ABSTRACT
Placing the Lo dances in the context of trecento music is made difficult by the nearly complete lack of surviving comparanda. The many repertories that have engaged Timothy J. McGee’s attention, none is more enchanting than the corpus of pre-1500 dance music preserved in Western European sources. The choice of the cultural identity of the Lo dances is the single most important interpretative decision facing a musician who wishes to perform them. Their cultural identity is a principal determinant of the possible range of instrumentation, ornamentation, playing style and even speculative choreography for the dances. The Lo dances may be the sole surviving vestiges of common, flourishing genres of improvised, non-notated Florentine dance. The musical characteristics of the dances that seem at variance with the vocal repertory of the trecento, particularly those characteristics of the longer dances that strike some as foreign or ‘exotic’, may have been normal and expected features of Florentine or Tuscan dance music around 1400.
