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