5 Italian Dances from keyboard collections

for 4 instruments.

These five Italian dances are taken from two keyboard anthologies: nos. 1-3 are after Gardane´s Intabolatura Nova of 1551, the other two pieces after a manuscript source, MS Magl. XIX 115 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, which was written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Two modern editions of the Gardane print have been published, one by Daniel Heartz in the Corpus of Early Keyboard Music series, the other by William Oxenbury (London, Stainer & Bell).
These transcriptions aim in principle to produce versions that might have survived in partbooks, following the normal conventions of Italian dance music around 1550; the Gardane versions, while quite crude in some ways, are also quite idiomatic for the keyboard, and often add notes above the tune; thus a straight transcription would have been problematic. Those divisions that seem appropriate for ensemble use have, however, been incorporated in the edition, though sometimes in a slightly altered form, but others have been stripped out. A curious feature of several of the Gardane pieces is that the first-time version of a section is often more, rather than less, elaborate than the second: by inverting the two sections we hopefully end up with something more similar to what might have been improvised.

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