Folia

La Folía (Spanish), or Follies (English), also known as folies d'Espagne (French), La Follia (Italian), and Folia (Portuguese), is one of the oldest remembered European musical themes, or primary material, generally melodic, of a composition, on record. The theme exists in two versions, referred to as early and late folias, the earlier being faster. Folias are generally characterized by having a fixed chord progression.

Due to its musical form, style and etymology of the name, it has been suggested that the melody arose as a dance in the mid or late fifteenth century throughout the Iberian Peninsula, either in Portugal or in the area of the old Kingdom of León, or maybe in the Kingdom of Valencia.^{[citation needed]}

The epithet "Folia" has several meanings in music.

Classical music features both "early Folia", which can take different shapes, and the better-known "later Folia" (also known as "Follia" with double l in Italy, "Folies d'Espagne" in France, and "Faronel [fr]'s Ground" in England). Recent research suggests that the origin of the folia framework lies in the application of a specific compositional and improvisational method to simple melodies in minor mode. Thus, the essence of the "early Folia" was not a specific theme or a fixed sequence of chords but rather a compositional-improvisational process which could generate these sequences of chords. The "later Folia" is a standard chord progression (i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI]-V / i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI7]-V[4-3sus]-i) and usually features a standard or "stock" melody line, a slow sarabande in triple meter, as its initial theme. This theme generally appears at the start and end of a given "folia" composition, serving as "bookends" for a set of variations within which both the melodic line and even the meter may vary. In turn, written sets of variations on the "later Folia" may contain sections consisting of more freely structured music, even in the semblance of partial or pure improvisation (a practice which might be compared in structural concept, if very different in musical material, to the performance in twelve-bar blues and other standard chord progressions that became common in the twentieth century.)

Several sources report that Jean-Baptiste Lully was the first composer to formalize the standard chord progression and melodic line. Other sources note that the chord progression eventually associated with the "later Folia" appeared in musical sources almost a century before the first documented use of the "Folia" name. The progression emerged between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century in vocal repertory found in both Italian ("Canzoniere di Montecassino", "Canzoniere di Perugia" and in the frottola repertoire) and Spanish sources (mainly in the "Cancionero Musical de Palacio" and, some years later, in the ensaladas repertoire).

The framework of the "Later Folia", in the key of G minor, the key that is often used for the "later Folia"; one chord per bar except for the cadential penultimate bar.

The basic 16-bar chord progression:

Over the course of three centuries, more than 150 composers have used it in their works. The first publications of this theme date from the middle of the 16th century, but it is probably much older. Plays of the renaissance theatre in Portugal, including works by Gil Vicente, mention the folia as a dance performed by shepherds or peasants. The possible Portuguese origin was attributed by the 1577 treatise De musica libri septem by Francisco de Salinas; however, one of the oldest folías is that of "Rodrigo Martínez", by an anonymous author, already registered in the Cancionero de Palacio (1470-1500) in Spain, which includes multiple songs and themes from the time of the Catholic Monarchs.