less than half the collection is taken up with ballets
and suites of branles. To what extent the former are complete or the latter were assembled by Praetorius
himself is not clear. Neither the suites of branles nor the ballets always stay in the same key. The second
set of branles, called Branle simple de Novelle, has its first six tunes (the same as the first six in
the Ballet des cornemuses, Robert Ballard, 1614) transposed from D to C because players might find the
key of D sehr schwehr und gar zu frembd! There follow four tunes in D minor or D major and two more in
C, after which one is to finish the suite with nine tunes from the preceding set, which is in G major and
minor. Nothing is said about transposing to bring all these dances into the same key, though a general
remark giving licence to transpose occurs in the preface. Transposition is not indicated for the ballets,
however, which sometimes drift through several keys (Ballet de Monseigneur le prince de Brunsweig;
Ballet de Monsieur de Vendosme faict a Fontainebleau). The dances of the ballets are not thematically
related. Some of the branle groups, however, are subtly unified through a similarity of the melodic curve
(II) or of motifs (XIV).