balletto, in music, genre of light vocal composition of the late 16th–early 17th centuries, originating in Italy. Dancelike and having much in common with the madrigal, a major vocal form of the period, it is typically strophic (stanzaic) with each of the two repeated parts ending in a “fa-la-la” burden, or refrain. It has a clear alternation of strong and weak beats, a quality common to the lighter forms of the time, such as the canzonetta, villota, villanesca, and villanella. The term was first applied to musical compositions by the Italian Giovanni Gastoldi in 1591 in his Balletti a cinque voci . . . per cantare, sonare, et ballare (Balletti in Five Voices . . . to Sing, Play, and Dance).
Although greatly influenced by the Italian model, the English composer Thomas Morley expanded its contrapuntal and harmonic dimensions in his First Booke of Balletts (1595). Morley’s style influenced not only the English composers but also the German Hans Leo Hassler and his younger contemporaries who transformed the balletto in the early 17th century into a more instrumental and homophonic (chordal) style. The suites of the German Johann Hermann Schein as well as later 17th-century Italian instrumental works often contain such balletti. Both the Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi and, in the 18th century, J.S. Bach wrote instrumental movements entitled balletto. The name was also given to a form of dramatic choreography popular in 15th-century Italy.