MUL 2010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Ballata, Courtly Love, Melisma
4 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
Music was already the food of love in the middle ages long before shakespeare coined the phrase. The ballata was one of many genres of secular song in the middle ages. Hear the origins of the genre in dance. Setting captures the feeling of bodies in motion. This was the age of courtly love- a highly stylized form of love in which a knight declares himself as the servant of the lazxxdy he is wooing. Polyphony- two or more voices of equal importance combine in such as way that each voice retains its own identity. Triple meter- consists of one accented(strong) beat followed by two unaccented(weak) beats (1-2-3 | 1-2-3) Mostly conjunct(stepwise) melodic lines are subdivided into smaller units, each of which ends with a cadence, a brief stopping point at which the music pauses. Landini always cadences on the unison- both voices sing exactly the same note.
