Bergamasca

What it means

Bergamasca originally denotes a lively, often rustic and comic folk dance from the area around the northern Italian city of Bergamo. In music theory, it also came to mean, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a fixed, short bass pattern with a characteristic chord progression used as the basis for sets of variations.

This bass pattern is repeated over and over while ever-new melodic and figurative variations unfold above it, similar to other ostinato basses of the period.

Musical use

Composers such as Girolamo Frescobaldi used the bergamasca bass line for virtuosic sets of keyboard variations. The dance itself was often included in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century instrumental collections and sometimes paired with comic or coarse texts.

It should be distinguished from other ostinato bass patterns of the period such as the folia or the romanesca, each of which has its own distinct chord progression.

Performance practice

When playing a bergamasca, keep the recurring bass pattern rhythmically clear so the variations above it remain audible as transformations of the same underlying framework. A dance-like, accented pulse supports its original folk-dance character.