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This blog is now closed to new content. In a post in March 2014/updated in October 2014, I wrote that in expanding work beyond my original blog,  Hearing Schubert D779n13, posts relating to dance-music designs (that is, musical forms) would be placed here and that the focus would be on William Caplin's form theory and its literature. (Link to Wikipedia article on Caplin. Link to Caplin's personal website.)

I have also published several essays on formal designs in music for dance and related music for performance and pedagogy. These are on the Texas ScholarWorks platform. Here are links and descriptions. For information on searching that site by author name, see the end of this post.

Cotillon after Schubert, with audio  (2015)

An episode from a cotillon as Franz Schubert might have played it in the 1820s. UT-Austin doctoral student Josh Straub is the pianist in the audio file.

Dance and Dancing in Schubert's Vienna (2015)

This file has six parts: the first concerns dancing in Vienna and dance music genres during the brief period between the Congress of Vienna and the July Revolution in France (1815-1830). The second part brings the focus ...

Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music  (2015)

A study of harmony and formal functions in dance music of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The data and analyses are also intended to supplement the form theory presented in William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory ...

Form Functions in Menuets by Beethoven and Others, 1770-1813  (2016)

This article adds further documentation for the claim that dance musics in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century were not dominated by the classical symmetrical period but were in fact written in a variety of thematic ...

Formal Functions in Menuets by Johann Sebastian Bach  (2017)

The menuet entered into upper-class social dance, ballet, and opera no later than the 1660s, thanks largely to Jean Baptiste Lully. This essay charts formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets by Johann Sebastian ...

Formal Functions in Menuets by Mozart, Part 1: Orchestral Works and Independent Sets 

A study of formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets by Mozart, the larger goal being to historicize more fully form-design practices in European music during the second half of the eighteenth century, especially ...

Titles of Parts 2-7:

Part 2: Sonatas and Chamber Music.
Part 3: A Comparison with Johann Christian Bach.
Part 4: His Older Contemporaries, to 1770.
Part 5: More to Theoretical Issues.
Part 6: Contemporaries, 1771-1780.
Part 7: Contemporaries and Successors, 1780-1828. 

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SEARCH FOR MY PUBLICATIONS ON TEXAS SCHOLARWORKS 

Go to this index published in December 2022: post --and this post for additional titles published in 2023-2024: post.     

OR use this link, which goes to the "music" department keyword listing under the Faculty research collection. It so happens that all but 4 entries are mine. Unfortunately, a glitch in the system means that searching by my name now only brings up publications since mid-2022.

Six menuets by Galuppi

While looking for opera buffa files for Baldassare Galuppi, who was as important to that genre in the 18th century as was Offenbach to the operetta in the 19th, I happened on these six menuets, which were included in a 240-page manuscript collection of music for Maria Venier, a resident of Venice. Presumed to be from about 1750, obviously pedagogical in purpose and for the use of a keyboard player, it includes a couple sonatas and sonatinas, a few other pieces, some notation instruction, and many empty pages.

The point of interest here is that the first strain in all six of the menuets is a galant theme, most with a motivically fragmented continuation. I haven't bothered to annotate the scores because the design is identical in all cases.

I found the file on IMSLP, but its original digital source is the Internet Culturale.

New publications: Parts 6 & 7 of the Mozart Form Functions Series

I have published two new essays on Texas Scholar Works. These are the final entries in the series Formal Functions in Menuets by Mozart. Part 6 is subtitled "Contemporaries, 1771-1780"; Part 7 is "Contemporaries and Successors, 1780-1828." Link to Part 6. Link to Part 7.

Here are the abstracts.

Part 6:

This essay continues the documentation of formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets from the eighteenth century, as begun in parts 1-4 of this series. In this essay, the focus is on menuets written by other composers during the middle decade of Mozart’s life, 1771-1780. The repertoire includes music by Carl and Anton Stamitz, Franz Joseph Haydn, Luigi Boccherini, and several others, as well as menuets in collections or compilations intended for performance, dancing, or pedagogy.

Part 7:

This final essay in the Mozart series charts formal functions (after Caplin) in named menuets written by other composers during the last ten years of Mozart’s life, 1780-1791, and by three composers active in Vienna thereafter, through the death of Schubert (1828). The repertoire includes menuets by Carl and Anton Stamitz, Franz Joseph Haydn, Luigi Boccherini, Giovanni Viotti, and Adalbert Gyrowetz, and several others. The three later composers are Beethoven, Hummel, and Schubert. Concluding comments return to questions of musical form theory.

Wikipedia article

The Wikipedia article on William Caplin has recently been expanded; it now includes a brief summary of his form function theory and a section with suggestions for "Further reading." Link.

Krähmer, Ländler, op. 8_Note on formal design

As a postscript to yesterday's post on Ländler by Ernest Krähmer, here is the fifth number of his Op. 8, published in 1824.  Score downloaded from IMSLP; modern notation by Hans-Thomas Müller-Schmidt, slightly deformed by me to condense it.

There are three strains, each closed tonally (the first and the third in Eb, the second in Bb). This design is exceedingly common in music meant for dancing; it can be found in published contredanses from the mid-18th century onward, and throughout much of the 19th century it remained the basis of the varying designs for the five numbers of the quadrille.

This design is maximally flexible yet practical. From it one can easily get nearly 2 minutes of music, assuming a bar per second and the most common ABACA realization with all strains repeated (btw, this is the version used in "Pantalon," the first number in the quadrille) . Making it seven parts--ABACABA--offers up to three minutes, plenty for an individual dance (it's used in "Poule," the third part of the quadrille).

I have written about these flexible designs in this blog post: link.
My Schubert blog has a series on forms "with refrains": link; link; link; link; link.

Krähmer, 12 Ländler

Ernest Krähmer was born near Dresden, educated and began his career in that city, then moved to Vienna, where he was an oboist in the Kärthnertor-Theater and subsequently in the court orchestra. He was also very successful as the primary Csakan virtuoso, an instrument keyed in Ab that became known as the "Romantic recorder" and was very popular during Krähmer's lifetime (he died in 1841) but quickly fell out of favor thereafter. (Information here is translated from the German Wikipedia articles on Krähmer and the Stockflöte. For images of modern reproductions of the instrument, go here: link.)

In my previous post on the Ländler of František Pecháček, I wrote in connection with his 12 Ländler (1801) that they represent the "violinistic Ländler in its traditional form—as distinct from the later keyboard Ländler of Schubert and many other composers in the 1820s, who strive to make the Ländler congenial and specific to the piano, holding to the form and characteristic figures but using less common keys often with chromatic twists and exaggerated registral play, the result being to blur the distinction between music for dance and music for recital."  The Csakan, keyed in Ab, obviously made its own contribution to this shift—indeed, Krähmer and his wife Caroline Schleicher "performed regularly together in Vienna, he on the oboe and the csakan, she on the violin and the clarinet" (translation from the German Wikipedia article on Krähmer).

In the spirit of clarification, however, I remind the reader that the confusion of menuet, Ländler, and Deutscher Tanz [German dance] was at its highest in the first quarter of the 19th century. The dances were still easily distinguishable but the musics for them were not. The music of menuet and German dance had begun to intersect substantively in the 1780s at the latest, as we know from the symphonies and chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries. In the trios of their menuet movements—especially with Mozart—the distinctive figures of the violinistic Ländler were also sometimes heard, though these can be hard to distinguish from a general pastoral affect. After 1800, things became much worse, a key figure demonstrating that change being Schubert, who is known to have used the label Ländler, Deutscher Tanz, or Walzer in different copies of the same piece. (Publishers were no help in this regard, either.) Walzer was the generic later 18th century term for "turning dances," which included both Ländler and Deutscher Tanz even though their steps, figures, and tempi were quite different. As things stood around 1815, the music of the Ländler was usually quieter and slower than the Deutscher Tanz and preserved more of the traditional figures, where the Deutscher Tanz usually still sounded like the hybrid type of the 1780s. Only in the 1830s, when the tempo of dances generally sped up did the distinction largely disappear and pieces were almost always called Walzer.

All this being said, the first piece in Krähmer's 12 Ländler (published in 1827) is quite obviously a Deutscher Tanz:

(The modern notation is by Hans-Thomas Müller-Schmidt; downloaded from IMSLP.) Note that the first strain is an antecedent + continuation theme, or what I call the "galant" theme because of its overwhelming importance in the second half of the 18th century: every one of the 2-bar ideas is different. The explanation, perhaps, is that this was intended as a promenade, a regular feature of any extended dance set (Beethoven included one to begin the 12 German Dances, WoO8 (1795), for instance).

The second piece in the set is much more like a Ländler, with soft dynamic, predominantly eighth-note rhythms, and characteristic phrase-ending figures. The chromaticism, however, is distinctive (Schubertian?). The theme is a period.

The third number shows a different side of the Ländler: soft dynamic and phrase-ending clichés but consistent quarter-note rhythms. The B-section would also be familiar to Krähmer's listeners as belonging to rural Ländler practices: the Schnadahüpfel (where the often delicate turning figures of the Ländler are briefly interrupted by loud stomping).

On the Schnadahüpfel, see this post on my Schubert blog: link.
Information on the confusion of waltz-family types draws especially on work by Walburga Litschauer. See these posts on my Schubert blog: link; link; link; link.

Pecháček, 12 Ländler (1801)

František Martin Pecháček (1763-1816) was a Bohemian violinist, conductor, and composer who spent his professional career in Vienna as a conductor in the Landstraßer and Kärtnerthor theaters. He was the father of the violin virtuoso Franz Xaver Pecháček.

A prolific composer, Pecháček senior wrote in all contemporary genres, including music for social dance. His 12 Ländler, for an ensemble unusual in the repertoire of the waltz—2 clarinets, 2 horns, and bassoon—were published in 1801.

Like Beethoven's Ländler in WoO11 and WoO15, written at the same time, this set provides an excellent example of the violinistic Ländler in its traditional form—as distinct from the later keyboard Ländler of Schubert and many other composers in the 1820s, who strive to make the Ländler congenial and specific to the piano, holding to the form and characteristic figures but using less common keys often with chromatic twists and exaggerated registral play, the result being to blur the distinction between music for dance and music for recital. A characteristic Pecháček's 12 Ländler do share with later Ländler is their repetitiousness, a marker of their primary role as music for dance, not for performance.

I have reproduced the first clarinet part below, with annotations about themes in the first strains. Of the twelve pieces, the first strains of two are clearly—and two more are probably—presentation + consequent themes, the type with least variation in its units. Five are clearly periods—and two others might be. There is just sufficient difference between basic idea and contrasting idea to identify the opening phrases as antecedents. In the majority of the numbers, the theme's cadential idea is derived from the figure of bars 3-4.

What applies to the first strains also does to the second.

Published parts downloaded from IMSLP.
Wikipedia article on Pecháček: link