To facilitate searching of early music types on this website., I have organized the types into a hierarchy. Thus, for instance, dance is a music type, but dances may be court dances or popular dances. A passamezzo, for instance, is a court dance while a branle is a popular dance. But passamezzos also come in different types, such as passamezzo antico and passamezzo moderno. Branles come in different types, such as a branle simple or branle gay.

In searching for types, you will mostly just enter the type you want — pavane, galliard, fantasia, or whatever. But you may want to take advantage of the website’s hierarchical system to do a more precise kind of search. You do this by clicking on the “Hierarchical Search” toggle switch. This gives you a list of all the top items in the music types hierarchy. From there, by clicking on any of them, you can go to any place in the hierarchy and do a search from there. For instance, if you are looking for a kind of religious piece, you can click on “religious” and go ahead and explore any of the sub-categories. Clicking on “mass” will give you a list of all the sub-parts of a mass represented in the database, like “credo” or “crucifixis est”. You can also use the hierarchical search to find pieces that have certain rhythmic or harmonic patterns or other characteristics.

If you are interested, I would recommend exploring the different hierarchies to see if you come up with something useful.