I ended yesterday's post with this table (data on music discussed in this series so far):
After pointing out that this is
not a comprehensive picture of menuet history from 1660 to 1730, I mentioned four points of interest. Here are caveats (additional comment) to each:
(1) The antecedent + continuation theme is the only type other than the period to be found in every sample set, from Lully to Bach.
The antecedent + continuation theme is not a monolithic type, as I noted in discussion of Fux's menuets. The "classical" version that emphasizes development in the continuation phrase is no more common in the historical era under examination here than is the type that privileges contrast. In their aural and expressive effects, these two types are nearly as distinct as the period and the sentence.
(2) Conversely, the sentence is entirely missing from the early sample sets and is weakly represented still in the later ones (with the exception of Fux).
Although this generalization works for the repertoire here, it is not a good account of all the social dance and song musics before and including Bach. Sentences are common in music before 1660 (the usual boundary mark for Lully's introduction of the menuet into opera and ballet), as they are also in the collections of Praetorius (1612) and Playford (1651). I think it is fair to say that the sentence is rare in
early menuets, and that its introduction into this genre is mostly a later 18th century phenomenon.
(3) Similarly, what Caplin calls "compound themes" are missing in the earlier sample sets but show up clearly in later ones (note 16-bar periods in Rameau, Chedéville, and Bach).
Although expanding themes to greater length is undoubtedly an important rationale for the compound themes, it might also be in part a notational device. Remember that the four-bar theme sounds identical to a period if you include its repeat -- and that four-bar themes were very common in the earlier 17th century. That is to say, a piece with a four-bar theme wasn't necessarily regarded by musicians as
just a shorter piece than one with an eight-bar theme. Something similar may well have been true in the early 18th century, when the 16-bar themes begin to appear in some numbers: despite the repeat signs, musicians may also have thought of them
as if they were written out variants of an 8-bar theme. (One of the mysteries of early notation in relation to practice is the central repeat sign: did it mark
requirement or
opportunity? By J. C. Bach's generation, at least, the modern habits seem to have been in place—see the graphic below—but if they were in fact secure in practice, why did Bach go to the trouble of writing out this instruction?) By the end of the 18th century, however, the 16-bar theme was often conceived of in terms of length, as more appropriate to a large instrumental work--the main theme of a concerto movement, for example--than to a small-scale dance. And in those circumstances, of course, there were typically no repeat signs (especially in overture-like symphony or concerto first movements).
