estampie

estampie, courtly dance of the 12th–14th century. Mentioned in trouvère poetry, it was probably danced with sliding steps by couples to the music of vielles (medieval viols); its afterdance was the saltarello. In musical form the estampie derives from the sequence, a medieval genre of Latin hymn. Like the sequence it has a series of repeated melodic phrases (aa, bb, cc, . . . ); phrase endings in the repetitions are often varied.

Estampies are among the earliest surviving examples of written instrumental music. The famous troubadour song “Kalenda maya” (by Raimbaut de Vaqueyras, died 1207) is a poem set to an existing estampie. Whether the estampie was identical with, or merely related to, the stantipes, a dance mentioned in the 13th century, is debated by scholars.