Moresche

Moresche is the plural of moresca, meaning Moorish thing, or Moorish girl in Italian. Both the singular and plural can refer to both a 15th~16th century dance genre or to a 15th~16th century song genre. This article concerns the genre of moresche, polyphonic "moorish" songs.

Moresche musically have no common heritage with the moresca dance form. Instead moresche are related to villanella and villanescas, stylized village songs for three to five voices. The significant difference relates to their texts – parodying the Italian spoken by African slaves in Italy. A related genre are greghesche, madrigals imitating Italian spoken by Greeks in Italy. The texts of moresche are often near untranslatable, due either to obscenity and double entendre, or nonsense language, or both.