The same principle operates in the final portion of Ortiz’s book, which gives another sort of peek into
the world of the unwritten, and a truly momentous one. “The better to complete this work,” he writes, “I
thought I’d include the following recercadas on these bass lines (cantos llanos) that are usually called
tenors in Italy, but that are mainly played as written here, in four parts, with the recercada over them.”^16
What follows is a series of recercadas in which the model solo improvisation is accompanied not by a
single cantus firmus line playing itself out in abstract long notes from beginning to end, but rather by short,
very rhythmic ostinato chord progressions: harmonic templates or frameworks that are repeated as often
as necessary to fill out the time required for the improvisation (as in “real life” they were repeated as
often as necessary to fill out the time required for dancing).
Ortiz’s instruction method for viol players is the earliest written source to contain these “tenors,” for
which the standard historian’s term is ground bass (or simply ground). Five grounds, all quite similar in
their harmonic structures, were in especially widespread use; they are given, together with their
traditional names, in Ex. 15-12. The duple-metered pair called passamezzo—old (antico) and new
(moderno)—were the ones most closely associated in Ortiz’s time with actual ballroom dancing: the
passamezzo (from passo e mezzo, “a step and a half”) was the somewhat livelier couples dance that
replaced the bassadanza at sixteenth-century Italian courts. “Composed” passamezzos first appeared in
lute tablatures in the 1530s. But the Spanish violist’s frozen improvisations were the first written
compositions to suggest the traditional use of these repetitive cadential formulas, which were employed in
Italy not only to accompany dancing but also to guide the extemporaneous singing of popular poetry since
at least the beginning of the fifteenth century (as we may learn from any literary account of court life, such
as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier).
EX. 15-12 Traditional ground-bass tenorsEX. 15-12B RomanescaEX. 15-12C Folia