Dancing Harmony: The Encounter between Music and Dance in the XVth Century Italian Courts

Abstract

The consolidated dance-music couple, so rooted in the tradition of Western dance to the present day, is a cultural construct that has its origins in the Renaissance, when for the first time in history dance is numbered among the Arts. The birth of specific dance treatises, which prescript a way of dancing for the hegemonic class, responds to the need to systematize a choreic style able to discipline the body, to provide it with features of social distinction, to reduce a physical practice through Art using words and musical notation and, finally, to leave a trace of a repertoire of choreographic compositions worthy of memory, some of which with its own musical accompaniment. The association between the two Arts reaches a point of great solidity in sharing of the measure (ethical and numerical) aimed at the aesthetic achievement of harmony.