Though dressage traces its beginnings back to ancient Greece, top class high school dressage and riding to the accompaniment of music essentially developed from the seemingly near mystical horsemanship displays in France and Italy between the 16th and the19th centuries. In the later part of the 16th century, the north of Italy specialized in Renaissance art based on equestrian motifs. It is to these areas the beginnings of what is now the dressage musical freestyle can be traced. Dressage was forever tied to music there, though not in the renowned music college of Pignatelli in Naples. This essentially occurred in the schools belonging to Fredirico Grisone and Fiaschi. Both these men penned treatises on dressage set to music. Pignatelli was actually the pioneer in training horses in pillars, so creating a whole new cultured in horse training, but it’s the music in dressage that has endured and increased the global presence of competitive dressage.

In sixteenth century Italy, music was essentially brought into equestrian activities to enable easy teaching of tempo and rhythm to horse riders. Grisone believed strongly in using the voice to maintain a horse’s tempo. His dissertation of 1550 was shortly available in German and French too. Fiaschi incorporated short musical stretches that matched equine movements and gaits in his treaty of 1556, so setting a musical vocabulary down on paper for the very first time. Fiaschi egged his riders to master music so well they could sing while riding their horses and ride as if they were doing so to the backdrop of rare and exciting music.

As long ago as 1548, costumed chevaliers in Lyons, France, astounded their audiences with fascinating displays of jumping horses and horses jumping and turning. Small bells were attached to these horses to supply a lovely sound in accompaniment to their prancing. It was said that so sweet was the sound, so pleasant the resonance that folks were no less thrilled than by the sparkling of the finest of gems; they were left wondering whether what they were seeing and hearing was real or all part of a dream. LaBroue wrote in 1602 La Broue that a rider without any musical sensibility was one who could never tune himself good enough to the horse’s tempo and beat to do an excellent job of riding.

In1612, Plunivel, who had revived the soft xenophon equine training methods, came up with an equine ballet honouring Louis XIII’s engagement to Austria’s Anne. The ballet was an impressive success. Though the ballet lasted just a couple of minutes in an otherwise long day dedicated to jousting, lavish parades and carrousels that went well into the late evening, Pluvinel’s ballet outshone everything else when his riders in blinding costumes cavorted around in a display that had the crowd mesmerised.

Though music’s association with dressage goes back a great distance, it was only recently that it made an appearance again in competitive events. Starting with the early twentieth century, dressage events drew to a significant extent on its military origins, instead of on its entertainment worth. The reintroduction of musical freestyle during the 1980s once again had dressage horses dance to perfection in the strongly competitive arena. All at once, an event which was considered as rather uninteresting became a sure crowd pleaser, and the popularity has stayed. Musical freestyle was added to the Olympic format for the 1st time in the 1996 Atlanta Games.

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