A look at these menuets shows how closely Caplin's analysis model and terms fits music of the later 18th and early 19th centuries -- by negative example. When ideas are three bars rather than two and clearly demarcated, there is no problem. Six-bar phrases are common enough in 17th century music, and especially in menuets. [note added on 17 June 2017: Meredith Ellis Little, in the "Menuet" article on Oxford Music Online, comments that three-bar phrases were "characteristic of the branle," the most common group dance before the mid-17th century. Thus, we might assume that Lully's use of it reflects a conservative aspect of his work.] The difficulty arises at the next level, as these six-bar phrases consisting of two three-bar ideas are often treated as the first strain in a small binary form. In the analyses here, I have in most instances understood the entire piece as a prolonged theme. Since the distinction is based on length, however, that is not entirely satisfactory as a method.
Nevertheless, we can learn enough about these pieces to say that an antecedent-continuation design prevails, though often as antecedent-continuation 1-continuation 2.
Thanks to text repetition and rhyme, this sung menuet from Atys (1676) provides the clearest example: a six-bar antecedent followed by two six-bar continuation phrases. Strictly speaking, however, the design is aabc (note that the antecedent phrase is repeated exactly, with the same text), which could lead one to read the whole as a compound sentence, where a+a forms a 12-bar presentation and b+c is a 12-bar continuation. The tension one feels between theme, small form, and compound theme appears to be more acute in the 1680s than it does a century later.
Here is the instrumental menuet that precedes the duo. The opening six bars are clear enough. I didn't mark the phrase on the score, but it is obviously a six-bar presentation with two three-bar ideas. The harder part is the second section. I initially analyzed the design as a continuation phrase with two three-bar ideas expanded to five bars (see my "expansion?" note in mm. 9-10), but this seemed like (literally) stretching things a bit too far. Thus, noting again the tension between form levels, we could construe the entire menuet simultaneously as an antecedent with two continuation phrases, or a small binary form (the repetition of bars 1-6 making the demarcation of A-B clear), or a large sentence consisting of presentation (6 + 6 bars) and continuation (5 + 5 bars).
The final example is another menuet from the prologue. Here again, a parsing of the continuation phrases into distinct ideas is not as obvious as one might like.
Tomorrow, three menuets from Armide (1686).
