Villotta (pl. villotte) is a type of popular song found mainly in Northern Italy, especially in

Friuli Friuli ( fur, Friûl, sl, Furlanija, german: Friaul) is an area of Northeast Italy with its own particular cultural and historical identity containing 1,000,000 Friulians. It comprises the major part of the autonomous region Friuli Venezia Giuli ...

. Often using

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

or folk songs in

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

, the structure of the modern villotta entails four

hendecasyllabic In poetry, a hendecasyllable (sometimes hendecasyllabic) is a line of eleven syllables. The term may refer to several different poetic meters, the older of which are quantitative and used chiefly in classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) poetry, and ...

lines of verse followed by a refrain. Villotte from the sixteenth-century are typically

strophic Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, ...

dialect songs that frequently contain nonsense syllables and passages in

triple time Triple metre (or Am. triple meter, also known as triple time) is a musical metre characterized by a ''primary'' division of 3 beats to the bar, usually indicated by 3 (simple) or 9 ( compound) in the upper figure of the time signature, with , , ...

.Donna G. Cardamone, 'Villotta', ''Grove Music Online'' ed. L. Macy.

Footnotes

Bibliography

* Donna G. Cardamone, 'Villotta', ''Grove Music Online'' ed. L. Macy. Available at http://www.grovemusic.com/. * Alfred Einstein, ''The Italian Madrigal''. Translated by Alexander H. Knappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk. 3 vols. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...

, 1949. Italian folk songs {{folk-song-stub