ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the investigation that led to the comparative study of the dance-masters’ standard galliard typology and the galliards of Salamone Rossi and other composers, including the resultant problems the latter pose for dancers and modern editors. Musicologists, music performers and dance practitioners have tended to base their ideas of how the galliard was performed on Arbeau’s descriptions in his 1589 Orchesographie because of its clear instructions, alignment of steps with musical notation and accessibility in translation. The gagliarda music in Caroso’s Nobilta di dame and Negri’s Le gratie d’amore appears with the balletti choreographies, whereas Arbeau’s seven gaillarde tunes are for the independent dance type. Much of the galliard music published in northern Europe in the mid-sixteenth century also confirms the Italian dance treatises’ typology. Musicologists writing about the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century galliard continue to describe its ‘regular’ or ‘uniform’ phrase structure and the ‘symmetry of the phrases’.
