Today's post is a complement to the "gavotte history" of eighteenth-century social dance. Already in the court of Louis XIV, a distinction was made between the solo or couple dance of the menuet and the group dance of the contredanse. The first strongly emphasized individual skills and performance, whereas the second emphasized group figures. Under Louis XV, the menuet started to lose favor, becoming a more or less perfunctory beginning to a ball whose main focus was the contredanse. (Richard Semmens,
The bals publics at the Paris Opéra in the Eighteenth Century)
In Bacquoy-Guedon's treatise, the musical examples begin with six "Airs, servant pour exerçer à la mesure du minuet." These are followed by six pieces labeled "menuet," the first four of which have minor-key trios. Together, these 12 pieces chart a history of the dance's music from the seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Bacquoy-Guedon's commentary on these examples starts on [
p. 29 of the treatise].
The first two menuets use an antiquated 3/2 meter (something one rarely sees even in Lully), and their first strains differ in design: sentence in no. 1 and antecedent-continuation in no. 2. The third and fourth airs have an Italianate motivic density that produces an ambiguous presentation-consequent pair in no. 3 but a straightforward sentence in no. 4.
The introduction of eighth-note figures in the sixth air makes it stylistically almost indistinguishable from the first menuet. The opening strains of the fifth and sixth airs, menuets 1-4, and their trios, are all cast in the hybrid antecedent-continuation design, strongly suggesting the eighteenth century turn toward a conventionalized design for the menuet.
Only in the fourth menuet does the sentence re-emerge (or perhaps presentation-consequent, depending on how you interpret bars 5-6). Its trio copies the design, as does menuet no. 5, before the conventional antecedent-continuation design reappears in no. 6.
